The Metaverse’s virtual world is used in various industries and is expected to continue to grow in the future. In addition, the Metaverse is a new type of society that integrates various new technologies, and NFT products play an essential role. Therefore, NFT product characteristics and industry trends should be assessed to revitalize the NFT market. To this end, this study confirms the influence relationship between social presence and NFT product characteristics in the Metaverse environment and examines the impact of each characteristic on consumer satisfaction and continued engagement intention to NFT product. Statistical analysis such as exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and structural equation modeling (SEM) using IBM SPSS Amos was conducted on data collected through a survey targeting male and female Korean consumers in their age group 10 to 50. Study results indicate that social presence significantly impacted all characteristics of NFT products (authenticity, scarcity, rarity, collectability, and interactivity). Scarcity and authenticity significantly impacted consumer satisfaction, and both authenticity and consumer satisfaction significantly impacted continued engagement intention. Thus, effective product development and marketing strategies can be established only by presenting different emphasized characteristics depending on the type of NFT product and the Metaverse’s social presence.

When there is a significant stripping in asphalt pavement, it is common practice to use a hydrated lime (HL) as an anti-stripping additive (ASA). However, since many asphalt plants do not have facilities for weighing and casting HL, they prefer to use of a liquid-type ASA (LA). Therefore, various brands of LAs which show proper anti-stripping function are currently developed, imported, and marketed in Korea. In addition to the anti-stripping effect, the HL has been known to give a significant age-retarding effect on paved asphalt in the field. Therefore, there was a question about whether or not the LA provides the same anti-aging effect as The HL. This study investigated anti-aging effect of the asphalt mixes which were prepared using both ASAs and short-term aged and long-term aged in the laboratory. The absolute viscosity was measured as an aging index from the binder recovered from the mixes after short-term aging (STA) and long-term aging (LTA) processes. The results showed that there was a significant higher aging found from the LA-added mix than the normal mix without any ASA. On the other hands, the mix with HL showed significantly lower ageing level than the LA-added mix and normal mix. The retardation of age-hardening by using HL was more effectively observed when the STA condition was stronger.

If asphalt-aggregate mixture is produced at a high temperature, the mixture will suffer a significant higher shortterm aging (STA) due to the elevated temperature. The binder in that mixture will be oxidized (aged) more than expected during STA due to the highly elevated temperature. The STA at the high-temperature level is one of the reasons why the hot-mix asphalt (HMA) mixture shows many distresses in the early stage of service life. In this respect, adopting warm-mix asphalt (WMA) technology is another advantage in the asphalt pavement industry. In this study, various levels of STA were used to evaluate aging levels of the binder in the mixture before and after STA. A gel-permeation chromatography (GPC) test was performed on the mixture particles without binder recovery to estimate the significance of aging for each case of STA. Statistical analyses were carried out to determine the difference in aging levels among STA temperatures. Statistical test results found that the aging level of the binder after STA was significantly higher than that of binders before STA at an α = 0.05 level. It was also found that the aging level of binders in the WMA mixture was significantly lower than that of binders in HMA after STA at an α = 0.05 level. It was observed that if an HMA mixture was produced at high-temperature STA, its aging level was estimated to be approximately four years in service.