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Living in a virtual city12/13/2023 “Along with developing the metaverse services, we are also going to invest in providing digital-equity programs such as providing digital education, targeting the elderly, and providing smartphones to marginalized groups. “One of the other things that we realized was that a metaverse as a platform could be hard to use by socially vulnerable people and people with disabilities,” Lee says. Lee also is thinking about how to make the platform user-friendly for all residents. “Before we fully open our platform to the public,” Lee says, “we are going to establish the user guidelines about how to behave and respect others in the platform.” Online bullying and bad behavior has been a problem in some metaverse gaming applications Seoul doesn’t want to see similar problems arise. While the Seoul team was pleased with the results of the pilot, the experience got them thinking about the rules of engagement between residents on the platform. About 1,600 avatars participated in various cultural activities, including 300 who rang in the new year in a metaverse version of a traditional bell-ringing ceremony. Seoul piloted the platform recently during a New Year’s Eve celebration, where in-person participation was limited due to COVID-19 restrictions. Seoul plans to open its metaverse platform to the public by October and has a four-year roll out plan.Īs they build it, city leaders are co-designing the platform with residents by allowing them to vote on features they want to see in the metaverse. Metaverse Seoul is being built by a public-private partnership consisting of more than 700 metaverse-related companies, South Korea’s central government, and local governments across the country, who also will gain access to the technology. “But young people can easily go into the metaverse platform and talk to an avatar, who is a professional, to get proper advice.” “Sometimes young people are hesitant to go talk to the counselor due to social pressures and physical distances,” explains Youngmi Lee, head of the Metaverse team in the Seoul Metropolitan Government. But city leaders hope that young people-normally a hard demographic to reach-will find it an appealing front door to services such as career counseling. Accessing city services this way won’t appeal to everybody, of course. In Metaverse Seoul, avatars will be able to get tax counseling, request public documents, or secure business permits. The metaverse is an immersive virtual world, where people can interact with each other via digital representations of themselves known as avatars. From there, they will be able to interact with virtual versions of all areas of Seoul’s city administration. When “Metaverse Seoul” launches later this year, residents will be able to put on a virtual-reality headset and see a 3D rendering of City Hall and the plaza in front of it. One city to watch is Seoul, which is the first city to announce plans to deliver residents services via a metaverse platform. A rendering of an avatar of a citizen accessing a city service in Seoul's metaverse.
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