MetaOmniCity: Towards urban metaverse cyberspaces using immersive 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 with the metaverse space travel. Nobody had expected involving the creators that the aspirational fictional virtual worlds such as "ActiveWorlds (1995)", and ``Second Life (2003)'' with many urban experiences embedded into a rich featured 3D environment would impact the way of experiencing our real urban environments. Are we going to feel/become ourselves - our cyber-physical presence (e.g., our augmented avatars) - in other mirror worlds doing many other things? Are the created imaginary worlds becoming a part of the 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 that can provide everybody with equity and accessibility by democratising all types of services leading to increased Quality of Life (QoL). This study analyses how the metaverse (3D elevation of linear Internet), that aims to build high-fidelity virtual worlds with which to interact with the real world, can be engaged within the Smart City (SC) ecosystem with high immersive Quality of Experiences (QoE) and an urban metaverse ecosystem framework — MetaOmniCity — that 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 (e.g., time, space and language) between the real world and their virtual counterparts, can be shaped to the particular requirements and features of cities. This can pave 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 digitally connected cities by removing physical borders. MetaOmniCity is expected to accelerate the building, deployment, and adoption of immersive urban metaverse worlds/networks for citizens to interface with as an extension of real urban social and individual experiences.