Dubai Municipality: Human Metaverse

The Office of the Director General of Dubai Municipality tasked us to build an immersive exploration of the human-centric potential for cities in the metaverse, at the World Government Summit 2022.

ENTERING ONE REALITY

Xische worked with Dubai Municipality leadership and Accenture to define a new perspective on the role of cities in the metaverse. Shifting from a dichotomy to a “one reality” mindset in which government leaders view services, experiences and infrastructure in the physical and virtual worlds — in parallel.

Our strategy, research and design teams articulated this new world-view, and distilled research into a narrative for the Director General to reveal to global government and private sector leaders at the World Government Summit. We then crafted an immersive, animated keynote production that brought the audience into the metaverse to detail Dubai’s vision.

HuMAN-FIRST cities

Continuing on our work at the last World Government Summit, where we examined the origin of cities and charted their evolution - from centers of protection, to centers of commerce, we shared a vision for a future of cities centered on the human. We previously also authored a report titled Human Centric Cities.

As technology continues to progress in amazing ways, the nature of cities will shift again. Our work with Dubai Municipality and Accenture helped us build a renewed belief that people should always remain at the center of our cities, instead of simply technology.

FROM THEORY TO REALITY

We focused on co-relating purely digital concepts to tangible life experiences shared inside cities. We posed questions on the role of cities in enabling rather than governing life as it converges rapidly between real and virtual worlds.

We posed the question of how best to realise the vision of government leaders towards a single reality. We explored the government role in designing personalized journeys to achieve highly inclusive immersive experiences in both physical and virtual worlds while remaining globally sustainability. We helped shape and reveal a unique One Reality framework that combines the virtual and the physical world, keeping the human interest at its core.

The production was showcased at the World Government Summit at Dubai Expo 2020 together with an interactive report launched online. This is an ongoing engagement.