Regulatory Sandboxes for Virtual Worlds Innovation

Virtual worlds are rapidly evolving from experimental entertainment spaces into persistent socio-technical infrastructures spanning healthcare, education, industry, and public services. This transition presents a unique regulatory convergence, simultaneously invoking rules on data protection, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital identity, and intellectual property. Traditional regulation is often too slow and fragmented to address these hybrid environments without either stifling innovation or failing to protect fundamental rights.

This webinar builds upon the recently published OPENVERSE policy brief, “Regulatory Sandboxes for Virtual Worlds Innovation”, to discuss on the potential of controlled, evidence-generating testing environments to help Europe build a trustworthy, inclusive, and competitive OPENVERSE.

Core Objectives

• Explore Experimental Governance: Discuss how regulatory sandboxes provide a supervised environment for innovators to test technologies and business models while generating real-world evidence for future EU legislation.
• Showcase the OPENVERSE Observatory: Provide insights into the OPENVERSE Observatory’s curated collection of international regulatory sandbox case studies.
• Bridge the Local and the European: Understand how municipalities and academic institutions interface with virtual world sandboxes to foster human-centric urban innovation and local digital ecosystems.
• Bridge the Real and the Virtual: Explain how it could be possible to model the evolution of European city cultures through advanced Digital Twins.
• Introduce the concept of Virtual Innovation Districts: Examine EABID’s proposal to leverage existing knowledge to create a “Virtual Innovation District”: a pan-European orchestration layer that simplifies cross-border scaling for micro-enterprises and startups.

Agenda

2:00 PM – 2:05 PM | Welcome Greetings | Fabio Perossini (The Lisbon Council)

2:05 PM – 2:15 PM | Setting the Scene: Outline of the Discussion | Francesco Molinari (The Lisbon Council)

2:15 PM – 2:45 PM | Open Floor: Expert Perspectives & Interventions

• John Favaro (Trust-IT Services) | Insights from the OPENVERSE Observatory’s collection of use cases
• Graham Colclough (UrbanDNA, EABID) | Presenting EABID’s Virtual Innovation District concept as a component of the sandbox framework
• Anna Aseeva (Digital For Planet) | Nudging Sufficiency in the Spatial Web: Behavioral Choice Architecture in Municipal Virtual Sandboxes

2:45 PM – 2:55 PM | Open Q&A

2:55 PM – 3:00 PM | Conclusions & Next Steps