Bernelle Verster

The metaverse, gaming and the metabolism of cities

I am currently exploring the next phase in my life, trying to combine what I believe is important - urban resource flows, with what I enjoy - games and visualisation and beautiful things. This talk is suited for people who are interested in games, data driven visualisation, and bringing academic work to the general public, policy and practitioners.

Imagine an augmented reality game, a mix between something like Township or SimCity and Ingress or Pokemon Go, with a visual style similar to the Lumino City game. Imagine a building game that uses real cities and real challenges – like the recent water crisis in Cape Town, where real resource limitations need to be managed. The game can start from a blank start to build your city or start with what exists in reality and modify it in certain ways (utopia or apocalypse) and play with what happens due to your decisions. https://aquasavvy.co.za/augmented-reality-game-for-citizen-scientists/

This would need a lot of different initiatives, data libraries etc to fit together well. Debian has experience in how very many different things fit together, and have experience in how different licensing options interface (or not), and maybe I can help improve this.

In this talk I will show what I try to do and what information I have found so far. I may show prototypes and what I have found in the Debian space, and probably have a whole lot of questions for the audience. I am just venturing into this and using the talk to give a deadline to my early research, so very much a work in progress. Help, comments, critique, co-presenters welcome.

I may link more strongly to a related academic initiative, Metabolism of Cities, e.g. https://prototype.metabolismofcities.org/cities/cape-town/sectors/water/