Exploring the visualisation of hierarchical cybersecurity data within the Metaverse

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Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the kind and generous support of several people.

My sincere gratitude to my academic supervisor Dr Sharon Moyo for her knowledge, encouragement, and patience.

Throughout this MSc programme I have been supported by my employer, the Cabinet Office. In particular, I would like to thank my line managers Arnau Siches and Simon Foster for giving me the space to study while working. A special mention to all my colleagues in Securing Government Services for volunteering to be guinea-pigs in my experiments.

Technical advice was magnanimously provided by Kaur Kullman from University of Maryland, whose work on Multidimensional Data Visualisations for Cybersecurity was a constant source of inspiration. Similarly, thanks to Peter Daukintis and the Mixed Reality team from Microsoft who graciously lent their time and expertise to discuss Metaverse hardware. Thanks also to Brian Eppert and the team behind Noda for building such an easy to use VR toolkit.

This project is built using a number of Open Source tools. My heartfelt appreciation to the authors of and contributors to D3.js, git, GNU/Linux, NumPy, Python, and Zotero.

Finally, eternal thanks to my wife Elizabeth Eden MA for her support during this MSc.

Executive Summary

The author’s employer is a part of the UK Government’s Cabinet Office. They have a large amount of cybersecurity data relating to the Domain Name System. This project assesses the feasibility of viewing and manipulating the data in a 3D Virtual Reality environment known as the Metaverse.

This paper is the capstone project for an MSc Digital Technology Specialist qualification. As a project, it is designed to showcase a substantial piece of independent work which solves a real-world problem for the author’s employer. It provides evidence of the author’s professional development and demonstrates their expertise in the field of data analytics.

The primary aim was to extract cybersecurity data relating to domain names, create a 3D visualisation of the data, and build a prototype Metaverse environment in which to test an interactive model with real users. A further aim was to solicit participants’ feedback and use this to assess what problems may be faced by organisations moving their workforce into the Metaverse. These aims were successfully met.

A prototype Metaverse experience was created in which users could explore hierarchical cybersecurity data. A small group of participants were surveyed on their attitudes to the Metaverse. They then completed a short series of tasks in the environment. Questions were asked to assess if they were suffering from Cybersickness. After completing further tasks, their attitudes were surveyed regarding future uses of the metaverse in the organisation. A second cohort of participants attended an online seminar. They completed a survey about their attitudes to the Metaverse. They then watched a short video of the Metaverse experience. Afterwards, they answered questions related to their attitudes towards future uses of the metaverse in the organisation. The results of these questionnaires were assessed to see whether participants were receptive to the idea of working with data inside the Metaverse in the future.

Of the 8 participants who tried the VR experience, the majority had little to no experience with VR until this study. All were able to complete data navigation and interpretation tasks in the Metaverse. The majority expressed excitement and interest in using VR in the workplace. No participant suffered from Cybersickness.

The 45 participants who watched the video demonstration of the Metaverse experience were more likely to have had previous experience with VR. They expressed slightly less interest in the way the Metaverse could be used in their organisations and also had concerns about the company who is developing the Metaverse.

In conclusion, while participants showed a clear interest in using VR to manipulate data, further work is needed to make sure future Metaverse experiences are accessible and do not endanger the health of participants. Several participants expressed distrust about Meta - the company formerly known as Facebook - which develops the Metaverse. The Metaverse is still in its infancy and more research needs to be done to find ways to make it more accessible and acceptable for users.

This MSc was funded and approved by the author’s employer in line with the UK Government’s Civil Service Apprenticeship Strategy (Lopez and Chisholm, 2021).

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Acronyms

1. Introduction

1.1 Context

The author works for a department of the UK Government which has a large amount of cybersecurity data relating to the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). The data are hierarchical, complex, and classified as Secret. Because of this complexity and volume, there is a pressing need to make it easier for employees to be able to easily view and manipulate data in order to understand the issues represented.

This project aims to research ways to visualise complex hierarchical data in the virtual and interactive three-dimensional environment known as the “Metaverse”.

The use of consumer-level gaming technology to create interactive 3D data representations is not new. The L3DGEWorld project used the “Quake Ⅲ” gaming engine to power a real-time and collaborative environment (Harrop and Armitage, 2006), albeit one which could only be experienced via a traditional computer monitor. This project aims to extend that research into “Virtual Reality” (VR) by having participants wear a stereoscopic Head Mounted Display (HMD).

The UK Government has a long history of storing, analysing, and visualising complex data. In 1086CE, the Domesday book collated data about the nascent state of England and Wales. Because the data were recorded in textual form, there was no way to visualise or explore the data (Hamshere and Blakemore, 1976). In 1858CE, Florence Nightingale revolutionised the way the state’s statistics were visualised through her use of two-dimensional Polar Area Diagrams (Anderson, 2011). A further paradigm shift is now underway regarding the display and interpretation of statistics about the state’s infrastructure.

1.2 Potential Benefits

Cybersecurity data is crucial to the running of the author’s department. They have a mission to safeguard the Government’s presence on the Internet. This research assesses whether the data can be represented in 3D and how employees feel about using the Metaverse to navigate such data. By its nature, DNS information is hierarchical (see Figure 06 - Illustration of the DNS hierarchy) and so this research is limited to data where every element has a well defined “ancestor”. Hierarchical data lends itself well to being presented in an interactive 3D environment where specific elements can be collapsed and hidden. Consequently, this research could be applied to any hierarchical data set, not just cybersecurity related.

Engaging with a new technology such as the Metaverse is risky for any organisation. As well as the costs of procuring hardware and developing software, there is the risk that employees will find the new way of working to be uninteresting or unhelpful. There is also a risk that VR may cause employee sickness. The benefits of this research to the author’s organisation will be a better understanding of these risks.

1.3 Main Aims

Usable 3D computer interfaces have been a highly anticipated development to the point where Hollywood’s vision of how future computers will act has become a meme (Grazier and Cass, 2017) as can be seen in Figure 01. But are such systems practical? Do workers feel excited or concerned about using these interfaces? Are there Health & Safety issues which need to be addressed?

1.4 Objectives

Following the literature review and discussion with stakeholders, a further objective was added: 5. Discover whether people suffered any ill-health effects while using the visualisations.

1.5 Professional Issues

The author’s organisation deals with both secret and top secret data. There is a drive to make these data more open and to change the way such data are classified (Heide, 2022). Until such changes can be made, the data must be kept secure at all times. This placed limits on the machines that could be used to analyse the data. As such, data were encrypted both at rest and in transit between devices.

The organisation also has a well-developed “National AI Strategy” which emphasises the need to develop cyber-physical infrastructure (GOV.UK, 2021). This work has to support the broader strategy, and does so by performing in-person testing of receptiveness to the Metaverse among the workforce.

The author is a Member of the BCS and follows their code of conduct (British Computer Society, 2021). This was particularly relevant due to the code’s insistence that members “have due regard for public health, privacy, security and wellbeing of others”, which was the basis of the ethical approach used in designing the study. Similarly, the work was carried out under the Civil Service Code which insists on a rigorous approach to impartiality and “fiduciary obligations” (Fuertes, 2021). These codes informed the author’s approach to the following issues.

1.6 Social, Ethical, and Legal issues

There are several Health & Safety issues associated with the use of HMDs. While wearing the device, users are oblivious to their surroundings, risking unexpected kinetic interactions with their environment. Therefore testing took place in a private room with adequate space for the participant to move around. To guard against other issues, a full Health & Safety risk assessment was conducted and is presented in Annex 1 - Risk Assessment.

In the paper “Exploring the Unprecedented Privacy Risks of the Metaverse” (Nair, Garrido and Song, 2022), the authors present several ways in which VR can be used to infer personal data about users. Although the paper is a pre-print, and was only tested on a limited and non-diverse set of participants, it is this author’s opinion that the paper identifies realistic threats. These must be taken into account by researchers in order to protect the personal data of their research subjects. As such, the prototype developed by the author does not collect any personal data.

Finally, ethical clearance for testing the prototype was granted by the University of Northumbria. All interview participants were presented with an information sheet about the aims and risks of the research, and gave verbal consent to participation & transcription of their interview.

1.7 Report Structure

This report begins with a literature review to examine current research on the Metaverse. It is followed by a discussion of the methodology used for the author’s research and development. Next is a section on the practical research work undertaken including development of a workable prototype. The results from this practical work are then analysed and, in a further section, critically evaluated. Finally, the author makes their conclusions and recommendations for further work.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Background

In order to survey the current state-of-the-art, the author performed a literature review. This review surveys a wide range of modern and historical papers relating to the project, and discusses their relevance, applicability, and utility. The review starts by examining foundational papers on the nature of the Metaverse. It then considers whether businesses find practical utility from Virtual Reality. Next, it discusses various data visualisation studies. It concludes with a synthesis of this knowledge and how that knowledge will be applied to this and future projects.

2.2 Scope

The literature review was conducted in line with modern expectations of both academia and industry (Berdanier and Lenart, 2021).

The Metaverse is an all-encompassing Virtual Reality (VR) environment which allows a user to interact with objects, data, and other users. The etymology comes from the Greek word “meta” (“beyond”) and “verse” (short for “universe”) meaning a reality beyond the physical plane of existence (Dionisio, III and Gilbert, 2013).

