This paper introduces the novel utility-oriented communications (UOC) concept and identifies its importance for 6G wireless technology. UOC encompasses existing communication paradigms and includes emerging human-centric and task-oriented communications concepts. The authors investigate semantic communications and semantic information transfer for vehicular metaverse as a case study of UOC. Consider the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) users access real-time virtual world updates from the base station (BS) wirelessly using semantic communication, and an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is deployed to impair co-channel interference. This paper formulates an optimization problem where a novel utility expression for semantic communications is incorporated. The proposed system model jointly considers latency and power in wireless communication and the utility of semantic communication. The proposed alternative optimization algorithm balances system efficiency and economics and outperforms existing optimization algorithms under the same channel conditions.