Introduction: Metaverse datafication: technologies, definitions, and futures

The ‘metaverse’ is currently being posited as the ‘next step of the Internet’ and the ‘interface of the future’, as can be witnessed not only from the rapid adoption of the term by technology companies and industry professionals, but also from the enormous investments made towards the development of metaverse platforms or ‘worlds’ and related technologies, such as headsets and other wearables. These developments – whether involving immersive environments or wearable technologies combining virtual and physical aspects – will involve a massive expansion of new and varied (corporeal, sensorial, spatial, and temporal) data, rely on novel technologies and techniques for capturing and analysing such data, demand innovative computational infrastructures and material resources, and create new uses for data as well as give rise to new regulatory concerns concerning their use and exploitation. Besides introducing the articles contained with this special issue, our editorial introduction unpacks a number of definitional issues that surround the term ‘metaverse’, seeks to justify the continued use of this term for research purposes, and proposes a broad but nonetheless analytically tractable conceptualisation of this phenomenon. In addition, we briefly situate the narrative that currently surrounds the ‘metaverse’ within previous discourses on emerging technologies in media and communication studies, and we sketch out the relationship between metaverse datafication and the importance of metaverse data for the emergence of AI systems and ‘generative AI’ in particular.