There is a growing field of study around the Metaverse and, specifically, how it relates to education and business processes. However, because this is a fashionable new field, there are many papers which use “Metaverse” as a keyword to increase their visibility in search engines, but barely relate to the topic. These papers have been excluded from this review. There are multiple papers looking at Metaverse from a gaming perspective, but these have only been included in this review where they also contain significant content about data structure visualisation.

There is a small but growing body of academic work looking at whether VR is a suitable environment in which to conduct business. Many papers are little more than paid-for editorials, often known as advertorials (Stirling, 2018). These papers prioritise their sponsor’s viewpoint rather than an objective academic one. Due to this lack of academic rigour, these papers have been avoided where possible.

Much of the literature around data visualisation refers to either medical or financial data. Although not directly relevant to the visualisation of cybersecurity data, they are still of interest to see how professionals interact with 3D data.

2.3 Metaverse

The term “Metaverse” first appears in Neal Stephenson’s influential 1992 cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash” (Zyda, 2022). This term quickly found its way into academic literature discussing the possibilities of creating interactive 3D worlds (Parr and Rohaly, 1995). These early papers were mostly focussed on the mechanics of creating such environments and the syntax used to describe them. Although technically detailed, they fail to look at concerns like usability, accessibility, and the ethical implication of their designs.

Since the Facebook corporation rebranded itself as “Meta” in 2021 (Egliston and Carter, 2021), the hype around the term “Metaverse” has been disproportionate to the reality of its impact (Dwivedi et al., 2022). The word Metaverse is now frequently misapplied in order to increase engagement (see Figure 02) with one commentator remarking that the term Metaverse was so over-used and over-hyped that it was treated as “a punchline” (Ball, 2022).

Reviewing the relevant literature led the author to conclude that the Metaverse has become a catch-all term for a variety of VR-related technologies. Despite the efforts of Meta (née Facebook) to colonise the term, there is a thriving ecosystem of organisations which are using “Metaverse” as a generic term for modern, interoperable VR.

The author’s working definition of the Metaverse follows this modern usage; a generic term for an interactive 3D environment experienced through Virtual Reality hardware. Conducting the literature review has highlighted the risk that the project will be inaccurately associated with Meta’s commercial products.

2.4 Business in VR

There is a demand for businesses to be able to host meetings in virtual space (Pearlman and Gates, 2010). While their study did not perform any analysis of actual activity taking place in VR, the authors were able to identify the existence of VR as a viable route for business events through their qualitative research. However this viability is undermined by their findings showing a low level of penetration; only 2% of respondents actually used VR for their events. Another significant finding was the lack of interoperability between VR solutions. This is corroborated by a subsequent paper (Dionisio, III and Gilbert, 2013). As noted in Pearlman and Gates (2010), widespread adoption was limited by the primitive state of technology. Neither paper addresses how improved graphical fidelity and faster speeds could improve the experience.

In the field of business education Metaverse training may have many significant advantages over traditional asynchronous educational videos (Lee, Woo and Yu, 2022). It is important to note that their study’s participants were recruited and tested via video-chat. The author contends that the selection of these participants would have been biassed towards those already familiar with virtual experiences, which may affect the applicability of their results. The paper concludes that interactive 3D content has both greater visual appeal and greater semantic content compared to data presented in tabular format. This validates the findings from earlier studies (Tanlamai, Savetpanuvong and Kunarittipol, 2011). Many of these studies assert that the novelty of interactive content may have made participants more accepting of the experience. In this author’s opinion this assertion is unsupported because, for many participants, interactive 3D objects are already an established part of their media landscape, for example in video games. Additionally, most papers highlight that the poor user experience of current technology may cause negative sentiment in participants without acknowledging that the user experience is likely to improve as technology advances.

Having reviewed the literature, the author concludes that it is important to calibrate for participants’ pre-existing familiarity with VR in order to understand whether they value the novelty more than the utility of the final product. Therefore, the project will assess each participant’s prior experience with the Metaverse and consider if this affects the results.

2.5 Data Visualisation

There is excitement in the field of medical research at being able to visualise the data structures of biological compounds (Taylor and Soneji, 2022). This is corroborated by studies on experienced surgeons, which found that the ability to visualise three-dimensional imaging resulted in fewer errors than conventional 2D visualisations (Timonen et al., 2021). Although statistically valid, the study on surgeons was only conducted on a small cohort (5 participants) who received a short period of VR training (15 minutes). A further weakness was that this study only looked at experienced surgeons. It did not investigate whether less experienced users would also benefit from this form of data visualisation.

A recent study of corporate annual reports shows how the design of charts in financial reporting can potentially mislead the reader (Shen, Lee and Wang, 2020). The study goes into detail about how the æsthetic choices can greatly influence the perception of the data, for example rendering graphs in an isomorphic fashion to simulate three-dimensionality. A later study corroborates that the design of graphs can mislead the viewer (Woodin, Winter and Padilla, 2022). However, the Woodin et al study was only concerned with 2D representation. The author contends that 3D images projected onto a 2D space are fundamentally different from structures which can be examined in their native projection. The review found there is a gap in the literature regarding the utility of true 3D visualisation experienced with stereoscopic equipment. This project addresses that gap.

This section of the literature review has had a positive impact on the project. The author is now aware that it is possible to create something visually appealing which nevertheless misleads users. The author is more cognisant of the need to develop a solution which faithfully renders the data.

2.6 Evaluation & Synthesis

In conclusion, multiple studies have shown the potential for VR to be a useful addition to the suite of tools used to visualise data. While the hype of the Metaverse shows no signs of diminishing, it is important to temper it with reality. Studies have shown that the novelty of VR often overshadows its utility. In addition many studies have failed to correct for the pre-existing expertise of test-subjects both in terms of their familiarity with the material and the VR environment.

One perennial problem is that authors seem wary of predicting how future improvements in technology will change the way users interact with the Metaverse. Moore’s Law is now well established. Moore postulated that the power of computing doubles relative to price roughly every 18 months (Shalf, 2020). The author thinks it is reasonable to infer from this that reduced latency and increased bandwidth are inevitable. These improvements when coupled with smaller, lighter, and cheaper electronics should result in a better Metaverse experience.

Outside of the scope of this project, areas of future study should look at whether there is a significant disparity in the acceptability of VR between different age groups. It is also worth exploring whether people who have grown up with VR environments will be more willing to engage with the Metaverse in a professional context.

In conclusion, the author’s research combines several aspects of the existing knowledge-base. This paper synthesises several modern research strands. By learning how other academics have approached these problems, this research project will investigate whether the Metaverse is an acceptable environment for exploring data-visualisation problems.

3. Methodology

3.1 Introduction

This section is a brief critical review of the appropriate methodologies for both research and development. It discusses the author’s research methods and plan for implementation.

3.2 Research Methods

The literature review was undertaken via a variety of Internet libraries including Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, and Scopus. Keyword searches included VR, Metaverse, Augmented Reality, 3D statistics, Cybersickness, and their derivatives. Citation chains were followed to fully explore the relevance of the papers found. The author contacted leading experts in the field of Metaverse studies. Both academic and industry experts were interviewed to understand state-of-the-art research and discover upcoming publications. This approach helped the author find and read a wide range of papers.

3.3 Research Constraints

The design choice of a study is inexorably bound to both the aims of the research and the nature of the problems being investigated (Walliman, 2010). Because the solution being proposed is novel, many of the relevant works were pre-prints or PhD theses. Close investigation was needed to check the validity and replicability of their findings.

3.4 Analysis Methodology

Due to the fickle nature of quantitatively recording subjective topics such as attitudes, behaviours, and experiences, a study such as this one requires a qualitative approach (Tenny et al., 2022). Because of the novelty of this project, and the relatively small number of participants, any statistical analysis was likely to be inconclusive. Therefore, experiments and questionnaires were designed to capture participants’ subjective feelings.

The study consisted of several elements. Firstly a research questionnaire was used to assess the participants’ current knowledge of VR. Secondly, participants were asked to perform tasks in the Metaverse environment. While in the Metaverse, a Virtual Reality Sickness Questionnaire (VRSQ) was administered to ensure the safety and comfort of participants, and also to assess the risk of Cybersickness (Kim et al., 2018). Finally, a qualitative study explored their feedback on the VR experience. The research questionnaire was built around a five-point Likert Scale which is optimal for extracting the maximum reliability and validity from the answers (Taherdoost, 2019). It was important to design the survey to take into account how the experience of being asked questions alters the subjective experience of the respondent (Scalia et al., 2022).

One known limitation of asking post-experience questions is that it relies on participants’ memories. This might provide an incomplete or inconsistent recollection of the experience (Schwind et al., 2019). Therefore, the study was designed to ask participants some questions while they were inside the Metaverse to capture their immediate thoughts, and then further questions once they had exited the experience.

Because qualitative research has a free-flowing structure and is exploratory rather than prescriptive, it provides insights into the scope of the problem and feeds into the future design of technology solutions (Pearlman and Gates, 2010). Due to the small sample size, the results were evaluated holistically rather than statistically. This sort of thematic analysis requires an analysis of the hierarchy of responses to interpret the data (Castleberry and Nolen, 2018).

