Roadmap for Open and Co-created Virtual Worlds

Roadmap for Open and Co-created Virtual Worlds

Welcome to the OPENVERSE Roadmap! The European Commission aims to build a Web 4.0 and virtual worlds that reflect EU values, protect fundamental rights, and ensure our businesses can scale globally.

To turn this vision into reality, we need your expertise. The inputs and feedback collected on this page will feed into EU-level policy discourse on Virtual Worlds..

How to Contribute

We want to hear from makers, service providers, policy-makers, and researchers.

1. Login or Register, it will take just one minute!
2. Click the "Discuss" link next to the Pillar or Key Action you want to weigh in on.
3. Click "Edit" at the top of the Talk Page.
4. Type your feedback!

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The "Actionability Check": What We Need From You

A roadmap is only as good as its practical implementation. We are not just looking for abstract thoughts. When you review the Key Actions below, please evaluate them against our five practical implementation categories. Tell us what is missing or what needs to be prioritised:

1. Technologies: What infrastructure (e.g., EU cloud, AI chips) is lacking?
2. Products/Applications: What tools or software need to be built?
3. Markets: How can we ensure adoption in sectors like healthcare, smart cities, and education?
4. Capabilities: What skills, data stewardship, or design talents do we need?
5. Regulation/Stimulation Support: What sandboxes, financing schemes, or legal protections are required?

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The Five Strategic Pillars

To achieve our vision, the roadmap is built upon five mutually reinforcing pillars that connect policy intent to delivery. When providing feedback, consider how your insights align with these core foundations:

• Pillar A – Trust and Safety by Design: Users will not stay without safety, and makers will not invest without clarity. This pillar promotes visible safeguards, proportionate moderation, and accessibility.
• Pillar B – Interoperability and Data-Readiness: Interoperability must be treated as essential infrastructure ("plumbing"). Priorities here include identity and asset portability, usage control, and open reference stacks.
• Pillar C – Skills, Financing Tools and SME Scale-up: Europe must build and stimulate, not just regulate. This pillar focuses on linking creator toolchains to Digital Innovation Hubs and ensuring a coherent financing path for creators.
• Pillar D – Science–Industry Testbeds and Sector Adoption: We need cross-border demonstrators in areas of European strength (health, manufacturing, education, cities, security) to show how standards and skills come together in real settings.
• Pillar E – Foresight-in-the-Loop: Policy must remain agile and cumulative. This pillar relies on regular scanning and annual refreshes to ensure that lessons learned from concrete deployments continuously feed back into new standards, funding, and guidance

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The 10 Key Actions (Grouped by Target Time frame)

We have mapped out 10 Key Actions (KAs) to achieve our goals. Please focus your feedback on the specific actions and topics that align with your expertise.

Immediate & Urgent Priorities (2026–2028)

KA2: Promote guiding ethical and health principles for well-being in virtual worlds.

Intended impact: Documented research on mental health and related risks, with medical and legal reference increase, protection implemented and more systematically enforced, in parallel with privacy and trust increase.

Indicative leads: EU policymakers, research, health and legal sectors, user communities, education, and media.

KA3: Promote inspiring partnerships across sectors and borders.

Intended impact: New applications, markets, and business models should accompany the increase in numbers (users, virtual assets, communities, research output, IPTR evidence, etc.).

Indicative leads: EU policymakers, industry, research, health, cities, Member States, finance actors, XR/VW associations.

KA6: Promote AI integration and the corresponding skill building for VW creativity.

Intended impact: Upskilling of various kinds, data stewards, ethical specialists, procurement experts, asset managers and brokers, AI creation advisors, avatar librarians, etc., should emerge in numbers.

Indicative leads: EU policymakers, researchers, technology makers, designers, education, industry champions, and security specialists.

KA9: Support, refurbish and inaugurate new forms of financing for VW creators.

Intended impact: What exists is too little known or used, but new means must also be created (some are close to launch, others still in the waiting room) to create the stimulating environment that lags so much behind our competitors. Evidence of easier access and of new financing schemes should quickly have its own metrics.

Indicative leads: EU policymakers & MS, financing organisations, pension funds, business schools, designers and makers.

Medium-Term Deployments (2026–2032)

KA1: Build skills for virtual worlds; make the EU a talent magnet.

Intended impact: Substantial increase in the number of individuals capable of becoming makers, creators, brokers, counsellors, evaluators, and researchers, with significant results in the number and originality of applications for all key sectors.

Indicative leads: EU policymakers, industry, research, Member States, and sector actors (e.g. health, security).

KA4: Help the Cultural & Creative Industries (CCI) and media test new business models.

Intended impact: Creators, as individuals and in communities, can deliver high-bandwidth, scalable professional output, with or without AI. New business models should also build on PPPs, BC-related communities, and open innovation schemes as much as on classical IPR.

Indicative leads: EU & MS, media and culture sectors, education, finance actors, XR/VW associations, business schools.

KA5: Develop standards for open/interoperable virtual worlds, with sandbox options.

Intended impact: At least some sector progression should become measurable, and cross-use of virtual assets should become increasingly common and referenced. Pilot incentives and actions valuing XR/VW associations supported and capable of scaling.

Indicative leads: Technology makers, industry, user communities, XR/VW associations.

KA7: Boost professional virtual worlds across sectors of excellence.

Intended impact: Healthcare, security, industry, and city management should at least deliver measurable performance and shareable experiences, definitely going beyond the interesting but dispersed experiments we know, i.e., towards professional ROI.

Indicative leads: Industry, technology makers, designers, XR/VW associations, education, EU policymakers & MS, finance actors.

Long-Term Scale-Out (2026–2035)

KA8: Address sovereignty: promote champions; fight IPR theft, manipulation and misinformation.

Intended impact: The journey is still long, but we must start somewhere. Cloud issues, chips, AI, and XR/VW makers, as well as small champions, should be encouraged with absolute priority. Misinformation, deepfakes and alternate reality narratives are challenging to fight, but new means are emerging. AI seems to represent both the problem and its solution.

Indicative leads: EU policymakers & MS, industry, finance, legal, defence and security, media, and education.

KA10: Reduce the environmental footprint of XR/VW deployments.

Intended impact: So far, the environment has been mishandled (valuing distant collaboration) or not handled at all, but the digital rise is such that VWs are part of the pack, and the moment will come when there will be a price to pay. Preparing for that can bring some benefits.

Indicative leads: EU policymakers & MS, environment specialists, the energy sector, education, and research.