Metaverse applications in smart cities: Enabling technologies, opportunities, challenges, and future directions

Recent years have witnessed a global trend toward the metaverse. The metaverse is a collection of immersive and interconnected digital spaces in which users can interact through computer-generated environments. As smart cities aim to enhance the experiences of their citizens by improving infrastructure, modernizing government services, increasing accessibility, accelerating economic growth, and promoting sustainability, the metaverse has the potential to significantly revolutionize, reshape, and transform smart cities. In this paper, we discuss how leveraging the metaverse for smart cities can stimulate innovations and bring about major improvements. We discuss the key enabling technologies for the metaverse, along with the premier benefits of adopting this technology and the opportunities it presents for smart city applications. We present ongoing projects and case studies to showcase the practicality of metaverse technology across various industries. Furthermore, we identify and discuss critical research challenges that currently impede the realization of the full potential of the metaverse. Finally, we outline future research directions that can be pursued to further the development of the metaverse and its integration with smart cities.