Relying on participants’ comments is sometimes seen as merely reflecting superficial opinions which are inferior to quantitative inquiry (Morse, 2002). However, the author disagrees with this assessment. In a small study, it is important to listen to participants’ expressed feelings because they may not always be revealed by the limitations of a Likert Scale questionnaire. Research also finds that relying solely on reported quantitative results may not be appropriate for assessing visualisations (South et al., 2022).

3.5 Implementation methodology

Building the testable prototype followed the Agile methodology. A traditional “Waterfall” project follows a rigid development plan whereas Agile enables the project plan to adapt to any challenges which arise as the project proceeds. Woody Zuill, one of the founders of the Agile movement (Gleeson, 2017), is noted for his maxim “Doing exposes reality” (Zuill, 2012); the development of the prototype changed iteratively as relevant information was discovered during each Sprint (see Table 01 - Initial Sprint Plan). There are several criticisms of 2001’s Agile “Manifesto”; modern researchers note that Agile prioritises the developers’ experience at the expense of user experience, and Agile processes don’t always fit modern business practices (Ozkan, 2019). However, this can be mitigated with the ScrumBan method which is recognised for improving quality and reducing wasted time (Petricioli and Fertalj, 2022) and is used in the author’s workplace.

There were two cohorts of participants. The first were stakeholders from the author’s immediate team who were asked to test the Metaverse prototype. Some were practitioners who work with DNS data as part of their roles and some were executives who need to understand, but rarely interact with, the data. The second cohort consisted of participants who chose to attend a virtual seminar. They saw a video demonstration of the Metaverse prototype. These participants were self-selecting members of the author’s professional peer group. Each participant from both cohorts was given information about the project and its aims. They also provided their consent to participate in the study and have their answers recorded. Consent information can be found in the appendix. Participants were not remunerated for their involvement.

Outside of the study, the work was presented to peers at a “Show and Tell”. This is an established part of the Agile culture and a necessary step to obtain feedback from interested parties (Hulshult, 2019). Feedback from these presentations was also integrated into the prototype’s design.

3.5.1 Sprint Plan

Agile projects are usually divided into shorter components called “Sprints”. The project consisted of 6 Sprints, each around twenty-days.

Sprints 2, 3, and 4 were planned to run simultaneously in order to produce a tightly coupled feedback loop.

As part of the Agile process, a Proof of Concept (PoC) was created to demonstrate the feasibility of the project. This was created in tandem with the Literature Review in order to establish how the project would likely proceed. This is described further in the next section.

4. Description of Practical Research Work Undertaken

This chapter describes the requirements analysis, system design, construction, and experimental work undertaken. It provides information about the user testing and data collection, and it justifies the techniques chosen. Finally, it addresses ethical and legal issues with the chosen approach.

4.1 Requirements Analysis

The author’s workplace contains multiple stakeholders with an interest in DNS security. Given the wide range of potential stakeholders, it was useful to map them onto a Power Interest grid (see Figure 03) to understand their influence and engagement with the project (Bernstein, Weiss and Curry, 2020).

Although the two-dimensional nature of the grid limits the analysis to only two factors, Mendelow’s grid makes it easy to see which actors need to be considered during the work. This form of analysis is accepted in the author’s workplace to identify the target users. A discussion with the stakeholders revealed a pre-existing requirement to visualise the vast amount of data collected about the security of domain names, and see where in the hierarchy issues occur. The prototype was designed to fulfil this requirement.

4.2 Health and Safety

Any study which involves users requires a risk assessment to ensure their safety. Exposure to VR can cause disorientation, increased heart rate, and nausea. Collectively, these symptoms are referred to as “Cybersickness” and can cause distress in participants (Petri et al., 2020). Although Petri’s study was small, the author has personally experienced Cybersickness and noticed it in others. There is a long history of research into human safety issues in VR, mostly around eye-strain and becoming entangled with trailing cables (Viire, 1997). While modern HMDs eschew external cables, there is still a risk of severe injury from unexpected encounters with the physical environment (Warner and Teo, 2021). The primary ethical concerns with this study were around Health and Safety, especially the risk from infectious diseases. Because the HMD and controllers were used by multiple participants, and given the HMD’s proximity to a user’s mucus producing orifices, enhanced cleaning of the equipment was necessary (Moore et al., 2021). A risk assessment was conducted in line with the author’s employer’s guidelines and is presented in Annex 1 - Risk Assessment.

4.3 Ethics

An ethical review was conducted in line with the University’s guidelines (Northumbria University, 2022). The ethical risks were judged low with one exception; the data used in the project are classified Government information with severe penalties for improper use (‘Official Secrets Act’, 1989). Consequently, participation was restricted to people with the relevant security clearance. It is a recognised problem that VR visualisations often require vast amounts of data, and those data are often transmitted to and stored in relatively insecure headsets (Kohnke, 2020). In order to avoid breaching the ethical guidelines around security, care was taken to protect the data in transmission and at rest - through encryption and cache minimisation respectively.

4.4 Design

The author collaborated with a number of external experts in order to validate that the technology existed to support this project. The Mixed Reality team at Microsoft helped the author understand what their Hololens product was capable of, but warned about the high cost of hardware and the rendering limitations of the platform. The author also interviewed Kaur Kullman, a noted expert in VR visualisations of cybersecurity data from University of Maryland. Kullman’s research (see Figure 04) shows the viability of using interactive 3D environments to visualise complex cybersecurity information (Kullman and Engel, 2022).

Kullman explained the current state-of-the-art, potential hardware issues, and the physical limitations of human test subjects. This fed into the author’s Sprint planning and project design. These collaborations informed the choice of hardware and platform.

Although there has been some academic analysis of consumer preferences for VR platforms (Yang and Nam, 2018), there is little research about enterprise needs. Therefore, the author undertook a conjoint analysis of the available hardware options.

The Oculus Quest 2 was chosen as the hardware platform as it offered the most flexible programming environment. It also had higher resolution, lower weight, and more control options than the alternatives. While the price was higher than the Cardboard, it was significantly lower than the Hololens.

4.5 Experimental Work

In order to build a performant model, several platforms were considered and tested. The first Sprint’s aim was to build an experimental Proof of Concept (PoC) application. This PoC was created using a framework developed in conjunction with Mozilla called WebVR (Oliver et al., 2019). The code for the PoC is in Annex 2 - PoC Source Code. The DNS hierarchy is commonly described as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) (Hoffman, Sullivan and Fujiwara, 2019), therefore, this representation was chosen for the visualisation. The PoC successfully loaded a small amount of DNS data from a CSV file, processed it into a DAG, and rendered it in interactive 3D (see Figure 05). This demonstrated that the project was conceptually viable.

The PoC was delivered to Microsoft who confirmed that, although it ran on their Hololens hardware, they noted that there were no native VR controls. An updated PoC was created to address this issue, and Microsoft reported that it ran satisfactorily. This meant that the next Sprint could proceed as planned.

The second Sprint focused on data collection. The majority of data were stored in the department’s case management system. In order to make use of them for the project, the data had to undergo a process known as “Extract, Transform, and Load” (ETL). This process allows the end user to construct their own queries on data which has been manipulated into a suitable format (Theodorou et al., 2017).

4.5.1 Extract

Initially, a naïve extraction was performed with no filtering. This resulted in every domain in the system being returned. However, not all of the domains were relevant; some had expired, some were unmonitored, and some were test data. Nevertheless, this exercise was useful in order to place an upper-bound on the number of domains. In collaboration with the author’s team, the data were filtered down to a more suitable subset.

4.5.2 Transform

As demonstrated in Figure 06, DNS is a hierarchical system i.e. in the domain "hmrc.gov.uk", the left-most portion "hmrc" is a sub-domain of "gov.uk". Similarly, "gov" is a subdomain of ".uk".

The data structure for the DAG required that this order be inverted, i.e. formatted as “.uk.gov.hmrc”¹. A Python program was written to ingest the domain names and reverse their logical order. After testing, it became clear that the DAG required both that there were no duplicates and no logical gaps in the hierarchy. The program was altered to satisfy these requirements. The revised code is in Annex 2 - PoC Source Code. This ability to rapidly react to unexpected issues is a key strength of Agile project management.

4.5.3 Load

A major concern was the performance of the system when loading the data. The unexpurgated dataset consisted of around 300,000 nodes which may have been slow to ingest and render. The system was initially tested with a sample of 4,000 nodes with no noticeable delay. A further test was performed by loading all the data, but truncating the display to the 2nd level. This test also rendered well, as can be seen in Figure 07.

Unfortunately, when displaying the 3rd level, performance decreased dramatically and became unacceptably slow. In order to prevent Cybersickness, it is necessary to maintain a high and consistent frame rate (Weech, Kenny and Barnett-Cowan, 2019). It also became apparent that a large set of domains might not be easily navigable without further work to improve the layout (Figure 08).

Finally, the PoC showed that it was possible to format and render the data. However, the performance of the platform was insufficient for the volume of data, and the interactive capabilities were non-existent. For the testable prototype, the author moved to a tool which improved performance. The practice of “mind mapping” in VR is actively being explored as a way to help learners organise their thoughts in a hierarchical manner (Sims and Karnik, 2021). The Noda mind-mapping tool (Coding Leap LLC, 2022) can import a formatted CSV and render it as an interactive DAG without performance issues.

