UN creates Citiverse initiative, metaverse platform for cities

During the celebrations of the First United Nations (UN) Virtual Worlds Day on 14 June in Switzerland, at the headquarters of the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), the international Global Initiative on Virtual Worlds – Discovering the CitiVerse was launched to support sustainable development and improve life in cities.

The aim is to define standards and principles to guide the governance of metaverse solutions for cities in areas such as urban planning, education and municipal services. The efforts will be led by ITU, the UN International Computing Centre (UNICC) and Digital Dubai. “By harnessing the transformative power of virtual worlds, we can accelerate progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The virtual worlds initiative is an essential step on the path to metaverse innovation that can enrich people’s lives in cities around the world,” says Doreen Bogdan-Martin, ITU Secretary General.

More specifically, the CitiVerse initiative will act as a platform to promote open, interoperable and innovative virtual worlds that can be used safely and with confidence by people, companies and public services:

• It will pave the way for the development of normative frameworks that address principles, facilitating elements and governance for the use of metaverse solutions in cities.
• It will offer training and hold events to share knowledge, best practices and solutions between cities.
• Offering a sandbox environment for testing and experimenting with metaverse scenarios in cities around the world.

The new initiative is based on the work of the ITU group on metaverses established at the end of 2022. In this context, opportunities have been identified that bring together metaverse concepts and smart cities in order to support urban planning and management, simulating the use of innovations before large-scale implementation.

The Citiverse initiative will also complement the work of the ITU standardisation expert group for the Internet of Things, smart cities and communities, ITU-T Study Group 20. It will also work with United for Smart Sustainable Cities, a UN initiative supported by ITU together with 19 partners.

“This initiative is a response to emerging technologies and their impact on people’s lives, particularly in the field of sustainable urban development through virtual worlds. Today, we see a significant role for Artificial Intelligence in all fields and we can imagine the revolutionary implications when it merges with the metaverse, virtual reality, augmented reality and spatial computing,” emphasises Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, Director General of Digital Dubai.

During the event to launch the initiative, Sameer Chauhan, director of UNICC, emphasised the potential of metaverse solutions to help overcome the challenges facing cities. He cited the value of creating asandbox for safe experimentation with solutions and studying the potential impacts on improving services for citizens around the world.

“By paving the way for future innovations through this platform, we can exploit the potential of virtual worlds to improve the delivery of public services, optimise the use of public resources and broaden citizen participation,” comments Chauhan.

What was the First Day of Virtual Worlds?

The UN’s first ‘Virtual Worlds Day’ was an unprecedented event held on 14 June with presentations from various world organisations, including the ITU, the UNICC, the World Bank, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), among others.

The aim was to highlight the transformative power of virtual worlds by bringing together political decision-makers and presenting the latest technological advances and their real-world applications relevant to the fulfilment of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.