According to ABI Research, close to 700 cities will have deployed urban metaverse infrastructure by 2030, often as extensions of existing urban digital twin platforms and solutions.

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. Additionally, the urban metaverse will play a critical role in making cities net zero and circular.

Cities that are early urban metaverse adopters include Seoul, Tampere and Rome.

The Metaverse Seoul includes government services (tax assistance), user-based avatars, virtual multi-office communication tools, urban gaming and virtual tour programmes. The Tampere Metaverse Vision 2040 includes: urban development and planning; workforce management; citizen wellbeing, equality, education, and healthcare; climate action and sustainability; urban governance and virtual city exploration.

The Rome Advanced District (ROAD) project comprises: development of new energy supply chains; energy district modeling (Eni, Acea, Autostrade per l’Italia, Bridgestone, Cisco, Gruppo FS, NextChem)

Maxar Technologies has developed SYNTH3D, a digital twin enabling simulation, visualisation, 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.

According to ABI Research, the urban metaverse ecosystem will be 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).

“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. This is especially important in complex urban environments which are challenging to design, maintain, explore, and engage with,” said Dominique Bonte, Vice President, Verticals & End Markets at ABI Research.