of intelligent surfaces for millimeter-wave (mmWave), visible light communication (VLC), and free-space optics (FSO). Furthermore, recently, the first attempt to integrate RISs with OFDM and SM/space shift keying (SSK) schemes have been reported in [4]. Researchers have evaluated the Theoretical SNR and SEP derivations, channel estimation, signal-to-interference-ratio (SINR) improvement for RIS, and joint active and passive beamforming optimization problems in the past few years [5]. Moreover, researchers have studied outage probability, asymptotic data rate, and uplink spectral efficiency when using RISs for transmission and reception in many novel research areas such as mmWave, FSO, VLC system, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), as mentioned earlier. Additionally, the use of machine learning tools, physical layer security solutions, and the potential of intelligent surfaces for mmWave/terahertz applications have been examined in recent years [6; 7]. By supporting MIMO transmission with better throughput and increasing spectrum efficiency in mmWave communication, RIS brings up new opportunities in mmWave communication. A RIS can alter radio propagation for mmWave MIMO Channels by passively adjusting the directions of impinging electromagnetic waves. Due to their higher performance over traditional MIMO systems, RIS has recently attracted much attention as a potential technique for FSO and hybrid RF/FSO communications. Furthermore, RIS as a wireless transmission technique in combination with hybrid RF/FSO can achieve significantly higher gain while decreasing design complexity and cost compared to multi-antenna amplify and forward relaying networks with fewer antennas. RIS-Assisted VLC and Hybrid VLC-RF Networks show remarkable capacity, throughput, and coverage augmentation potential. This integration has the potential to provide a powerful solution for future wireless applications as it can efficiently overcome line-of-sight blockage in highly dynamic settings, such as vehicle application scenarios. Furthermore, it helps to avoid bottlenecks while allowing for intricate interactions between network elements [8; 9]. According to recent studies, RIS can significantly improve UAVs' energy efficiency and connectivity, mainly when multiple devices are supported simultaneously, and channel impairments vary. The authors in [10; 11] focused on improving the system's secure energy efficiency by maximizing the UAV's direction, the RIS's phase shift, user association, and transmit power all at once. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a detailed state-of-the-art survey for RIS-assisted technologies and metasurfaces based on large surfaces with their merits and demerits. Further, various novel implementations of RIS, such as active RISs and their signal models, are presented and compared with their performance with a passive one. Their differences are discussed concerning the link budget for the connectivity. To benefit the overall system performance, we then address the challenges in RIS implementation and highlight the possible opportunities if the challenges can be overcome. Furthermore, we review some novel field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based dynamically controlled RIS structures. Finally, we provide a detailed overview of RIS-assisted communication systems, their performance parameters comparison, applications, and ongoing and future research. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the existing and recent technologies for communication based on Intelligent surfaces with recent state-of-the-art schemes. Section 3 describes the principle of operation of RIS, RIS-assisted smart radio environment, its associated limitations, and RIS performance parameters comparison. The principle and operation of the metamaterials are discussed in Section 4. Performance comparison of passive/phase shifts active/Liquid crystals-based RIS implementation and novel active RIS signal models are discussed in Section 5.