Metaverse Implications: A Taxonomy

The metaverse is emerging as a transformative virtual environment that promises to reshape people's lives, introducing broad technological, social, economic, and cultural changes. Despite growing academic interest, existing literature remains dispersed, addressing isolated technological, economic, or ethical concerns without offering a general framework for understanding its broader implications. This article addresses this gap by conducting a systematic review of literature sourced from the scientific repositories ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Scopus. The review integrates existing knowledge and results in the creation of a taxonomy that categorizes the implications of the metaverse across multiple dimensions, including economic, technological, social, cultural, and environmental domains. The resulting taxonomy provides valuable information on both the opportunities and risks associated with the development of the metaverse and its implications, which also highlights its disruptive and transformative effect of smart city to AI-enabled citiverse. Finally, the identified implications are correlated with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to create a conceptual framework for assessing their impact.