The UAE, that is working on establishing itself as hotspot for Web3 activities, has decided to make Dubai one of the world's top ten metaverse economies. This week, Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced a roadmap for the growth of metaverse in Dubai. Called the ‘Dubai Metaverse Strategy', this plan aims to onboard over a thousand Web3 firms onto its industrial ecosystem. This move, the UAE estimates, can bring about 40,000 jobs in the next six years leading to 2030.
In the coming years, Dubai is looking to knit a state-of-the-art metaverse ecosystem to offer to the companies that are offering services related to the technology. The Dubai Metaverse Strategy will test the applications of metaverse in various sectors including tourism, education, retail, remote work, healthcare, and legalities, disclosed an announcement published on WAM, an official news agency of UAE.
To ensure that the metaverse technology is well incubated, Dubai will be stepping up its game to conduct research and development on other technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (XR). These make for essential elements of the overall metaverse tech and have already added 6,700 jobs in the UAE, adding $500 million (roughly Rs. 4,175 crore) to the nation's economy in recent times.
“The strategy also aims at leveraging real-time data, using machine learning and IoT, and employing AI simulation and blockchain to enhance the human thinking processes,” the announcement added.
Market research firms have different projections about the growth of the metaverse market by 2030. While Marketsandmarkets.com projects the market size to reach $1,303.4 billion by 2030, PS Market Research, Statista, and Precedence Research estimate it to swell to the sizes of $1,157 billion, $507 billion, and $1.3 trillion, respectively.
The World Economic Forum (WEF), in its latest report said that nearly 700 cities will have some kind of a metaverse infrastructure by the year 2030. As of now, however, South Korea's Seoul, UAE' Dubai, and the US' Santa Monica have been named as leading cities in the international metaverse sector.
Dubai has already been taking steps to become an early adopter of the metaverse technology. In September 2022 for instance, UAE's ministry of economy made a debut in the metaverse.
