Towards a Metaverse Platform for Immersive Collaborative Design: A Critical Review of a Furniture, Fixture and Equipment (FFE) Application

The current technological revolution is rapid and a disruptive catalyst to existing ways of doing business in every aspect of human endeavour. One of the most recent technologies gaining attention is the metaverse, which offers computer-generated social spaces for communication and interaction. The metaverse has an inherent value for collaborative virtual working, although there are few examples of its use in building design, particularly for the FFE sector. This study critically evaluates an existing virtual reality (VR) platform for FFE design called COFFEE, to ascertain how much it can deliver a metaverse experience. The study starts with a detailed critical review of the literature of key metaverse publications in the Scopus database to develop a taxonomy of metaverse characteristics. This was then used to develop a taxonomy evaluating COFFEE to ascertain its alignment with Metaverse definitions and expectations. Finally, a user experience evaluation (n=117) of COFFEE is presented as an indicator of acceptance of Metaverse concepts by FFE stakeholders, including architects, designers, suppliers and building users. The study found COFFEE to meet the requirements of immersion and virtual interaction aspects of the metaverse and could, therefore, be considered an early metaverse proof of concept. However, key characteristics such as Digital twining, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain and Cryptocurrency are not present in COFFEE, although they can be integrated to improve user experience. A high degree of user acceptance which is indicative of FFE readiness for metaverse developments. Future areas of improving COFFEE alignment with metaverse include using digital twins with additional information such as temperature and sound from IoT sensor measurements, which will help choose some FFE elements. COFFEE will benefit from integrating a marketplace for retailing FFE elements that can be incorporated into the design.