The recent Facebook rebranding to Meta has drawn renewed attention to the metaverse. Technology giants, amongst others, are increasingly embracing the vision and opportunities of a hybrid social experience that mixes physical and virtual interactions. As the metaverse gains in traction, it is expected that everyday objects may soon connect more closely with virtual elements. However, discovering this "hidden" virtual world will be a crucial first step to interacting with it in this new augmented world. In this paper, we address the problem of connecting physical objects with their virtual counterparts, especially through connections built upon visual markers. We propose a unified recognition framework that guides approaches to the metaverse access points. We illustrate the use of the framework through experimental studies under different conditions, in which an interactive and visually attractive decoration pattern, an Artcode, is used as the approach to enable the connection. This paper will be of interest to, amongst others, researchers working in Interaction Design or Augmented Reality who are seeking techniques or guidelines for augmenting physical objects in an unobtrusive, complementary manner.

翻译：近期Facebook更名为Meta，重新引发了人们对元宇宙的关注。科技巨头及其他机构正日益拥抱这一融合物理与虚拟交互的混合社交体验愿景与机遇。随着元宇宙日益普及，日常物品有望很快与虚拟元素建立更紧密的联系。然而，在这一新型增强现实世界中，发现这个"隐藏"的虚拟世界将是与之交互的关键第一步。本文聚焦于将物理对象与其虚拟对应物相连接的问题，特别是通过基于视觉标记建立连接的方式。我们提出了一种统一识别框架，用于指导接入元宇宙入口的方法。通过不同条件下的实验研究，我们展示了该框架的应用——采用一种交互性强、视觉美观的装饰图案（Artcode）作为实现连接的方式。本文对从事交互设计或增强现实研究的学者尤其具有参考价值，这些人正在寻找以非侵入性、互补方式增强物理对象的技术或设计准则。