A Language-Based Solution to Enable Metaverse Retrieval

Recently, the Metaverse is becoming increasingly attractive, with millions of users accessing the many available virtual worlds. However, how do users find the one Metaverse which best fits their current interests? So far, the search process is mostly done by word of mouth, or by advertisement on technology-oriented websites. However, the lack of search engines similar to those available for other multimedia formats (e.g., YouTube for videos) is showing its limitations, since it is often cumbersome to find a Metaverse based on some specific interests using the available methods, while also making it difficult to discover user-created ones which lack strong advertisement. To address this limitation, we propose to use language to naturally describe the desired contents of the Metaverse a user wishes to find. Second, we highlight that, differently from more conventional 3D scenes, Metaverse scenarios represent a more complex data format since they often contain one or more types of multimedia which influence the relevance of the scenario itself to a user query. Therefore, in this work, we create a novel task, called Text-to-Metaverse retrieval, which aims at modeling these aspects while also taking the cross-modal relations with the textual data into account. Since we are the first ones to tackle this problem, we also collect a dataset of 33000 Metaverses, each of which consists of a 3D scene enriched with multimedia content. Finally, we design and implement a deep learning framework based on contrastive learning, resulting in a thorough experimental setup.