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As traditional physical spaces grapple with evolving reading habits and information consumption patterns, the notion of libraries within the metaverse poses intriguing questions about accessibility, knowledge dissemination and the evolving role of librarians. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of metaverse in virtual libraries.

This paper analyzes various literature relating to libraries and the metaverse in the virtual worlds through a review of the literature.

In the ever-evolving landscape of information and technology, the emergence of libraries in virtual worlds presents a transformative paradigm that brings forth both tremendous advantages and intricate challenges. These advantages are underscored by enhanced accessibility for a global audience, interactive engagements that cater to diverse learning styles and the unprecedented scalability that digital environments provide. Virtual libraries hold the potential to reshape the way people access, share and engage with knowledge, while also fostering a sense of community that transcends geographical boundaries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the original idea that highlights the importance of metaverse in virtual libraries.

This paper aims to provide an integrated legal and marketing perspective on the imminent trademark challenges and opportunities for sports organizations operating in the metaverse.

The approach is a legal commentary that explores the ways in which the current legal framework, especially in the context of trademarks, might need to transform to offer robust protection for sports brands in the virtual marketplaces emerging within the metaverse.

Our analysis reveals that the traditional legal frameworks for trademarks are often inadequate to address the unique challenges posted by the metaverse, such as the issue of virtual goods replication and the global accessibility of branded content. The findings indicate that sport organizations must adopt proactive strategies to monitor and enforce their trademark rights effectively within these expansive digital environments. Moreover, legislative bodies may need to consider reforms or new regulations specifically tailored to the complexities of trademark protection in the digital realm to prevent dilution and misuse of sport brands.

In light of legal and branding issues related to metaverse-based trademarks, this paper is dedicated to examining the legal principles and foundations necessary to enhance the protection of sports brands within the virtual marketplace of the metaverse.

Gamification has emerged as a dynamic force in education, with increasing interest in its impact on college students' learning. Most previous research regards gamification as a single element and only focuses on the cognitive level of gamification elements, lacking an overall exploration of the impact mechanism of gamification elements. Against the backdrop of virtual learning communities, we apply the cognition-affection-conation theory to examine the influence of various gamification elements on college students' online learning behaviors, examining both cognitive and affective pathways.

Data were collected through a predefined questionnaire from 11 Chinese virtual learning communities, with 587 respondents participating in the study. SmartPLS was employed to conduct a Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis of the research model and test the hypotheses.

Our findings reveal that immersion and achievement-oriented gamification elements positively impact learning behavior. Conversely, the social gamification element exhibits a negative influence due to social burnout within virtual learning communities. This study pioneers a model to understand the intricate influence mechanisms of gamification elements on college students' online learning behaviors. The model contributes to the enriched exploration and practical application of college students' learning behaviors in virtual learning communities.

Unlike previous studies that often treat gamification as a single element and focus solely on cognitive aspects, this research explores both cognitive and affective pathways using cognition-affection-conation theory. By examining the influence of various gamification elements on college students' online learning behaviors in virtual learning communities, this study provides nuanced insights. In particular, immersion and achievement-oriented gamification elements positively impact learning behavior, while social gamification elements have a negative influence due to social burnout. This comprehensive approach deepens our understanding of how gamification affects students' learning experiences, enriches knowledge, and provides practical insights for educators and instructional designers.

The study aimed to capture student experience during virtual internships by identifying the facilitators and barriers during their experiential learning journey. The students were pursuing their Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) program at a business school in India. The authors shed light on the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the current education system, specifically experiential learning through virtual internships.

About 38 Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted from July to September 2022 with the students of a business school located in Pune, India. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed to generate new themes for ascertaining the facilitators and barriers to virtual internships. Interpretative Phenomenology Analysis was undertaken to analyze the lived experiences of the respondents.

Students viewed virtual internships positively in terms of mentor support, active learning, flexibility, and an easy onboarding process. Poor work-life balance, lack of peer learning and infrastructure issues were some of the barriers/challenges faced by the students.

The study discusses various managerial and administrative implications. The findings help educationists design effective pedagogy by drawing insights from constructivist learning theory, where students' active role during virtual internships must be given primary attention. Corrective measures in the pedagogy can be taken while designing a virtual internship, considering the barriers found in this study.

The themes identified in the study are a novel contribution to the growing body of knowledge on virtual experiential learning. The study empirically captures student experience regarding a relatively new phenomenon of virtual internships, which is the uniqueness of this paper.

This paper aims to examine the impact of metaverse experiences on customers’ offline behavioral intentions: How do customers’ visits to a hospitality business’s virtual property in the metaverse affect their intentions to visit the physical property in the real world?

Based on the general learning model and social cognitive theory, this research hypothesizes the positive impact of metaverse experiences on customers’ visit intentions and explores two boundary conditions for positive impact: user–avatar resemblance and servicescape similarity. Two experimental studies were conducted.

Metaverse experience has a significant impact on customers’ visit intentions, and this impact is moderated by user–avatar resemblance and servicescape similarity.

This research addresses the call for empirical studies regarding the effects of metaverse experience on people’s behavioral intentions.

As one of the earliest empirical studies on the marketing effects of the metaverse, this research provides a basis for future metaverse studies in the hospitality field.

