Generative AI-empowered effective physical-virtual synchronization in the vehicular metaverse

Metaverse seamlessly blends the physical world and virtual spaces through ubiquitous communication and computing equipment and infrastructure. In intelligent transportation systems, the vehicular Metaverse can provide a fully immersive and hyperreal travel experience (e.g., via augmented reality head-up displays, AR-HUDs) to drivers and passengers in autonomous vehicles (AVs) through roadside units (RSUs). However, providing real-time and immersive services requires effective physical-virtual synchronization between AVs and virtual simulators. This paper proposes a generative AI-empowered physical-virtual synchronization framework for the vehicular Metaverse. In physical-to-virtual synchronization, digital twin (DT) tasks generated by AVs are offloaded for execution in RSUs with future route generation. In virtual-to-physical synchronization, virtual simulators customize diverse and personalized AR content via generative AI models based on user preferences. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task enhanced auction-based mechanism to match and price AVs and virtual simulators for RSUs to provide real-time and effective services. Finally, property analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is strategy-proof and adverse-selection free while increasing social surplus.