An interactive PoC (Figure 09) was constructed using Noda and subsequently became the basis for the tested Metaverse experience.

4.6 Construction & Installation

As discussed above, the prototype was constructed in the Noda VR app. Noda ingests a CSV of data and then renders it in the Metaverse. The author constructed an algorithm to transform the extracted data into the format required for Noda. This was then manually altered to add features such as node colouring, shape, and textual description (see Figure 10).

The author considered manually placing the nodes on the 3D canvas. While this is feasible for a small dataset, it is impractical for large datasets. Therefore a second algorithm was used based on the Force-Directed graph layout provided by the popular D3.js library (Poinet, Stefanescu and Papadonikolaki, 2020). This uses the classic Verlet integration to plot the trajectories of multiple nodes, bound by their relationship to descendent and ancestor nodes, but repelled from nodes not within their hierarchy (Verlet, 1967). Both the D3 library and Verlet algorithm are well regarded in the author’s industry and are the primary acceptable ways to approach this task (Bostock, Ogievetsky and Heer, 2011).

Once the data were formatted, they were securely transferred to the HMD using USB. The graph was loaded into the environment, manually checked for accuracy, and departmental logos were added. Finally, the environment was saved and backed-up in compliance with the organisation’s information retention rules.

4.7 Rapport Building

The study consisted of two different groups of participants. The first were members of the author’s workplace. They were able to experience the Metaverse by wearing the HMD and interacting with the environment. The second were members of the author’s wider industry. They were invited to a video-conference seminar and watched a demonstration video of the Metaverse experience.

A key requirement for user research is for the researcher to build rapport with the subject; this is needed in order to make the subject comfortable, to reassure them that data protection is taken seriously, and to make them feel confident they can discuss with the researcher any issues they encounter. Two different approaches were needed to build rapport with these different groups.

The author examined a number of ways to build rapport, while also delivering mandatory information about consent and Health & Safety. Research has shown that starting an interaction with an impersonal or robotic reading of a prepared statement often makes people uncomfortable (Deakin and Wakefield, 2014). However, the author’s industry makes use of templates for building rapport with subjects. These templates have been repeatedly tested and are considered best practice (Calderon, 2022). For the first group, a statement based on these templates was used to build and establish rapport (see Annex 3 - Questionnaire and Results). It is worth noting that because the participants belong to the same team as the author, there was a pre-existing level of rapport.

Although participants in the online study were asked the same questions as the in-person participants, a different approach was needed to build rapport with subjects over video (Hai-Jew, 2015). To address this, the author delivered a welcoming and informal introduction for their presentation to a cross-Government symposium on data issues. The author encouraged participants to ask questions and provide feedback. Video from this session can be seen in Annex 4 - Presentation to DataConnect22.

4.8 Ethical, social and legal considerations

Throughout the project, care was taken to ensure that all modern ethical, social, and legal issues were considered. One aspect which was not fully explored was the negative experience of the Metaverse on users with mobility issues or visual impairments. Research is ongoing to discover how people with visual impairments can fully interact with the Metaverse, but even at this early stage it is apparent that a visual-only Metaverse experience will be discriminatory (Waskiewicz, 2022). Tackling this issue is beyond the scope of this investigation, but is discussed further in Chapter 7.

4.9 Summary

In summary, the Sprints to design the prototype were successful. Data were successfully extracted, transformed, and loaded into a variety of models. The pilot test allowed the author to adjust the parameters of the questionnaire and survey. Finally, user testing and response gathering was undertaken in accordance with the expectations of the author’s organisation.

5. Results and Analysis

This chapter assesses and analyses the findings from testing the prototype with users. This follows the advice of Bylinskii that “it’s not enough to perform a study carefully, it must also be reported thoroughly, so that the reader can understand what was done, what the results show, and how they can be reproduced.” (Bylinskii et al., 2022). The techniques used in this section include product testing with users, statistical surveys, and sentiment analysis.

5.1 Questionnaire Construction

A key part of Agile design is testing prototypes with users (Luojus, Kauppinen and Lahti, 2018). All aspects of the research were designed to be run in an Agile fashion, so both the prototype Metaverse experience and prototype questionnaire were piloted with two participants in order to validate their utility.

The “technology acceptance model” is an established method of assessing users’ attitudes towards new technology (Davis, 1989). The author based their initial questionnaire on a previously designed and tested set of questions from “A Technology Acceptance Model Survey of the Metaverse Prospects” (Aburbeian, Owda and Owda, 2022). For the questionnaire design, the author considered using an indeterminate Likert Scale for ranking participants’ feelings. However, they concluded that a 5-point Likert Scale was more commonly used and would allow participants to quickly complete the questions (Kandasamy et al., 2020). In order to achieve the best results with a questionnaire, it is important to make sure participants understand the purpose of the study and feel comfortable providing negative feedback. One way to achieve this is to emphasise to the user that it is the service being tested, not the user, and that there are no right or wrong answers (Bylinskii et al., 2022). This is consistent with the author’s employer’s practices and was incorporated into the questionnaire instructions given to participants.

As the author has no medical training, they used a pre-existing questionnaire to assess whether participants were suffering from Cybersickness. A variety of questionnaires were considered. Because of its direct applicability to the issue of VR devices, the industry-standard Virtual Reality Sickness Questionnaire (VRSQ) was chosen to assess participants’ comfort (Kim et al., 2018). Kim’s version can be seen in Figure 11. It asks participants to self-report any physical issues they experience; including eye-strain, headaches, and vertigo. The author identified a potential weakness of the questionnaire; it fails to address issues with proprioception (also known as kinesthesia) i.e. whether the user feels a disjoint between their perception of their body’s movement and reality.

Feedback from the pilot showed that some questions from the VRSQ were ambiguous, for example the term “Fullness of head” was not understood. This is possibly due to translation issues from the original Korean. The questions were adjusted to be clearer for participants (see Annex 3 - Questionnaire). Additionally, feedback from the pilot participants was used to make some æsthetic changes to the design to the prototype and clarify the questionnaire preamble.

5.2 Product Testing

Participants who took part in the Metaverse experience were asked to complete a series of tasks. These included navigating to a specific part of the model, reporting on what they saw, and interacting with the data. The full list of tasks can be found in Annex 3 - Questionnaire. This product testing showed that every participant was able to complete each task. All reported that they found the navigation easy to understand and use. Interaction was slightly more difficult and a few participants took some time to familiarise themselves with the controls.

The product testing took place in a private area in the workplace. This was necessary to prevent participants from feeling uncomfortable about performing tasks in public. The nature of the HMD meant that participants could not see their surroundings. Therefore a private space prevented other people from approaching the participants and risking injury to either party.

5.3 Results of the Study

Participants were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of 8 stakeholder participants from the author’s immediate team. They wore the HMD and completed the task in VR, as seen in Figure 12. Testing took place during the working day and in the regular office environment. One potential participant declined to take part in the study, as was their right. The participant explained that they had previously experienced Cybersickness when using a VR HMD and were unwilling to risk their health by taking part. They were happy for their objection to be recorded in the study.

The second group consisted of 45 participants in an online seminar as part of the UK Government’s Data Connect Week (GOV.UK, 2022). These participants answered the same questions as the first group, but saw a video presentation of the Metaverse experience, rather than trying it themselves. Because these participants did not enter the Metaverse environment, there was no need to administer the VRSQ, nor ask them about their direct experience of the prototype.

5.4 Survey Results

35% of those attending the online seminar were occasional-to-frequent users of VR, compared to 0% of in-person participants. (Figure 13). This lack of experience may bias the later results as those participants may be more interested in the novelty of the experience rather than the utility.

The participants in the online seminar were self-selecting. This may explain why more of them had experienced the Metaverse compared to the participants in the in-person study who were selected from the author’s team.

In contrast, the in-person cohort expressed greater enthusiasm for trying the Metaverse (60%) than those at the seminar (33%).

It is important to note that the in-person participants were all members of the author’s team. This personal relationship and lack of anonymity may have caused them to report more favourably so as not to upset or discourage their colleague. This sort of bias is well-known within the user testing community and should be corrected for in a future study (Locascio et al., 2016).

Post-demonstration, the surveys showed there was stronger support for the idea that the Metaverse could be useful to the organisation amongst participants who had directly experienced it (60%) than those who watched the video demo (40%).

This is perhaps because those who only experienced the video demonstration came from a variety of organisations, not all of which would have data suited to this sort of interactive experience.

Similarly, Figure 16 shows that intention to use the Metaverse was much higher among the in-person cohort (75%) than those who watched the video (40%). Although a minority of both sets of participants expressed reluctance in future use, there was a majority in both sets who supported it.

A short demonstration of a novel experience is not representative of a full working day in the Metaverse. Future studies should use much longer demonstrations to see if that alters users’ attitudes towards the experience.

5.5 Virtual Reality Sickness Questionnaire

While participants were immersed in the Metaverse, they were asked a series of questions to determine whether they were experiencing Cybersickness. One participant declined to take part citing a previous nausea-inducing experience with VR. Amongst the others, the most common complaint was that the headset was uncomfortable and that the image was blurry. None of the participants experienced nausea, vertigo, eye-strain, or any of the other symptoms listed on the VRSQ. Participants who usually wore eyeglasses were the only ones to mention blurry images. They reported that images were fuzzy, although “No more than I’d expect with my eyesight” and that images were “Fuzzy - like looking at a CRT”. This may have been caused by the lack of a “spacer” to adjust the focal length of the lenses (Botha, de Wet and Botma, 2021).

