Aligning digital twins and metaverse with the UN SDGs and applying them to understand human behaviour in smart and virtual cities.

Abstract

Smart Cities have a strong environmental and social impact. Their digital operations eliminate emissions and accessibility challenges and contribute to the development of sustainable communities, economic growth, responsible production and consumption, climate actions, and more. However, since smart cities remain a vision without any such city being fully built yet, it is important to understand and test human behaviour, performance and well-being when functioning in digital environments. Metaverse technology can provide such information and operate as a test environment in future adaptations of smart technologies in the physical world. This paper explores the impact of metaverse in the built environment and the smart cities, highlights the technologies involved in such a digital ecosystem, the user’s behaviour in smart cities, and their contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Furthermore, this work presents an initial process framework for the identification of the smart cities' functional characteristics and minimum technological applications that can relate them to specific SDGs.

Keywords: Smart Cities, Digital Twins, Metaverse, Virtual Reality, Sustainability, Innovation, Artificial Intelligence, Built Environment

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004612