The Dubai Metaverse Strategy aims to turn Dubai into one of the world’s top 10 metaverse economies as well as a global hub for the metaverse community. The strategy aims to build on Dubai’s achievement of attracting more than 1,000 companies in the fields of blockchain and metaverse. It also promotes Dubai’s ambitions to support more than 40,000 virtual jobs by 2030. This would further boost Dubai’s economy and support the UAE government’s vision of increasing the number of blockchain companies by five times the present number.

The Dubai Metaverse Strategy seeks to:

• foster innovation, enhance the metaverse’s economic contributions through R&D collaborations, and promote advanced ecosystems utilising accelerators and incubators that attract companies and projects to Dubai
• foster talent and invest in future capabilities by providing the necessary support in metaverse education aimed at developers, content creators and users of digital platforms in the metaverse community
• develop Web3 technology and its applications to create new governmental work models and development in vital sectors, including tourism, education, retail, remote work, healthcare and the legal sector.

The strategy also aims to develop global standards in building safe and secure platforms for users and develop metaverse infrastructure and regulations to accelerate the adoption of these technologies.

The strategy’s key pillars focus on:

• extended reality (which blends the physical and virtual worlds)
• augmented reality (AR)
• virtual reality (VR)
• mixed reality
• and digital twins (a virtual representation of an object or system).

The strategy aims at leveraging real-time data, using machine learning and IoT, and employing AI simulation and blockchain to enhance human thinking processes.

Technology pillars of the metaverse strategy are data, network, cloud, and edge computing that focus on real-world data obtained, validated, stored, processed, and managed. Other pillars include promoting the full deployment of 5G networks to enable edge computing and provide on-demand computer system resources. Edge computing allows data to be collected, stored and processed locally via smart devices and local networks, instead of the cloud.

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Watch this video about the metaverse

Related links

• What Is a Metaverse? – Gartner
• What is the metaverse? And why should we care? – World Economic Forum
• MoHAP launches the world's first Metaverse customer happiness service centre – WAM
• Dubai Metaverse Assembly- Dubai Future Foundation
• Dubai Metaverse Assembly Outcomes Report (PDF, 10.7 MB).