## 4 Literature Review  
A literature review was undertaken to identify previous works about aforementioned question (\"Q\"). The search, let's call it S1, was done on the Web of Science and Scopus databases [42; 43] of document titles only, covering the period from January 2018 to December 2022 (the search strings are shown in Appendix C). The criteria for inclusion were that the titles and/or abstracts of papers had to be relevant to Q (completely or partially). A PRISMA flowchart of the process is shown in Figure 7. We found 1779 papers; after dropping duplicated documents, patents, documents not in English, datasets, clinical trials, the number of papers decreased to 111. After reading the titles and abstracts to identify the most relevant works, five papers were selected, all of them having been published in 2021-2022. Finally, two papers were retrieved. After a complete read, both [44; 45] were considered to be about Q. The work presented in [44] had two objectives. The first was \"to generate new knowledge and gain a deeper understanding of the metaverse and the challenges that it faces in the future\". The second was \"to gain a better understanding of people's perceptions of the metaverse\", which is a topic close to Q. To this end, a questionnaire was administered to 220 subjects (Appendix D). The work in [45] is focused on the need to study the intention of participating in the metaverse (a topic close to Q) and on the involved psychological constructs, as literature is lacking in this respect. In this case, a questionnaire was administered to 450 Peruvian citizens (Appendix D; the answers are not available); the first conclusion was that \"institutional support, technological literacy and participation self-efficacy have a positive and significant effect on the intention to participate in the metaverse\". During our analysis of papers and some of the references mentioned therein, further works emerged. These works were focused on other themes connected to the metaverse, such as feasibility, enabling technologies, taxonomies, road mapping, and the current state of such technology. Such papers mentioned various topics (e.g., ethics, usage, or privacy issues) in a way that was also potentially related to Q. Therefore, a new literature review based on a search, let's call it S2, was done to identify previous works about the metaverse with questions about the future, ethics, humans, morality, which could still be relevant to Q. The search has been done on the Web of Science and Scopus databases, in document titles only and by covering the period from January 2010 to March 2023 (the search strings are shown in Appendix C). As with S1, the criteria for inclusion were that the titles and/or abstracts of papers had to be about topic Q (completely or partially). A PRISMA flowchart of the process is shown in Figure 8. We identified 730 papers. After dropping duplicated documents, patents, documents not in English, datasets, and clinical trials, the number of papers decreased to 410; after reading the titles and abstracts, 65 papers were selected, all of which were published in 2021-2023. Of these, 62 were retrieved. After a complete read, two papers [46; 47] were found to be about Q.  
Figure 7: PRISMA flowchart of the review process of S1. The work in [46] aimed to analyze the impact of the metaverse on humans, on one hand by consulting specific professionals such as therapists, psychologists, and neurologists, and, on the other hand, by administering a questionnaire to 250 subjects in order to understand people's view of the metaverse (see Appendix D). The work in [47] comprised a study of the ethical implications of the metaverse in everyday life. It is remarkable that this work was probably the only one from S1 and S2 which took an explicitly critical position on the metaverse and was not directly favorable to it. It called for a \"re-orienting\" of the metaverse by paying more attention to human factors.