We are creating the open 'metaverse' for education and research communities. We call it the CyberArchWarehouse. It is an immersive collaborative environment running inside Unreal Engine 5 allowing archaeologists, researchers and students to come together, analyze and study digitized assets from archaeological artifacts to fully simulated digital twins of natural and manmade structures. The goal of this project is to create this platform and support an online community around it that integrates all these tools together for academic study and research. As a new avenue of digital exploration we hope to attract a diverse range of people that are driven to enter the Metaverse primarily out of a curiosity and desire to learn and study the rare and amazing digital assets representing many fields of research and academia. Besides developing new xR interactive tools and experiences ourselves, we see this as an opportunity to create a platform in which modular code (C++/Blueprints) can be injected within a running pre-packaged game allowing the community to contribute to its growth as a research, analysis, and visualization platform.

We stream in all assets on the fly from our cloud server with ca. 8TB of mesh assets, point clouds, images and other data types. The end goal is to bring any type of archaeological data or application into VR where it can be studied as if present in the physical world. •Of particular interest is the integration of at-risk world cultural heritage and developing non-conventional tools to make it accessible to scientists, students, and the general public.

One of the real advantages of immersive collaboration is it enables embodied cognition and learning. However, we beleive this can only be acheived if you can see yourself (body, hands, feet) and colleagues as their true selves. We have developed a simple pipeline for anyone to create their digital twin as a photo-realistic avatar using Epic Games integration of MetaHumans. Coupled with your digital avatar we take full advantage of the latest tracking technology to delivery embodied multiplayer collaborative experiences within the CyberArchWarehouse. From within our platform we can already give lectures with streamed powerpoints and digital assets and tours. A major goal this coming year is to test an entire class lecture of 15 students within the CyberArchWarehouse all streaming into the lecture in VR.

One immediate avenue we see missing from the discussion on the open Metaverse is the role digital museums will play in creating virtual online communities. Our platform is perfectly suited to spin-off museum experiences to reach a broad audience. Physical museums of all branches (natural, cultural heritage, art, technology) have been focal points attracting visitors from all around the world for centuries and even generating annual revenues at scales of the film industry. As a first step we have partnered with the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem to recreate the digital twin of their museum along with taking visitors along a virtual tour of the archaeological sites from which all their digital assets originate. As a next step we are expanding our platform to be more easily configurable to create a digital twin of any museum. Most important we can create museums of digital assets and sites that are endangered or no longer have their physical counterpart.

Currently a powerful PC is required to render the digital assets in the CyberArchWarehouse and stream to VR/AR headsets. We see this as an immediate hurdle to many researchers and students that would want to participate but do not have the financial or computational resources to do so. Therefore, we have developed at UC San Diego a Kubernetes build of UE5 that allows us to spin up a cloud computer to host our project through Pixelstreaming. UC San Diego is the main contributor to the Pacific Research Platform which is a conglomeration of hundreds of attached computers across the United States with the throughput and available resources that rivals and beats on many metrics AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, and more. Best of all it is free for students and researchers. We have modified the Pixelstreaming plugin and simpleHMD plugin to enable what we call WebXR Pixelstreaming. Essentially any user with a VR/AR device can navigate to our hosted webpage and enter a WebXR session that streams head and hand position directly into UE5 and can stream back to the headset 4k 90fps stereo video.