The continuous enhancement of living conditions imposes higher requirements for medical and healthcare services. Although improved to a certain extent, there still exist critical challenges in current medical pattern, such as the shortage of medical resources, inefficient medical treatment, and limited medical technology level. The metaverse can offer a novel mechanism to address these problems in traditional healthcare domain, and thus, to enhance the quality of medical services. Generally, the metaverse is a dynamic feedback system that facilitates the collaboration and coexistence between the virtual and physical worlds. By fostering collaboration and evolution between intelligent agents in the virtual world, knowledge of this interdependence can be reconstructed in the digital realm. This allows problems existed in the real world to be abstracted and represented in the digital space, where models can be established and computational experiments can be conducted. The outcomes obtained can dynamically guide or control the execution of strategies in the real world, with real-world execution results serving as dynamic data inputs to continually update the virtual world’s model. In addition, this paper summarizes the current research status of different healthcare application scenarios for metaverse, highlights the challenges and vision, and aims to inspire further research in this field.

The metaverse, as an extension of the physical world, can be described as a highly immersive digital realm constructed with technologies such as mixed reality and digital modeling. It is rooted in decentralized principles and features novel economic forms, individual identities, and institutional systems. In this architecture, the entire social landscape is redefined under the logic of service, gradually becoming a service ecosystem operated and cooperated by numerous intelligent entities. To achieve sustainable and healthy development of the metaverse ecology, this paper first analyzes the operating logic of the metaverse from the perspective of the fusion of the cyber-physical-social tripartite world and the three typical complexity characteristics faced by it: evolutionary complexity, cognitive complexity, and regulatory complexity. Next, the paper focuses on introducing the idea and technical system of computational experiments as an analysis and governance tool for the metaverse service ecosystem. Then, it explores the integration of computational experiments and metaverse technology, including how computational experiments can be applied to the metaverse and how the metaverse can support computational experiments. Finally, the paper introduces the metaverse applications of computational experiments, covering fields such as industrial design, health care, social governance, and military reform.

With the mutual interaction and dependence of several intelligent services, a crowd intelligence service network has been formed, and a service ecosystem has gradually emerged. Such a development produces an ever-increasing effect on our lives and the functioning of the whole society. These facts call for research on these phenomena with a new theory or perspective, including what a smart society looks like, how it functions and evolves, and where its boundaries and challenges are. However, the research on service ecosystems is distributed in many disciplines and fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, complex theory, social network, biological ecosystem, and network economics, and there is still no unified research framework. The researchers always have a restricted view of the research process. Under this context, this paper summarizes the research status and future developments of service ecosystems, including their conceptual origin, evolutionary logic, research topic and scale, challenges, and opportunities. We hope to provide a roadmap for the research in this field and promote sound development.