The only other symptoms mentioned were due to the HMD. One participant reported “throbbing in the back of the head. Because it is so tight” and three specifically mentioned the heaviness of the headset. One participant mentioned that they had a brief dizzy spell after they had removed the HMD. These reactions are consistent with the effects both predicted and observed in the literature (Hawkinson, 2022). The discomfort was spontaneously mentioned by several participants before the VRSQ was administered, meaning it was readily apparent to users without prompting.

This lack of Cybersickness could be attributable to the relatively short amount of time participants spent in VR. It may also be because the prototype was optimised to ensure a smooth frame-rate. It is believed that the more realistic the VR environment is, the worse the symptoms of Cybersickness are (Tiiro, 2018). The Noda environment, while sufficiently detailed to give the illusion of complexity, is not a photorealistic simulation (see Figure 10 and Annex 4). This may have reduced the risk of Cybersickness. However, there is a great deal of variation between individuals’ susceptibility to Cybersickness (Rebenitsch and Owen, 2014). It may be the case that the cohort had a low predisposition to a negative reaction. It may also be the case that participants were unwilling to reveal medical information or admit their distress.

5.6 Selected comments

Both sets of participants were able to give free-text commentary to each question. This allowed them to be more expressive about their feelings than is provided for by the restrictive Likert scale. While it is possible to perform automated sentiment analysis and opinion mining using neural networks and Bayesian classifiers (Li et al., 2019) there was only a small amount of data, so these responses were manually sorted by sentiment. This generated an emotional map of participants’ feelings towards the Metaverse. The volume of data gathered from the written responses roughly corresponds to those of the Likert scale responses, but they provide much more nuance, detail, and insight into the strength of those feelings.

As discussed in the Literature Review, the term “Metaverse” has been used in this paper as a generic term for VR worlds. However, the comments from participants show that they inexorably link the term with the Meta Corporation (still referred to by its old name, “Facebook”, by all respondents).

Some users are obviously concerned about the direction in which this technology is going, which may lead to them rejecting the journey into the Metaverse. Research has shown that some people believe all humans are “biologically and psychologically maladapted to life in a technological society”, leading to those people feeling alienated from modern life (Fleming, 2022).

The analysis of the survey shows that the testing of the prototype was successful. It also quantifies the appetite for use of the Metaverse in the workplace. The results of the VRSQ did not raise significant concerns about the health effects of VR in short sessions. These results need to be caveated with the recognition that this was a small study with a specific user group. This critical evaluation is covered in the next section.

6. Critical Evaluation of Results

The aim of this research was to build a prototype to see if users could interact with complex hierarchical Cybersecurity data which had been rendered in the Metaverse, and to assess users’ perceptions of both the experience and the Metaverse in a business context. It also sought to explore reported health issues with wearing VR headsets.

These aims were successfully achieved. Custom code was created to extract, transform, and load the data from existing systems, through industry-standard algorithms, and into a new environment. Participants shared a range of opinions about using VR in the organisation. While there was some scepticism, users were mostly supportive of adopting the Metaverse for interactive data. However the phrase “Metaverse” was repeatedly met with hostility from participants, which stemmed from the association with Facebook. The health impacts of using HMDs were explored and some limitations were found.

6.1 Health and Wellbeing Issues

Previous research has shown that one of the limitations of using an HMD is that users find them uncomfortable (Mehrfard et al., 2019) as demonstrated in Figure 17. While work is ongoing to make headsets smaller, lighter, and more comfortable, the current state-of-the-art is relatively primitive. This constrains the acceptance of HMD hardware among potential users.

All of the issues raised in Mehrfard et al. (2019) were replicated in this study - along with a few additional concerns. For example, the foam padding of the HMD is known to cause allergic reactions in some people which caused Meta to include a silicone cover with later revisions of their hardware (‘Oculus recalls Quest 2 headset pads after skin rashes’, 2021). During this study, the silicone cover was prone to slipping off the HMD and blocking its lenses. Some participants found wearing the device to be claustrophobic and were worried about not seeing their surroundings or people approaching them. Concern was also expressed at the high cost of the HMD and its apparent fragility; one participant was worried about damaging the expensive equipment. These are psychological concerns as opposed to physiological, but indicate possible causes of resistance to VR adoption in the workplace.

An unexpected finding was that setting up the HMD for each participant required a lengthy calibration process. Multiple factors can have an effect on the comfort of the headset and the clarity of image. For example, InterPupillary Distance (IPD) varies considerably between humans and a mismatch between the user’s IPD and the IPD setting on the HMD can cause discomfort (Kim et al., 2021). Additionally, differing cranium sizes result in a need for different tightness settings on the HMD head strap. Finally, the position and comfort of the head strap was impacted by participants’ various hairstyles.

All these factors may have contributed to the negative sentiment expressed by some participants. Their wellbeing was negatively impacted by their frustration at the poor clarity of the images, the discomfort of wearing the HMD, and the lengthy calibration routine.

6.2 Data Presentation Issues

When evaluating the success of a new method of presenting data, a popular metric comes from Edward Tufte who asked the chart designer to consider the “data-ink ratio” (Tufte, 2001). This is often referred to by the pithy epithet “show the data”. Tufte encourages creators of visualisations to eschew superfluous decoration and to concentrate on the presentation of data. While Tufte’s work has undeniably been influential, his theories are all based on the qualitative feedback of one subject - himself. A later quantitative study showed that, in contrast to Tufte’s preferences, some people prefer graphs which displayed a low data-ink ratio (Inbar, Tractinsky and Meyer, 2007).

In order to assess the prototype, a Tuftean analysis of the VR environment was conducted by the author and is reported in Table 03. It shows that the use of VR to display complex information meets many, but not all, of Tufte’s recommendations.

6.3 Industry Applicability

The applicability of the study to the wider industry may be limited. The prototype was only tested on a small cohort who were already familiar with the data. They were all members of the author’s team, which may have affected their objectivity. Although demographic data was not recorded on a participant level, the author’s team does not have sufficient gender diversity to be able to draw robust conclusions about whether there is a notable difference in acceptance between genders. Similarly, employees at the author’s workplace do not represent a wide range of ages. Therefore it isn’t possible to assess whether the perception of the Metaverse differs by age.

The prototype only tested highly-structured hierarchical data. Participants were able to navigate and interact with data in this new paradigm, but not all organisations have data which is curated and structured. This type of navigation may be restricted to datasets which are both massive and well-defined.

Cost is a significant barrier to adoption. The UK Government wishes to “maximise efficiency within budgets” in order to save money (Sunak, 2022). Despite the ability of technology to improve the efficiency and impact of the Civil Service, there is a reluctance among senior politicians to fully embrace new ways of working (Smith, 2021). Against this backdrop, it is uncertain whether the organisation will be prepared to invest in the technology necessary for widespread Metaverse deployment.

6.4 Current Academic Research

This research builds on recent work which demonstrates the need for effective visualisations of Cybersecurity data (Kullman and Engel, 2022). While 3D visualisations of complex data are not new (Berkel and Bos, 1999), the price of hardware has fallen and the speed of software has improved to such a degree that this research shows that it is finally feasible to use VR in the workplace to explore complex data sets.

Contemporary research shows the promotional hype around the Metaverse doesn’t necessarily match the enthusiasm of potential users (Dwivedi et al., 2022). These findings are replicated in this study. Participants mostly enjoyed the immersive VR experience, but their comments highlighted several drawbacks to the technology which undermine its supposed utility.

6.5 Reflection on research

The author reflects on the research using the DIEP reflective model (Rogers, 2001).

6.6 Ethical, legal, and social issues

Participants’ data were processed according to GDPR. The Official Secrets Act was observed in relation to the secret data being used. The study did not provide a way for people with visual impairments to interact with the prototype. This is a recognised limitation with the current state of VR (Seigneur and Choukou, 2022). While users who experience Cybersickness could be accommodated through the use of 2D video demonstrations, there was no effective method of including those for whom VR is inaccessible. Deployment of this technology, without reasonable adjustments, would likely be a breach of the Equality Act.

6.7 Conclusion

Testing the prototype showed that it is possible for users to interact with familiar hierarchical data in the Metaverse. Participants mostly found the experience both useful and compelling, but it should be acknowledged that the novelty of using VR in the workplace may have had an impact on their reactions. The name “Metaverse”, and the reputation of Facebook, are barriers to adoption. Finally, although the majority of participants didn’t suffer any of the effects of Cybersickness, the HMDs were uncomfortable to wear even for a short period.

There is further work to be done to make the Metaverse experience more useful for organisations, and this will be discussed in the next section.

7. Further Work, Conclusions, and Recommendations

7.1 Strength and presentation of findings

This was a small study, performed on people familiar with the existing data. Nevertheless, the study shows that participants exhibited interest and excitement about bringing the Metaverse experience into the workplace. This is tempered by concern about the company which controls it.

