Metaverse-Enabled Digital Twins for Business and Smart Cities: Toward A Human-Centered Framework for Digital Transformation

Digital Twin (DT) technologies are increasingly changing how businesses and cities model, assess, and enhance complex systems. Traditional DTs have served as static representations of tangible assets, providing monitoring and predictive functionalities. However, minimal stakeholder engagement and a focus on specific sectors have often limited their full potential. The rise of the metaverse, reinforced by Extended Reality (XR) technologies, presents a unique chance to evolve DTs into immersive, interactive, and human-centered platforms for collaborative decision-making. This integration allows stakeholders to visualize and engage with multidimensional data in real time, facilitating predictive analysis, scenario planning, and participatory governance. In business environments, DTs enhanced by the metaverse improve supply chain modelling, aid corporate strategy formulation, and foster innovation in customer experiences, ultimately increasing resilience and adaptability. In urban settings, they support smart infrastructure management, sustainability oversight, and collaborative planning by integrating IoT, Building Information Modeling (BIM), and geospatial data into engaging simulations. This research presents a conceptual framework that links business ecosystems and smart cities through a DT layer mediated by the metaverse, and GIS work for a GeoAI-enabled urban development system may address the political, societal, legal, and technical-instrumental challenges currently affecting cities and those expected in the foreseeable future. This framework, supported by enabling technologies and designed for inclusivity and scalability, illustrates a multidisciplinary approach to digital transformation applicable to both private and public sectors.