MetaCube: A Crypto-Based Unique User-Generated Content Editor for Web3 Metaverse

Web3 (also known as Web 3.0) metaverse is a blockchain- driven networked, decentralized, and open virtual world. The key feature of the Web3 metaverse is that the ownership of digital assets is recorded by non-fungible token (NFT) protocol on the blockchain. Thus, users are better encouraged to construct Web3 metaverse due to the ownership of their user-generated content (UGC). However, the existing UGC editors mainly face two challenges: they cannot guarantee the uniqueness of UGC; and they are hard-pressed to find a trade-off between model granularity and 3D modeling difficulty. In this article, we design a novel UGC editor for the Web3 metaverse, named MetaCube, to address these challenges. MetaCube applies an artificial intelligence ( AI) method to assist the UGC creation for decreasing the 3D modeling difficulty while maintaining the model granularity. To guarantee the uniqueness of UGC, this article proposes 3D Crypto-dropout, a specially designed dropout that can utilize user information to control the UGC creation process and generate unique fine-grained 3D models. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed 3D Crypto-dropout can effectively guarantee the uniqueness of UGC from both numerical and human-centered evaluation. Moreover, the existing challenges and open research topics for the uniqueness of UGC are also profoundly discussed.