Educational institutions orchestrate a variety of in-school events and activities to enrich the student experience. Given their benefits, it is crucial to encourage student participation. With the recent advent of the metaverse, there is an opportunity to engage students due to their inclination toward adopting such technologies. However, the dynamics of celebrating school events within these virtual worlds remain largely unexplored. Our study sought to address this gap by examining school event celebrations in the metaverse through an appreciative inquiry approach. During Valentine's Day, we introduced a special edition of our educational metaverse (i.e., MILES Virtual World) tailored to celebrate the occasion. We discovered that conducting school events in the metaverse requires the integration of real-life social rituals to augment students' social experiences and foster a sense of community. Moreover, the need for realism and the mirroring of real-world traditions in virtual settings emerged as critical drivers for creating more emotionally satisfying and engaging user experiences. The challenge of encouraging student participation in physical events parallels the issue encountered in virtual worlds, where students may feel discouraged from participating if they do not observe their friends' presence within the metaverse. Our study also calls for collective engagement in shaping the virtual world to ensure more inclusive, engaging, and enriched educational metaverses. As we continue to navigate the evolving landscape of immersive digital environments, the insights gained from our research underscore the importance of collaboration, innovation, and student agency in shaping the future of education.

Social relationships are important to human well-being and interaction. Recently, there has been growing interest in how they are formed in various digital media, including social media and video games. Amid the rise of digital engagement, the metaverse has emerged as an essential virtual environment for social interaction. Unfortunately, there is limited understanding of how social relationships are developed and maintained within the metaverse. In this study, we explored the dynamics of social relationship development in a metaverse world. Using a one-shot case study, we assessed the roles of immersion and embodiment, as well as the moderating effect of copresence, in building social relationships through multiple regression analysis. Our findings show that with higher levels of immersion and embodiment, the formation of social relationships in the metaverse is significantly improved. Copresence further intensifies these effects, which is indicative of its crucial role in virtual social interactions. These results indicate that enhancing the immersion, embodiment, and copresence elements in metaverse environments can encourage stronger social bonds among users. Overall, this study advances our understanding of online social relationship formation in the metaverse environments and its design and development.

The emergence of the metaverse has expanded the vital role of virtual worlds in education. It extends the traditional configuration of virtual spaces by offering a more immersive, interactive, and social experience. Unfortunately, there is insufficient literature on how to develop a metaverse application aligned with academic standards and best practices. In this study, we adopted a co-design approach in remodeling our mobile educational metaverse to draw a blueprint for existing and future metaverse technology adopters. We sent a follow-up survey to stakeholders inviting free-text comments. This survey focused on the challenges, issues, and expected features from the perspectives of developers, teachers, and students, respectively. Our results revealed several challenges that developers face when building a metaverse, such as technical infrastructure, student engagement, avatar customization, and performance optimization. Meanwhile, teachers emphasized potential issues that may arise from the use of metaverse technology in educational settings, such as learning outcomes, health and safety, digital citizenship, and ethics and morality. Finally, students expected several key features of an educational metaverse application, such as socialization and collaboration, virtual world interactions, metaverse optimization, realistic graphics, and minigames and activities. The implications of these findings are significant and can help other educational institutions seeking to integrate metaverse technology into their academic services. Overall, our study presents an initial foundation for further exploration and advancement within the rapidly evolving field of metaverse technology.

Visionary Studios took advantage of creating an approach to promoting and preserving these rich Philippine legends through a form of an interactive animation film. Mitolohiya adapts the story about the origin of The First Coconut Tree and the Creation of Man, using two-dimensionl characters with three-dimensional textured environments. Go through an epic adventure featuring Bathala; a god living on a deserted planet who seeks and desires to create the first life on Earth, Galangkalulua; a winged god who wanders the universe, and Ulilangkalulua; a serpent god ruling over the clouds. Along with bonus sequences of stories showing the legends of five other deities from Tagalog myths. Tala; the goddess of the stars, Hanan; the goddess of morning, Mayari; the goddess of the moon, Lakapati; the goddess of good harvest and Amanikable; the god of the sea. This animation film is created to promote and preserve Philippine myths about Tagalog gods & goddesses through an interactive hybrid animation format. Overall, the preliminary data shows that most of the participants were not familiar with the adapted Tagalog myth in the film however, after watching the interactive film, most of the respondents gave positive feedback to the overall film's animation, design, aesthetic, story, and website. According to the data, the animation and interactivity of the film makes it more engaging for the viewers which shows that the use of the interactive hybrid animation and website is effective in promoting Philippine Tagalog mythology. It is highly recommended to give further research about the different legends and stories within the Tagalog pantheon. Due to the large variety of characters, the possibility of creating numerous adaptations can also be suggested.