  Metaverse is an emerging virtual universe where humans can have real-time
interactions and solid social links like in the physical world, and it opens up
a new era of Internet and interactions. In Metaverse, an immersive and
photorealistic environment promotes social activities, including education,
meetings, and shopping of digital avatars based on critical technologies,
including 3D rendering, extended reality, digital twins, artificial
intelligence, and Blockchain. However, the limitations of computation, storage,
and energy resources restrict the development of Metaverse, and a series of
system issues (e.g., latency, security, and battery-life) continue to arise. As
a result, how to find corresponding measurements to mitigate unsatisfactory
influences becomes the focus. Mobile edge computing (MEC) as a distributed
computing paradigm offloads computation-intensive tasks to the edge of the
network. It brings the resources as close as possible to the end devices,
addressing the shortcomings mentioned above. In this paper, we propose a
comprehensive survey of the MEC-based Metaverse. Particular emphasis is given
to the technologies convergence, architectures, and application scenarios,
e.g., BoundlessXR and CloudXR. Significantly, we introduce the potential future
directions for developing Metaverse systems.
