A group of us recently applied for EU funding for a project, to, basically, bring water into the metaverse. Here’s the TL;DR of what the project is trying to do, should we be successful.
We only just submitted, we won’t know if we got it for a while. EU funding being what it is, we go through multiple rounds and if we survive them all we may have funds early in 2026. So yes, waaaayyy too early to celebrate. However, the process to get words on paper that says exactly what we want to do, and then getting consortium partners together who understood that, and felt equally passionate, and then contribute their perspectives in dazzlingly complementary ways was so inspiring, that I am chalking it up as a success now already.
So, for posterity, here is our abstract, and maybe some other bits that is particularly awesome. My primary intention for this project is to get funding to build the proof of concept tool – the digital twin (which we really see as a interoperable metaverse component). My secondary intention is for this project to serve as the first of two case studies for my Post-Doc. (Which I hopefully get funding for before I basically do all the research on the side, anyway.) If on the wild chance this interests you and you want to throw some money at us to get the proof of concept into existence sooner, then, please reach out!
Problem: Water infrastructure is invisible.
A central challenge with the modern water system is that it is mostly invisible. People turn on a tap and there is water, flush the toilet, empty the tub, and the dirty water is gone. Systems are not just below ground, water management is stabilised as a backdrop of modern practices rendering the connection between water and urban planning and design rather invisible. Water infrastructures are complex and interrelated, needing to make use of several, constantly changing data sources. Water has multi-factor water-quality indicators. The potential of visualisation to highlight and explore these challenges through incorporating a water-focused lens into digital twins is explored in this project.
Bring water sensitive urban design into digital twins of cities, creating a visual canvas tool through and for participatory planning perspectives.
AquaSavvy is a transdisciplinary project involving systems-of-systems data engineering, urban resource flows, and participatory planning. We intend to create a visual, interactive, web-based platform showing the different water flows that exist in an urban context in the form of a digital twin. The project is expected to last for 3 years, with iterative progress on creating the digital twin, and the interoperable data system-of-systems. The intent is to obtain data from diverse sources, form an interoperable data system-of-systems, translate the data to a usable form and to different visualisations for the platform. The primary aim of the platform is to communicate to the general public how water interacts with the urban fabric, to allow conversations and ultimately interventions between various stakeholders, including the wider public, with regards to how water sensitive urban design is implemented. This is implemented in parallel with the co-design of participatory planning approaches through the case study areas of Orø, Denmark, and Bursa, Türkiye, that makes possible interventions at much more local scales and much shorter time-frames than the conventional decades-long urban transformations.
Innovation: 1. Process-oriented data approach
This project departs from conventional digital twin creation in three key ways. Firstly, rather than assuming data availability, the transdisciplinary process of how to obtain the required data from the stakeholders’ perspectives is investigated, which also includes the capacity of contributing data in what can be considered citizen science.
2. More human-centric use case of digital twins
Secondly, the use case of this digital twin concept is human-centred rather than technocentric; to communicate and visualise broad approaches to urban water resource management from a bottom-up perspective. Further the intended stakeholders is wider than the conventional, to include not only city authorities, urban planners, utility companies, and other stakeholders who will use or contribute to the digital twin, but also non-conventional stakeholders including the general public, and more-than-human actors like biodiversity and ecosystem components. This shift alters the perspective from solely considering aspects of risks and technical infrastructure to also encompass nature, human, and spatial aspects relating to synergy and integration with urban design and development. The project and its associated tool is intended to incorporate non-traditional knowledge alliances, and as such is envisioned at a different level of technical detail than is typically considered in professional GIS applications. It is more similar to a game world, in that it is intended to be curated, emergent, open-ended and not photo-realistic.
3. More efficient and dynamic data integration
Thirdly, the technical aspect of integrating the data is also innovative through its use of a systems-of-systems integration approach. Data sources are integrated through the Evolutionary Architecture described by IPSME, which stands out for its integration of disparate systems without requiring uniform protocols, thereby supporting system dynamism and simplifying integration.
Other stuff:
Why I want to bring water into the metaverse:
In such dynamic and fragmented environments (really, here we are talking about the environment, late capitalism, and the current political realities) it becomes crucial to experiment with new professional and democratic dialogue tools that can operate within the complexities, controversies and uncertainties present in late modern societies, … Visualising and enabling such dynamic experimentation has up to recently been technically difficult (Hadjimichael et al 2024, Langenheim et al 2022). The emergence of Digital Twins of cities provides a potential way to facilitate this experimentation, coupled with the emerging concept of the Metaverse and its focus on interoperability (Yang et al., 2024).
A digital twin is typically a technically bounded, visual representation of a model or simulation of a city or industrial installation, excluding the inputs and consequences of the chosen model. While the concept of virtual worlds and digital twins are easily conflated with the concept of the Metaverse, the idea of the Metaverse by contrast is fundamentally a social notion concerned with the interconnection of many different instances, for example the bridging of digital twins, simulations and game worlds (Yang et al., 2024) that aims to extend social interaction into visual representations. Therefore it is problematic that current digital twins of cities seem to almost exclusively focus on physical assets (Naderi & Shojaei, 2023) in isolated “walled garden” contexts; few have incorporated other resource streams especially in open access or interoperable formats. In this project we challenge this approach from a technical perspective and provide a prototype alternative, while facilitating local knowledge and climate change preparedness (Brennan et al., 2022) through the staging of new participatory planning approaches.
How this links to my Post-Doc
Rather than trying to convince citizens through so-called “stakeholder engagement” about what the best approach is after the fact, AquaSavvy’s tool will allow citizens to imagine their best suited approaches at hyper-local levels relevant to their immediate lives, with an AI-assisted knowledge brokering that facilitates complicating the narrative, in other words incorporating divergent views, including information that challenges the dominant narrative and embracing counter-intuitive statements in a way that stimulates curiosity rather than conviction (Kahan et al., 2017; Gilligan & Eddy, 2021). In this way, the AquaSavvy tool facilitates the transformation of expertise to include a wider range of knowledge, while re-establishing trust in public authorities through the staging of new participatory planning approaches.