Although virtual worlds, such as the Metaverse, can disrupt the hospitality sector, few empirical investigations have critically evaluated the scope and scale of this disruption from an industry perspective. This study aims to rectify this knowledge gap by exploring the opportunities and challenges of the Metaverse as seen by hospitality professionals.

This is a Delphi study conducted with UK-based senior hospitality industry practitioners experienced in designing and implementing digital innovations within their organisations.

The Metaverse is most likely to be adopted by hospitality organisations willing and able to take risks, such as large and/or chain-affiliated enterprises. The Metaverse will not replace traditional hospitality services but supplement and enhance them with new layers of service. The main applications are in the context of events and experiences. The Metaverse will also provide the “try before you buy” option, revealing the opportunities to design digital twins of physical businesses. Young and technology-savvy individuals are most likely to first adopt the Metaverse. The key challenges of the adoption are attributed to the technological unpreparedness of hospitality organisations; market immaturity; inflated customer expectations; a skills gap among hospitality employees; and regulatory issues. These challenges require the engagement of various stakeholders to create an operational and monitoring framework for hospitality organisations to embrace the Metaverse.

This study highlights how the Metaverse can disrupt the hospitality industry at the level of strategic planning and business operations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first empirical investigations of the potential of the Metaverse from the viewpoint of hospitality industry practitioners.

Adequate means for easily viewing, browsing and searching knowledge graphs (KGs) are a crucial, still limiting factor. Therefore, this paper aims to present virtual properties as valuable user interface (UI) concept for ontologies and KGs able to improve these issues. Virtual properties provide shortcuts on a KG that can enrich the scope of a class with other information beyond its direct neighborhood.

Virtual properties can be defined as enhancements of shapes constraint language (SHACL) property shapes. Their values are computed on demand via protocol and RDF query language (SPARQL) queries. An approach is demonstrated that can help to identify suitable virtual property candidates. Virtual properties can be realized as integral functionality of generic, frame-based UIs, which can automatically provide views and masks for viewing and searching a KG.

The virtual property approach has been implemented at Bosch and is usable by more than 100,000 Bosch employees in a productive deployment, which proves the maturity and relevance of the approach for Bosch. It has successfully been demonstrated that virtual properties can significantly improve KG UIs by enriching the scope of a class with information beyond its direct neighborhood.

SHACL-defined virtual properties and their automatic identification are a novel concept. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no such approach has been established nor standardized so far.

Previous studies on social influence and virtual product adoption have mainly taken users’ purchase behavior as a dichotomous variable (i.e. purchasing or not). Given the prevalence of competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product in online communities, this paper investigated the differences in the effect of social influence on users’ adoption of basic and upgraded choices of a virtual product. It also examined how the effect varies with users’ social status and user-level network density.

A natural experiment was conducted in an online game community. Two competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product were provided for in-game purchase while a random set of users selected from 897,765 players received the notification of their friends’ adoption information. A competing-risk model was used to test the hypotheses.

Social influence exerts a stronger positive effect on users’ adoption of the upgraded virtual product than of the basic virtual product. Middle-status users have the greatest (least) susceptibility to social influence in adopting the upgraded (basic) virtual product than low- and high-status users. User’s network density enhances the effect of social influence on adoption of both virtual products, even more for the upgraded one.

This research contributes to the social influence and product adoption literature by disentangling the different effects of social influence on basic and upgraded versions of a virtual product. It also identifies the boundary conditions that social influence works for each version of the virtual product.

This paper aims to investigate how best to classify money laundering through online video games (i.e. virtual laundering). Currently, there is no taxonomy available for scholars and practitioners to refer to when discussing money laundering through online video games. Without a well-defined taxonomy it becomes difficult to reason through, formulate and implement effective regulatory measures, policies and security controls. As such, efforts to prevent and reduce virtual laundering incidence rates are hampered.

This paper proposes three mutually exclusive virtual laundering categorizations. However, instead of fixating on the processes undergirding individual instances of virtual laundering, it is argued that focusing on the initial locale of the illicit proceeds provides the appropriate framing within which to classify instances of virtual laundering. Thus, the act of classification becomes an ontological endeavour, rather than an attempt at elucidating an inherently varied process (as is common of the placement, layering and integration model).

A taxonomy is proposed that details three core virtual laundering processes. It is demonstrated how different virtual laundering categories have varied levels of associated risk, and thus, demand unique interventions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first taxonomy available in the knowledge base that systematically classifies instances of virtual laundering. The taxonomy is available for scholars and practitioners to use and apply when discussing how to regulate and formulate legislation, policies and appropriate security controls.

Lifelong learning has come to involve a variety of learning experiences. These include conventional campus teaching, workplace open learning, modular flexible learning programmes, correspondence‐based distance learning courses, and most recently Web or multimedia‐based courseware. This paper considers the use of multimedia environments for open, flexible and distance education, in particular a learning environment known as the “Virtual University” as part of a process of lifelong learning. A comparison of different modes of learning is made. The Virtual University consists of virtual lectures, virtual seminars, virtual tutorials and virtual exams. It has a number of advantages over both formal lectures and conventional open learning materials, such as interactivity, adaptation, simulation, demonstration and integration. A questionnaire survey was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the Virtual University, and the results indicate an enhancement of the overall learning experience.