A cross domain framework for analysing the metaverse as a sociotechnical system

The metaverse is emerging as a class of persistent, networked digital environments that combine immersive interfaces, platform infrastructures, data-intensive services, economic exchange, and social interaction. Research increasingly spans technological, economic, social, governance, and sustainability dimensions, but remains unevenly integrated, limiting consistent analysis of how developments in one domain affect others. This conceptual framework article examines how relationships among the economic, technological, social, political-regulatory, and environmental dimensions of metaverse development can be structured within a cross-domain socio-technical framework and which structural tensions arise from those relationships. The framework is developed through a structured integrative synthesis of interdisciplinary academic literature and selected policy-oriented sources. The metaverse is treated as an ecosystem or governance arrangement built around persistent, multi-user, spatially or immersively mediated digital environments and their supporting infrastructures. Extended reality, artificial intelligence, digital twins, blockchain, and advanced connectivity are considered enabling technologies rather than universal defining components. The synthesis identifies three convergence patterns—institutional coordination, responsible innovation, and interoperability—and five provisional tensions: innovation versus regulation, value extraction versus inclusion, centralized versus distributed governance, interoperability versus platform enclosure, and geopolitical fragmentation versus global coordination. Cross-domain pathways illustrate how interoperability, personalisation, environmental impacts, and regulatory fragmentation propagate across domains. Two illustrative configurations, an industrial digital-twin ecosystem and a consumer social metaverse platform, demonstrate the framework. The contribution lies in making socio-technical dependencies, spillovers, and governance trade-offs explicit and comparable.