This paper started by defining three main aims; build a prototype to visualise complex information in the Metaverse, assess professionals’ attitudes to using VR in the workplace, and investigate the health constraints of using VR equipment.

The prototype worked well from a technology perspective and, judging from the comments of participants, was a useful way to visualise the data and show the scale of issues faced. The findings indicate that the processing power of modern HMDs is insufficient for models with extremely large volumes of data (see Load). However, when using smaller models, the fidelity and fluidity of the Metaverse environment was sufficient to create an experience which was both useful and compelling.

The survey showed participants had both an acceptance of VR in the workplace and a willingness to find ways to exploit this technology. While some doubts remain over the suitability of Meta to be an effective steward of the fledgling Metaverse, sentiment towards the technology’s use in the workplace was broadly positive.

Participants expressed some health concerns with the HMDs, particularly around the weight and comfort of the device. While no users complained of eye-strain, some reported that the images were blurry. Widespread Cybersickness did not occur in this study, although one potential participant refused to take part having previously experienced VR-induced nausea.

7.2 Recommendations

The author recommends that the term “Metaverse” should not be used in the generic sense due to its inescapable link with Facebook. Instead, a more neutral term should be adopted, for example “Virtual Reality”.

Technology companies frequently misappropriate terms from science fiction in order to make their products sound innovative and exciting (Newitz, 2021). This trope is illustrated in Figure 18. The original Metaverse envisioned by Stephenson was a dystopian nightmare. It served as an allegory for how the worst excesses of humanity can corrupt an environment. Given this, the author finds it puzzling that Facebook chose to rebrand their company around the notion of the Metaverse. Perhaps this behaviour should not be surprising as several major technology projects have already been named after dystopian fictional products such as Skynet, Palantir, and Panopticon (Levendowski, 2022).

The author contends that companies cannot escape the reputational damage which accompanies these choices. Several participants brought up the science-fiction roots of the name “Metaverse” and the poor reputation of the “Meta” company. This should be taken as a warning signal that there remains a strong emotional barrier to adopting technologies promoted by platforms with questionable workplace practices (Chitkara, 2020).

7.3 Further research

Employers may be unwilling to adopt technology which opens them up to claims of workplace discrimination. Currently, people with visual impairments are excluded from participating in Virtual Reality, therefore accessibility research needs to be prioritised. Similarly, ongoing work into the cause of Cybersickness and its prevention will be necessary to ensure these products are usable by all employees.

7.4 Suggestions for improved practice

Users face significant privacy risks when interacting with VR (Nair, Garrido and Song, 2022) - a concern noted by some participants. It is imperative that future solutions are designed in such a way as to preserve users’ privacy and dignity. With an increase in workplace monitoring (TUC, 2020) it seems inevitable that some employers will abuse the Metaverse to intrude on their employees’ personal data. Best practice guidelines should be developed to ensure that business tools in the Metaverse prevent this sort of intrusion. Further investigation is needed to determine how best to warn users of the risks they face from the Metaverse.

In addition, employers need to have a better understanding of Cybersickness (Garcia-Agundez et al., 2019). Intense use of HMDs may not be suitable for a significant number of employees. Given that up to 90% of users already experience eye-strain from the use of digital devices (Coles‐brennan, Sulley and Young, 2019), it is likely that users of HMDs will also experience these issues.

In the author’s opinion, HMDs cannot become a shared resource. Today, employees waste considerable time configuring shared computer equipment to meet their personal needs (Smith Brain Trust, 2019). The author previously noted the long and convoluted set-up time required to adjust an HMD to fit each participant. Making employees reconfigure a shared HMD for each use would add an unacceptable time burden. With shared HMDs being a potent vector for antibiotic-resistant bacteria and other pathogens, the risk of disease transfer is also high (Creel et al., 2020). Therefore, any organisation intending to use the Metaverse should ensure that it has sufficient budget to provide every user with their own HMD and also supply suitable cleaning products.

7.5 Further Exploitation Within The Organisation

Participants undoubtedly found the prospect of using the Metaverse exciting, and some saw how it could be useful in the future. But this is tempered with four main drawbacks:

7.6 Conclusion

This small study shows the viability of using the Metaverse in the workplace to examine complex hierarchical data. While concerns remain about the health impacts of wearing Virtual Reality equipment, users seem excited to explore the potential of the Metaverse. It remains to be seen whether the negative reputation of the Metaverse will be a significant barrier to wider adoption.

There is a long history of researchers creating new and baroque methods to visualise hierarchical information. For example the complexity of the early World Wide Web led to the development of Hyperbolic Trees as a navigation tool (Lamping and Rao, 1996). However, despite the technical proficiency and innovative approach of Hyperbolic navigation, it did not become mainstream. The first modern VR display was created in the middle of the last century (Bradley, 1965) but did not become a commercial success.

The use of 3D environments helps solve some problems associated with investigating large amounts of data but may not be easily integrated into existing workflows. Although VR is currently enjoying a resurgence of interest via the Metaverse, it is uncertain whether it will become widely adopted.

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Annex

Annex 1 - Risk Assessment

Annex 2 - PoC Source Code

HTML & JavaScript source code to the PoC used to assess the feasibility of the project.

Annex 3 - Questionnaire and Results

3.1 Preamble

Thank you for volunteering to take part in my MSc research project today. I’m talking to a number of different people to understand their experiences of Virtual Reality and the Metaverse. This research typically takes less than 15 minutes.

I’ll be asking you some questions and I would also like you to take a look at a prototype VR experience to see how well it works for you. I’m not testing you - there are no right or wrong answers - I’m interested in understanding how this idea performs. You can’t break it - it’s not a real service and it doesn’t collect any data.

Some people report symptoms of dizziness, eye strain, or nausea when using VR. If experienced, these symptoms typically fade quickly. You can choose to stop at any time. I’m going to ask you to think aloud while you’re completing the tasks. I’ll be taking notes and will be recording what you see. Do you have any questions so far?

3.2 Questions

These questions were adapted from “A Technology Acceptance Model Survey of the Metaverse Prospects” (Aburbeian, Owda and Owda, 2022).

3.2.1 Pre-Experience Questions

3.2.2 Instructions

3.2.3 In-Experience Questions - Part 1

3.2.4 VRSQ

3.2.5 In-Experience Questions - Part 2

3.2.6 Post-Experience Questions

3.3 Further information

3.4 Questionnaire Results

3.5 Sentiment Quantified Comments

Entries in italic are from participants from the group which tested the prototype.

3.6 Individual Informed Consent Form

Annex 4 - Presentation to DataConnect22

It may not be used or retained in electronic systems for the detection of plagiarism. No part of it may be used for commercial purposes without prior permission.

This has the effect of formatting DNS into the order now favoured by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World-Wide Web (Runciman, 2011).↩︎

Table 01 - Initial Sprint Plan
Sprint	Contents
Academic Research (to feed in to literature review)	Prior Art - Interactive 3D visualisations of security related data Usability - issues to be aware of in creating metaverse experiences Psychology - how understandable are 3D graphs? Ethical issues - cutting edge issues relating to the metaverse
User Research	Identify Stakeholders Gather user stories via interviews Understand what risks the business wants to identify from the data
Data Gathering	Get access to relevant systems Extract data in a variety of forms Transform data into different data structures Load data into suitable systems
Experiment with different visualisation techniques	Static / Non-interactive (i.e. data structure is rendered once) Interactive (i.e. data structure can be manipulated) Pre-recorded animation (i.e. a story is told with the data and visualised)
Test with users	Qualitative questions Feedback
Report findings	Conclude write-up
Submission	By 2022-12-07 due to travel commitments

	Table 02 - Conjoint Analysis of hardware choices
Brand	Price	Performance	Weight	Programming Environment	Controls	Screen resolution (per eye)
Hololens (Microsoft, 2022)	High (£3,350)	High	566g	Microsoft Windows Only	Hand tracking	2048*1080
Oculus Quest 2 (Meta, 2022)	Medium (£350)	Medium	530g	Web, Android app, in-app tools	Hand tracking, joysticks	1832*1920
Cardboard VR (Google, 2022)	Low (£5 + cost of existing Android phone)	Low	<200g	Web, Android app	None	1080*1080

	Selected participant comments from questions asked before the demonstration
Questions	Negative	Positive	Author’s Analysis
What is your opinion on The Metaverse?	“I guess it’s because it’s becoming synonymous with Facebook, and… well… Facebook.” “Haven’t tried it but everything I’ve seen about it has been negative.” “trying to monopolise on the VR industry - it’s not good.”	“Positive if there is an agreement on what it actually is. Seems to be being thrown around as the latest buzzword right now” “Has potential, still not found a killer app yet though”	The negative sentiment is mostly focussed on Facebook and participants’ dislike and distrust of the company. Any positive sentiment is tempered by the fact that it is seen as having high potential rather than actual usefulness.
I can’t wait to try The Metaverse	“Suspicious of data gathering activities (eg Meta)” “Whatever the metaverse can do a normal computer application could do. It sounds boring. It’s a gimmick” “There are no good headsets of a doable value.”	“I’m a doer not a reader - being able to see it with my own eyes will be amazing. I’m just really excited.” “Sounds interesting and a new way of seeing and understanding data”	Participants were eager to try the Metaverse overall, but doubts remain especially over price of headsets and the potential for corporate abuse.

