METACITIES project establishes an Excellence Hub that spans a large geographical area, that of Southeastern Europe, represented by three clusters in Cyprus, Greece, and Bulgaria. Each cluster consists of partners involved in the Quadruple Helix (i.e. scientific, industrial, social, public) with the aim to collaboratively design common digital Research and Innovation strategies, policies, and joint pilots, orchestrated towards the benefit of the citizens, the stakeholders, the local ecosystems and the growth of the whole southeast European region. Metacities EH builds upon Digital Twins (DTs) and metaverse technologies through cross-border collaboration. The technical objective of the METACITIES Excellence Hub relates to Digital Twin and Metaverse technologies for the benefit of the future cities.
Starting from the Physical World, representing the actual city or region, METACITIES propose a series of system blueprints and recommendations that can be used to successfully build their Digital Twins and Metaverses. METACITIES conceptual model represents an evolution of the notion of smart city, which usually implies the use of Information Communication Technologies for the processing of data and their statistical manifestations in the form of dashboards. As Digital Twins are directly and in real time, interconnected and interacting with the physical city, exchanging processing data and making decisions, they can execute actions on the city’s operations that may affect its daily life. Specific domains with strong social footprint are selected as reference implementation areas to guide and validate the proposed technological, collaboration and strategy framework and efficiently coordinate the input from the different actors: academic, business, public authorities and societal actors, comprising the three participating innovation ecosystems, Cyprus, Greece and Bulgaria.
