ABI Research says the urban metaverse is in an early exploration phase, with only a few relevant deployments currently. The firm forecasts that by 2030, close to 700 cities will have deployed some form of metaverse infrastructure, often as extensions of existing urban digital twin platforms and solutions.
“Though metaverse is undeniably overhyped and steeped in vagueness, the urban context offers interesting value-generating use cases and applications, ranging from seamless interaction of citizens with eGovernment services, virtual tourism, smart infrastructure design, planning and development, and urban workforce enablement and enhancement. ,” explains Dominique Bonte, vice president, verticals & end markets at ABI Research. “This is especially important in complex urban environments which are challenging to design, maintain, explore, and engage with.”
Benefits for city governments include gaining political capital through enhanced citizen engagement and participation and significant cost savings related to smarter and more effective urban infrastructure design, operations, and maintenance. The urban metaverse will also play a critical role in making cities net zero and circular.
Early urban metaverse case studies and examples include:
Metaverse Seoul – Government services (tax assistance); 3D environments; User-based avatars; Virtual multi-office communication tools; Urban gaming; Virtual tour programs
Tampere Metaverse Vision 2040 – Urban development and planning; Workforce management; Citizen wellbeing, equality, education, and healthcare; Climate actions and sustainability; Urban governance; Virtual City Exploration
Rome Advanced District (ROAD) project – Development of new energy supply chains; energy district modeling (Eni, Acea, Autostrade per l’Italia, Bridgestone, Cisco, Gruppo FS, NextChem)
Maxar Technologies (SYNTH3D) – Digital twin enabling seamless simulation, visualization, and AR/VR experiences of hyper-realistic satellite imagery-based 3D environments for smart cities
Urban metaverse technologies are centred around generating immersive 3D experiences combining digital twins, AR/VR/XR, avatars, AI, cloud, compute, and mobile devices.
The urban metaverse ecosystem will be heavily dominated by urban digital/virtual twin providers such as Dassault Systèmes, Siradel (Engie), Greehill, and Autodesk in combination with mainstream XR hardware and software metaverse vendors, including NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft (HoloLens 2), Magic Leap (Magic Leap 2), HTC (XR Elite), Apple (Vision Pro), and Meta (Quest 3).