	Selected participant comments from questions asked after the demonstration
Questions	Negative	Positive	Author’s Analysis
The Metaverse experience is exciting.	“Devalues what it means to be human, too many risks as humans are inherently evil” “it doesn’t feel much different to previous attempts at 3d visualisations”	“Level of interaction you can’t get anywhere else.” “A different way of seeing things. Instead of seeing things in a text format - I could see visually and go into depth with the things that you wanted.” “I can see it being a good tool to visualise complex issues”	There is ample positive sentiment toward the Metaverse, but undercut with an acknowledgement that 3D experiences have been tried before without success.
Using The Metaverse will be helpful to the organisation.	“large cash outlay” “anything interactive I’ve seen (eg Zuckerberg demos) is far short of anything useful” “This could be done on a flat screen.” “my concern is that this could turn into a case of Doing Metaverse Because Everyone Is Doing Metaverse, and ultimately trying to shoehorn it into applications where it isn’t the most appropriate tool”	“I’m a visual learner. Being able to jump into a diagram made it easier to understand and more interesting.” “Our dataset is complex. Analysts have trouble navigating it. Using the metaverse would help them” “Provides new ways to illustrate structures/problems that the organisation is facing.” “turning highly complex data into something a human can interact with is amazing”	The major concerns are around the cost of hardware, and that the hype around the Metaverse will lead to unsustainable products. Again, participants see high value in being able to interact with complex data sets and demonstrate their complexity to others.
I intend to use The Metaverse in the future	“I doubt it would be practical or possible to implement within the civil service” “All I think about is Facebook. When I hear metaverse all I hear is an extension of facebook. And I have no interest in that.” “They are looking to get people addicted and monetised. It’s not coming from a place where they want to help humanity - it is just business expansion. Especially when this could be quite addictive.”	“Lots of potential for collaborative work, spatial placing etc.” “It would be beneficial for a range of people to understand the scale and complexity of the data that my organisation works with” “Metaverse is huge and has many different uses and scope. For me and my job I can see the benefit” “It’s just natural. It’s part of evolution to act in virtual spaces.”	Once users had either seen a demonstration, or experienced the Metaverse, their sentiment became much more positive. This was tempered by the realisation that the cost was likely to be prohibitive. There is also a prevailing attitude that corporate IT departments in the public sector are a blocker to innovation (Smith, 2013).
Any further thoughts on what you’ve seen?	“Does Facebook get my data?” “I’m reluctant because of what I’ve heard. Environments you go in and there are no rules and people come and attack you.” “Having removed the headset - I felt it was a bit heavy.”	“really brings the idea to life in a way that a static slide could never do.” “The more we can empower people to create their own visualisations, the more powerful this tool will be” “Definitely something I want to try again. An awesome piece of tech.” “I didn’t feel silly using it.”	The Metaverse experience is seen as empowering and interesting. But, once again, Facebook’s reputation, and the negative press associated with it, are barriers to adoption.

Table 03 - How did the prototype compare to “Tufte’s instructions to practitioners” (Tufte, 2001)?
Show the data	All the data are shown.
Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else	Participants spent a lot of time “enjoying the view” and marvelling at the environment. Once the shock of the new wore off, they then engaged with the substance.
Avoid distorting what the data have to say	The data were plainly arranged. There was no distortion or manipulation.
Present many numbers in a small space	Space is less of a concern in VR as it has an endless topography. Nevertheless, a large amount of data were presented in a relatively compact form.
Make large data sets coherent	The ability to collapse large data sets into smaller, more manageable chunks makes this more coherent.
Encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data	The use of colour and shape allowed participants to easily compare data.
Reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure	The interactive nature of the structure gives both an overview and fine-grained detail.
Serve a reasonably clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration	The purpose of the visualisation was exploration. However, some elements (such as website logos) were purely decorative.
Be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set	The prototype is separate from any statistical or verbal descriptions.

What is your previous experience with Virtual Reality Systems?
I have never used it	I have rarely used it	I am an occasional user	I am a regular user	I am an experienced user
Comments:

What is your opinion on The Metaverse?
Very negative	Mostly negative	Neutral	Mostly positive	Very positive
Comments:

Others’ opinion about the Metaverse affects my intention to use it.
Strongly disagree	Mostly disagree	Neutral	Mostly agree	Strongly agree
Comments:

I can’t wait to try Metaverse
Strongly disagree	Mostly disagree	Neutral	Mostly agree	Strongly agree
Comments:

Are you experiencing any of the following?
	Yes (describe)	No
General discomfort
Fatigue
Eyestrain
(Original) Difficulty focussing (Asked) Difficulty concentrating
Headache
(Original) Fullness of head (Asked) Pressure inside your head
Blurred vision
Dizzy
Vertigo

Time passed quickly when using VR devices.
Strongly disagree	Mostly disagree	Neutral	Mostly agree	Strongly agree
Comments:

Using Metaverse will be helpful to the organisation.
Strongly disagree	Mostly disagree	Neutral	Mostly agree	Strongly agree
Comments:

I intend to use Metaverse in the future.
Strongly disagree	Mostly disagree	Neutral	Mostly agree	Strongly agree
Comments:

Question: What is your opinion on The Metaverse?
Negative	Neutral	Positive
Scary, would prefer it didn’t exist even if it has benefits	I don’t know enough to have formed an opinion	Positive if there is an agreement on what it actually is. Seems to be being thrown around as the latest buzzword right now
I guess it’s because it’s becoming synonymous with Facebook, and… well… Facebook. [though to me it’s William Gibson, Jaron Lanier, etc.]	neutral. seems revolutional	Going to be huge
Risk of centralised corporate application of VR.	context-dependent when overall +ve/-ve	open to be persuaded
I associate it strongly with Meta, who I do not trust. Also most screenshots/videos I’ve seen so far look like Runescape.	Looking to see where the hype lands	has a lot of potential
Entry barrier perhaps?	Little interaction but interested	Has potential, still not found a killer app yet though
I really don’t like that Facebook are trying to own it. I don’t like Facebook.	A more interactive internet where the best will be better and the worst will be even worse.	Nice I could play with that
Interested to see what’s possible, but sceptical at the moment	It sounds like nothing else we’ve seen before, but I don’t know much about it at this point
Haven’t tried it but everything I’ve seen about it has been negative. It seems like another addictive thing that will take you way from reality. I worry about the future where we’re using it 24/7	Pretty neutral. All I know about it really is from fiction.
It’s just stupid. There’s no point to it. A waste of money and time. Trying to make something which isn’t useful to people. Also trying to monopolise on the VR industry - it’s not good.	I don’t anything about it other than the hype
I think that anything can be mapped onto 2D. And it’s just another thing. Just because it exists that’s no reason to do something with it. I think it will be exploited for more time wasting activities	Not formed an opinion
I’m worried about security. Especially of young people. Possibly because I don’t know much. But the rules around security seem quite loose.	Open world thing. Can’t put it into words. Get confused and think of the multiverse
I can see the potential advantages. I am an avid sci-fi fan. So versions of the metaverse is something I’m very familiar with. I’m interested in how something commercially driven will end up	There are lots of benefits of the metaverse educationally. A lot of good things. Somewhere where people can get together where they couldn’t in person. Music concerts. Escapism is very important. But the downside is that you can use it to escape real life. Not putting your focus on reality. You can prioritise your metaverse life over your normal life. Like Instagram where you’re only uploading the best bits of you.

Question: I can’t wait to try The Metaverse
Negative	Neutral	Positive
There are no good headsets of a doable value.	Once I know more, I might be!	I think VR and AR are the future so anything that will bring this into the mainstream is an exciting development
Suspicious of data gathering activities (eg Meta)	Currently neutral, more concerned of side-effects in society	multiplayer games are going to be awesome
A stretch for me given I don’t engage in social media	Until now I’ve not been hugely interested in the Metaverse (I spend a lot of time just on Instagram as it is!) but this may be due to my lack of understanding of it	Sounds interesting and a new way of seeing and understanding data
It would be interesting but I am sceptical how it will work, how much it will cost. Will the hardware be available to support it.	I’m curious. I want to take a look.	Always exciting for something new.
Don’t have any burning desire to try it or buy a headset. IT feels like 3D tv in the home. It was a thing until it wasn’t a thing. It feels like this could be the same. It might not be.	I’ve got mixed feelings. I don’t think it is a necessity. We have created something that may prove to be good but will take years. I’m a busy person so I’ll leave it to other people	It is exciting and a new possibility
I don’t care about the metaverse. It’s just not worth my time. Whatever the metaverse can do a normal computer application could do. It sounds boring. It’s a gimmick		Looks an interesting new tool
I’m open to new experiences. If something came up - a use case - I’d crack on and use it. I’m slightly concerned that it will be exploited for entertainment rather than utility.		Want to see what’s going to be there. Always interested in getting one. But never got around to it. Have friends who play and then they stop. Good at the start. Virtual parties and talking to people. Virtual concerts. Looking around. That appeals to me. Gaming - I play here and there.
		I love technology. I just feel like you’re somewhere else when you’re not. It’s a different way to learn. I’m a doer not a reader - being able to see it with my own eyes will be amazing. I’m just really excited.
		Excited to see how it works and what it can do.
		I’m a technology geek. I’m genuinely interested in the application of new technology. And science fiction!

