Museum + Metaverse: Cultural digital transformation breeds new business forms

According to the media reported recently, Beijing cultural BBS, issued the Beijing culture industry development white paper (2022), puts forward new formats lead to build digital development trend of the development of new pattern, game animation, wen stressed Beijing brigade wenbo in areas such as actively explore yuan universe application scenarios, promote forms of virtualization, immersion, digital development.

Museums have been hit hard by the pandemic. Major museums have launched online exhibitions, and the "cloud" and digital transformation have also provided new development opportunities for museums. In March this year, 60 curators and scholars from 50 museums and universities across the country jointly issued the Initiative on Museums' Active Participation in the Construction of the Metauniverse, calling on museums to keep pace with The Times, actively integrate with the metauniverse, and "let themselves and their collections live in the metauniverse." Chinese museums also actively embrace emerging technologies from "forcing the cloud", from data online to actively participate in the construction of the metauniverse, promoting the formation of new forms of cultural industry. The National Museum of China's first virtual digital Homo sapiens "Wen Wen" has taken advantage of the vividness and empathy of a virtual character to successfully "break the circle" and attract a large number of fans.

72848889bf91bf8944b5246b7135fdfdAccording to the definition made by Professor Shenyang of Tsinghua University, the metauniverse is the next generation of Internet application and social form that integrates a variety of new technologies. It is based on the expansion of real technology and digital twin to achieve the expansion of time and space, based on AI and Internet of things to achieve the human-machine integration of virtual human, natural person and robot. Based on blockchain, Web3.0, digital collection /NFT to achieve economic value-added. In the social system, production system, economic system of virtual and real, each user can be world editing, content production and digital assets of their own.

From the first concept of "metaverse" put forward in the science fiction Avalanche in 1992 to the initial presentation of games such as "Second Life", the metaverse has become an ideal scene for the development of museums. The immersive interactive experience created by the integration of virtuality and reality has brought the previously serious and "cold" museums into the lives of ordinary people.

The metaverse brings a new dimension to the immersive interactive experience of museums. Yuan constructed universe immersive interactive scene experience, through the panoramic video, images, and will be broadcast live across the dynamic way, such as combination of time and space environment of cultural relics, cultural ecology, life custom, such as background, implementation artifacts time-space scenario is close to the representation of human nature and true sensual, build a brand-new immersive experience, cultural relics "alive".

Hunan Provincial Museum used 3D image production technology, combined with AR and VR technology to reproduce the "slow life" of people in the Song Dynasty. The Paris Museum used HoloLens2 to "resurrect" extinct species and launched an immersive exhibition, showing extinct animals in augmented reality, to "virtual repair" the incomplete or disappeared past. Bring people back to the long river of history to feel the splendor and silence of The Times, and transfer the power of culture. Using the "nonlinear" narrative feature, the subject can switch and jump freely in the meta-universe, forming an immersive interactive experience. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, United States, launched about 400,000 virtual exhibits, linked with the popular game fantasy, through the two-dimensional code of virtual exhibits to import the collection into the game, in different platforms and scenes conversion, breaking the museum itself space restrictions, attracting the attention of cross-field audiences, promote the wide spread of culture.

1b6e247635b5335c16f11ba6fbf35a89-1With the deepening of the integration of the two, the impact of the two-sidedness of meta-cosmic technology on the development of museums can not be ignored. The combination of the metauniverse and the museum goes beyond the digitalization of products, intelligent management and humanization of services. With the support of the traceability and verification technology of NFT (Non-fungibleToken with the attributes of digital dictionary collection, referred to as NFT), museum digital collections are no longer limited to digital twins. Instead, it becomes a unique, scarce, irreplaceable and indivisible ontology. At this time, the gap between digital collection and digital collection is not only based on the difference of technology, the information content of the collection gradually breaks away from the bondage of the carrier, but also forms the extinction of ontological historical accumulation.

It should be noted that the digital transformation of museums has not been smooth. On the one hand, the concept of the metaverse itself is a reasonable imagination based on emerging technologies. There are still some disputes about how to jump out of the boundary of "networking" and "intelligent" and enter the real metaverse in practice. On the other hand, the museum's cultural relics have extraordinary uniqueness and rarity. Will virtual access lead to the "disappearance of spirit and charm" that people worry about? Therefore, museums should stick to their public attributes and make better use of digitalization to carry out cultural inheritance and development.

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