Speaking on Wednesday during a session on the future of communication and digital connectivity, Dr. Christina Yan Zhang, CEO and founder of The Metaverse Institute in the UK, explained how the Kingdom was embracing the technology.

“In Saudi Arabia, we have many amazing smart city projects, where we use digital today in the metaverse environments to simulate the whole city,” she said.

“Even before the city is constructed, all citizens who are planning to move to a city, either here in Saudi Arabia or from other parts of the world, they can see how the city is going to look like, either as public transport or housing or health care or as fiction.”

She said that the metaverse brought together a range of new technologies to create an intuitive, immersive and interactive interface that was very user-friendly.

“We are seeing the hallmark of this icon system through things like artificial intelligence, 5G connections, cybersecurity and different user interfaces like VR, AR, XR,” Zhang said.

Jasir Alherbish, CEO of the Heritage Commission at the Saudi Ministry of Culture, said: “When you have this strong digital platform, everyone will participate. These technological advancements help us manage our sciences.”

Lawrence Eta, vice president of digital analytics at the Royal Commission of AlUla, said the point of the conference was to discuss the future of education and sciences, and the need for digital literacy.

He said in AlUla the RCU was working closely with telecommunications providers to develop the infrastructure needed to be able to present the region and its culture to the outside world.

“AlUla is the size of Belgium, so the first thing we have to have is internet penetration.”

He added that digital connectivity allowed telecommunications to bring value to the world.

“For example, let us take a look at autonomous pods. It is less about the autonomous cars and more about the digital economy that’s being created, because now we have local people in AlUla that are actually powering those ports.”