IEEE Access (Jan 2023)
MetaOmniCity: Toward Immersive Urban Metaverse Cyberspaces Using Smart City Digital Twins
Abstract
The movie — The Matrix (1999) — boosted our imagination about how further we can be immersed within the cyber world, i.e., how further the cyber world can be indistinguishable from the real world. Nobody, including the creators, had expected that the aspirational fictional virtual worlds such as “ActiveWorlds (1995)” and “Second Life (2003)” would impact the way of experiencing our real urban environments with many urban experiences embedded into a rich featured 3D environment. Are we going to stay as ourselves while existing in a mirror world? Are the fabricated, created imaginary worlds becoming a part of real worlds or vice versa? The recent once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has confirmed the importance of location and time-independent Digital Twins (DTs) (i.e., virtual scale models) of cities and their automated services which can provide everybody with equity and accessibility. This study analyses how the metaverse (3D elevation of linear Internet), that aims to build high-fidelity virtual worlds with which to interact with, can be engaged within the Smart City (SC) ecosystem with high immersive Quality of Experiences (QoE) leading to increased Quality of Life (QoL). An urban metaverse ecosystem framework — MetaOmniCity — is designed to demonstrate a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for policymakers, city planners and all other stakeholders about how to transform data-driven SCs with DTs into virtually inhabitable cities with a network of shared urban experiences from a metaverse point of view. MetaOmniCity, allowing the metaversification of cities with granular virtual societies, i.e., MetaSocieties, and eliminating the boundaries between the real world and their virtual counterparts can be shaped to the particular requirements and features of cities. Urban metaverse shared worlds, an extension of residents and urban society, where the virtual and the physically real blend and are more organically integrated, would impact urban ways of living significantly with many practical implementations. This would open doors for potential businesses with tremendous global economic value by democratising skills/assets within an urban environment, paving the way for immersive globalisation with the bigger and richer metaverse of Country (MoC) and metaverse of World (MoW) being an immersive DT of the broader universe with tangibly connected cities. MetaOmniCity is expected to accelerate the building, deployment, and adoption of immersive urban metaverse networks for citizens to interface with as an extension of real social and individual experiences.
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