Question: The Metaverse experience is exciting.
Negative	Neutral	Positive
Devalues what it means to be human, too many risks as humans are inherently evil	It could well be…	Great to see some VR applications for data!
Not sure it adds to understanding	It was interesting, but I wouldn’t say exciting. Useful tool for work purposes. A different way to see things.	interesting research
it doesn’t feel much different to previous attempts at 3d visualisations	I don’t know. Why Metaverse and not VR. Metaverse is something very specific created by other people.	It looks cool, and I can certainly see how it expands to make it something you can’t get elsewhere
I think it’s just not so much fun as it is made out of it. But you could do some cool things. But you could replicate it on a normal screen with normal controls	Lots of use of opportunities but access to hardware may be limiting. Ability to visualise things is very powerful	Opens up a new way to interact and share data
		I wasn’t aware of these potential use cases, or that organisations could load in their data or connect it to the Metaverse (I’ve not been paying nearly enough attention!)
		Level of interaction you can’t get anywhere else. Immersive. Easy to explore different sections. Unique experience. Can’t do that anywhere else.
		A different way of seeing things. Instead of seeing things in a text format - I could see visually and go into depth with the things that you wanted. Very visual.
		It was all new. I was enjoying having a look round and seeing where everything was. I got lost in it all.
		I can see it being a good tool to visualise complex issues to senior people.
		Because the tech has reached the point where it is sufficiently seamless. Imperceptible lag. It feels natural to operate in. Our animalistic brains perceive it well. Much more natural dealing with lists.

Question: Using The Metaverse will be helpful to the organisation.
Negative	Neutral	Positive
This could be done on a flat screen. I don;t know how easy it would be to manipulate the data (but I am sure this will improve in time)	It might be…	I think right now, it’s early days but we should be starting to think about and planning for future applications
large cash outlay, see above re not different enough	Probably not for our kind of data but can see value in others.	Possibly for some things 3d is useful where there are cross links
At the moment the usage seems descriptive rather than interactive - anything interactive I’ve seen (eg Zuckerberg demos) is far short of anything useful	It depends	Create a shared space with an easier environment for people to visualise as a non-expert than excel and spreadsheets
While I have no doubt that there are strong use-cases for VR in business, my concern is that this could turn into a case of Doing Metaverse Because Everyone Is Doing Metaverse, and ultimately trying to shoehorn it into applications where it isn’t the most appropriate tool.	not sure how much it adds compared to 2D, although it might work for e.g. people survey. Or using it for 3D charts (not hierarchies).	Visualisation can improve confidence
Depends on the purpose . I don’t see govt employees hopping into the Metaverse and faffing about. I do think that something like this could be on a normal computer.	I think it could be but it’s hard to say what for at the moment. The domain management thing, like seeing which has issues to investigate, I still think it’s more efficient to have something like a 2d report that sends an email alert or something saying there’s something wrong with a domain	Our dataset is complex. Analysts have trouble navigating it. Using the metaverse would help them I think and give senior people an appreciation of it’s complexity.
	I can think of an example where we store certain information as a hierarchy, so your specific example actually might be useful. But we’ve done fine without it before.	I can’t think of a use case today but the principle of being able to map and model data like this is phenomenal. It needs developing but as a basic concept turning highly complex data into something a human can interact with is amazing. Imagine visualising a family grouping and wider contacts of a child in social care or between families. Are there individuals deep within a family network connecting to other children etc.
	Unsure. Different people have different requirements.	My organisation has some big (as in millions) hierarchical datasets with very uneven content. It would interesting to apply this approach to some of those
	There is potential	Provides new ways to illustrate structures/problems that the organisation is facing. Can already imagine how it will make it easier to compare how certain domains/tables/datasets are more complicated or bigger than others. It may make it easier for users to find issues or insights. I think it’s easier to pull insight from a top level, though I question how helpful it will be at a granular level.
	Such a short experience. Looked like it had potential. But how would it work in practice? And the difficulty of scaling it and using it for long periods of time. I can’t see how it would make something more efficient. I can see how it is better to present something or explain something. But in terms of trying to fix something I can’t see it. More like a presentational tool.	More an more data is flooding into the organisation. I think this will help us to explore the data in new ways.
	At this point, I’m not sure. I only saw the surface of it. I don’t know what that was for. It was showing me information, but how I would use it properly I’m not sure.	Depends on how you design the system or product. There are areas where you can create and learn. Can break down the tree and see exactly where it is. Good for demoing stuff. Better than a conversation.
	The question is too high level to give a definitive answer. For analytic and design. Less so for economics. I might visualise strategy. It can help us tell stories at a pace and way that people will find engaging. It is very tempting. I’ve always wanted to get inside the data. Being able to visualise the sharing agreements it just plays beautifully. For people who deal with lots of text, less so.	Based off that experience. When explaining DNS and how a tree works and subdomains sit - it can be quite difficult. I’m a visual learner. Being able to jump into a diagram made it easier to understand and more interesting. Things which are more interesting are better for earning. The highlighting really helped to focus my attention and go into depth
		So different viewing something in that way. I’m used to just a laptop. If I was doing this, I’d be more interested in how I can utilise it.
		Because having this virtual representation of things helps with processing information. Makes it easier. Especially colours make you see something is going on. Better than spreadsheets and static information.

Question: I intend to use The Metaverse in the future.
Negative	Neutral	Positive
I’m a coder, so don’t tend to consume data too much.	Can’t see applicability to me at the moment, but I’ll keep an open mind	I initially didn’t expect this is what the meta verse could look like. I assumed it would be more linked to VR type games with characters. Excited to see how we could use it in the future
Probably not enough value.	It’s a novelty, I’ll try it if someone has the equipment and has already set it up for me.	possibly but only using as a tool in specific use cases
it would be cool to use it, but I doubt it would be practical or possible to implement within the civil service (given that it’s taken 2 years to get access to R packages!)	only in specific scenarios	I do not know if I will have the opportunity, but would like to.
I find 3D visualisations make me nauseous	I am waiting for the metaverse to get bigger or the price to come down.	Because it is happening and I am interested
I’ll take the opportunity if I get it. That doesn’t seem likely in a work context.		I can see how this would be useful in visualising the connections between objects/data in our infrastructure
All I think about is Facebook. When I hear metaverse all I hear is an extension of facebook. And I have no interest in that. If you mean things separate to that then yes, potentially. LD7111 No one says search, everyone says Google - it feels like that’s happened with Metaverse. It is worrying. They are looking to get people addicted and monetised. IT’s not coming from a place where they want to help humanity - it is just business expansion. Especially when this could be quite addictive.		think it will be useful for showing data visually in 3D, at least will help get an understanding of scale
It’s a gimmick. I don’t see the point.		Could be useful for Linked data.
		I’ve already been building and playing with Metaverse apps.
		I don’t have the technical skills now to develop this but this is very exciting!
		Lots of potential for collaborative work, spatial placing etc.
		It would be beneficial for a range of people to understand the scale and complexity of the data that my organisation works with
		Always been keen. Now, on seeing this, it has motivated me to look into it.
		It interests me. It is new so it is something that is exciting for me and I want to know more about it and how it would benefit me.
		It is a fun way of exploring complex ideas
		I’ve seen it now. This is a good use. Metaverse is huge and has many different uses and scope. For me and my job I can see the benefit of something about.
		It’s just natural. It’s part of evolution to act in virtual spaces.

Question: Any further thoughts on what you’ve seen?
Negative	Neutral	Positive
Not sure what the interactions between people adds in this case	It worked well. I felt like you really had to reach. Would be better if it worked remotely. While it wasn’t a problem. You get very deep into something quickly, so you lose the big pyramid quickly and lose track.	Very cool
Does Facebook get my data?	I don’t think we exploited the dynamics enough. I didn’t experience the all the possibilities	It’s interesting. Graphics needs development
I’m reluctant because of what I’ve heard. Environments you go in and there are no rules and people come and attack you. Kids’ safety is very important. Adults too.		Seems so exciting but no idea about how I would even start to look at ways to involve it in my work, other than waiting for it to be main system.
Having removed the headset - I felt it was a bit heavy.		I would like to do some work in this area myself with geospatial data representation
		Interesting - would like to discuss more, we are actively looking at how to use metaverse in policy making
		Should be particular use cases where this way of immersive UX makes workflows more efficient. Does this has an efficient visual search engine?
		Really clear explanation, and I love the interactive demo; really brings the idea to life in a way that a static slide could never do.
		Different people have different data needs, so would need different visualisations. The more we can empower people to create their own visualisations, the more powerful this tool will be
		Pretty unique. Not come across anything like that. It was fully immersive. Definitely something I want to try again. An awesome piece of tech.
		It was really cool. It was fun. I’ve never tried it before. I didn’t feel silly using it. I enjoyed using it. I want to know more! I’ve only known it as a gaming thing because of my other half. But to potentially use it for work is really interesting.
		You could have chosen to put that in a neutral featureless space. Your attention would focus on the construct. Having a room and things to focus in the distance helped the user experience. I had reference points to prevent motion sickness. I thought it would be distracting and it wasn’t. It helps to ground you in the artificial construct. I was surprised how intuitive it became.