Prabowo-Gibran Wants To Implement Virtual Cities, Here Are The Needs And Challenges Of The City Of Metaverse

Illustration of the concept of a metaverse city in Indonesia (photo: dock. unsplash)

JAKARTA Technology is indeed progressing, but not all parties can realize the metaverse city. There are many things that need to be learned and understood to build this technology city.

Therefore, the plan to build a metaverse city from Presidential Candidate (Capres) Prabowo Subianto has become a debate lately. Some consider Prabowo's dream to be too high to be realized.

The draft metaverse city was first leaked by the Prabowo-Gibran National Campaign Team (TKN) Expert Council, Budiman Sudjatmiko. The politician said that Prabowo plans to establish 10 metaverse cities supporting the capital city of the archipelago (IKN).

The nine cities are like nine planets, and the sun is IKN as a super hub from the digital ecosystem. This can be done, people exist," Budiman said some time ago, quoted by VOIdariExtranews.

Actually, there is nothing wrong with planning the metaverse city because the Makassar City Government has been carrying this concept since last year. However, we need to understand the understanding and needs of this concept first.

The city of metaverse is a concept in which a city combines the real world with the virtual world. All communication and community needs will use an online system so that its technological capabilities must be qualified.

Quoting from Racounter, digital infrastructure in the form of an internet connection is a major necessity. Without sophisticated connections, the metaverse city is just a dream. With this need, it's no wonder that Seoul in South Korea has succeeded in implementing the metaverse city.

More than 95 percent of its 10 million population have used 4G or 5G connections. Seoul also supports a public road road network at more than 100,000 points that can be accessed easily and of course free of charge.

In addition to the availability of connectivity, the government must also ensure that the majority or almost all of its citizens already use smart devices. The reason is, all city activities will involve the internet network.

Another challenge from the metaverse concept is computing the cover, namely computing services in the form of servers, storage, databases, networks, and much more. There are two things that need to be met from this challenge.

First, the government must have sufficient storage of clouds to process all public data. In addition, the government must also have strict security in order to avoid the problem of cybercrime.

The last need that cannot be ignored is the availability of funds. Seoul is known to have set aside Rp787 billion in funds just to build one city. In fact, the city is quite advanced in terms of connectivity and its devices.

Therefore, the budget for cities in Indonesia cannot be equated with Seoul. Prabowo stated that the construction of one city would require IDR 125 trillion so that 10 cities would be IDR 1,250 trillion.