Welcome to Smart Agriculture

Smart Agriculture ›› 2022, Vol. 4 ›› Issue (4): 126-137.doi: 10.12133/j.smartag.SA202206006

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Agricultural Metaverse: Key Technologies, Application Scenarios, Challenges and Prospects

CHEN Feng1,2(), SUN Chuanheng1,2(), XING Bin1,2, LUO Na1,2, LIU Haishen1,3   

  1. 1.National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing 100097, China
    2.National Engineering Laboratory for Agri-product Quality Traceability, Beijing 100097, China
    3.Beijing Key Laboratory of Digital Plant, Beijing 100097, China
  • Received:2022-06-20 Online:2022-12-30

Abstract:

As an emerging concept, metaverse has attracted extensive attention from industry, academia and scientific research field. The combination of agriculture and metaverse will greatly promote the development of agricultural informatization and agricultural intelligence, provide new impetus for the transformation and upgrading of agricultural intelligence. Firstly, to expound feasibility of the application research of metaverse in agriculture, the basic principle and key technologies of agriculture metaverse were briefly described, such as blockchain, non-fungible token, 5G/6G, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, 3D reconstruction, cloud computing, edge computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, brain computer interface, digital twins and parallel system. Then, the main scenarios of three agricultural applications of metaverse in the fields of virtual farm, agricultural teaching system and agricultural product traceability system were discussed. Among them, virtual farm is one of the most important applications of agricultural metaverse. Agricultural metaverse can help the growth of crops and the raising of livestock and poultry in the field of agricultural production, provide a three-dimensional and visual virtual leisure agricultural experience, provide virtual characters in the field of agricultural product promotion. The agricultural metaverse teaching system can provide virtual agricultural teaching similar to natural scenes, save training time and improve training efficiency by means of fragmentation. Traceability of agricultural products can let consumers know the production information of agricultural products and feel more confident about enterprises and products. Finally, the challenges in the development of agricultural metaverse were summarized in the aspects of difficulties in establishing agricultural metaverse system, weak communication foundation of agricultural metaverse, immature agricultural metaverse hardware equipment and uncertain agricultural meta universe operation, and the future development directions of agricultural metaverse were prospected. In the future, researches on the application of metaverse, agricultural growth mechanism, and low power wireless communication technologies are suggested to be carried out. A rural broadband network covering households can be established. The industrialization application of agricultural meta universe can be promoted. This review can provide theoretical references and technical supports for the development of metaverse in the field of agriculture.

Key words: agricultural metaverse, blockchain, extended reality, digital twins, parallel agriculture, virtual farm, agri-food supply chain traceability system, agricultural education system

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