It is well known that the metaverse, also named general cyberspace, is virtual-real fusion spaces, consisting of a virtual space namely cyberspace and virtual-real spaces namely cyber-enabled physical, social, and thinking (cyber-enabled) spaces. This paper discusses the open issues of the metaverse in terms of science and technology and proposes a new discipline and inter-discipline hierarchy for the metaverse first. Then, it ex?plores various relevant standards of discipline classification and a discipline and inter-discipline hierarchy based on physical, social and thinking spaces, and investigates the cyberspace and cyber?enabled spaces. On the basis of the above research, this paper proposes the detailed metaverse discipline and inter-discipline hierarchy based on cyber-physical-social-thinking spaces and enriches the content of cyberology from the aspects of cyberspace and cyber-enabled spaces. Finally, this paper predicts the future development of cyberology in terms of society, enterprise and humankind.

The Metaverse is a virtual environment where users are represented by avatars to navigate a virtual world, which has strong links with the physical one. State-of-the-art Metaverse architectures rely on a cloud-based approach for avatar physics emulation and graphics rendering computation. Such centralized design is unfavorable as it suffers from several drawbacks caused by the long latency required for cloud access, such as low quality visualization. To solve this issue, in this paper, we propose a Fog-Edge hybrid computing architecture for Metaverse applications that leverage an edge-enabled distributed computing paradigm, which makes use of edge devices computing power to fulfil the required computational cost for heavy tasks such as collision detection in virtual universe and computation of 3D physics in virtual simulation. The computational cost related to an entity in the Metaverse such as collision detection or physics emulation are performed at the end-device of the associated physical entity. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, we simulate a distributed social metaverse application. Simulation results shows that the proposed architecture can reduce the latency by 50\% when compared with the legacy cloud-based Metaverse applications.