Explore, Play, Thrive: A Global Community Taking Control of Its Future.
Visualising and enabling the dynamic experimentation to address the problem of invisible water management 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). Interoperability bridges otherwise highly disparate isolated environments, enabling the aggregation of data and the different views of that data.
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. There are two challenges with current approaches to these visual models; the “walled garden” approaches by individual companies focused on optimising their systems for a specific goal, that makes it hard for other actors to use the products or platforms for other purposes, and secondly the techno-centric approach of the city simulations and their visualisations.
In this project we challenge both of these aspects, firstly from a technical perspective through the Industry of Integrations (IOI) approach, producing a prototype alternative platform, while facilitating local knowledge and climate change preparedness (Brennan et al., 2022) through the staging of new participatory planning approaches through the use and co-development of the visualisation tool.
Industry of Integrations (IOI)
Given the massive amount of interoperability required to model, analyse and manage water systems, the task of providing interoperability should be shifted from individual companies or governments to serve the larger community in general. Centralised systems typical of companies and increasingly true for governments, tend to internalise their operations and focus on optimizing their own system (typically for a profit or KPI incentive), rather than the interoperability of their product. Further, few have incorporated other resource streams especially in open access or interoperable formats.
In this project we illustrate how to provide an interoperable system, through an approach called the Industry of Integrations (IOI). The movement for the creation of an Industry of Integrations (IOI) was designed in the context of integrating virtual worlds. IOI aims to transform gaming by, rather than waiting for corporations to integrate their virtual worlds, establish a player-driven ecosystem, where anyone with API knowledge of a system can build and monetize their integrations, bridging diverse platforms and dissolving sandbox boundaries. IOI shifts interoperability from corporate control to communities, fostering a grassroots industry of user-generated content (UGC) integrations that amplify creativity across gaming landscapes. IOI’s decentralized approach empowers players, modders, and small developers to connect UGC-supporting systems—linking characters, assets, or tools across games. This drives inclusivity, digital transformation, and sustainable innovation in gaming culture.
In a similar way, an industry of integrations is applicable to both water related Open Data Infrastructures (ODIs) and Collaborative Data Platforms (CDPs). For ODIs, this would be at high levels, or knowledge infrastructures more broadly, and for CDPs, at more local levels e.g., through civic technoscience (Kasperowski and Kullenberg 2019). The combination of IOI and civic technoscience enables a citizen-driven ecosystem where people can build integrations, bridging scientific databases between different disciplines, and more innovatively bridge scientific databases and game platforms, allowing the incorporation of physical world elements into virtual environments, be they serious games, casual games, virtual worlds or simulations. By implementing the required software infrastructure and pushing for an industry of integrations related to science, it is possible to bridge science and creativity, dissolving the boundaries between laypeople and experts, and building new knowledge alliances. This is what we understand as the Metaverse.
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