Recently, the "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Further Comprehensively Deepening Reform and Promoting Chinese-style Modernization" mentions, "explore effective mechanisms for the integration of culture and science and technology, and accelerate the development of new cultural formats."
As an advanced form of the integration of the digital economy and the real economy, the metaverse is changing the ecosystem of the traditional cultural tourism industry, promoting the upgrading of traditional cultural tourism formats and the development of new formats.
In August last year, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and a total of five other departments jointly issued the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Innovation and Development of the Metaverse Industry (2023-2025)", clearly proposing the construction of a cultural tourism metaverse.
The Shandong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology also issued an opinion, proposing to build a digital cultural metaverse, providing policy guidance for the metaverse to empower the development of new productive forces in cultural tourism.
Under the resonance of market promotion and policy guidance, the new format of cultural tourism empowered by the metaverse has been continuously developed.
The metaverse is characterized by immersive experience, using VR, AR and other technical means, with the help of glasses, gloves, Vientiane walkers and electronic skin and other devices, consumers can obtain a multi-sensory and high-fidelity all-round physical and mental experience such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, etc.
As a result, a series of new cultural tourism formats such as immersive performances, immersive night tours, immersive exhibitions, and immersive blocks have been derived.
"Sanxingdui Fantasy Journey" restores the whole picture of Sanxingdui ruins 1:1, and constructs virtual interactive spaces such as Sanxingdui archaeological excavation site, digital museum exhibition area and Sanxingdui ancient Shu Kingdom, so that visitors can "cross" into the site of the ruins anytime and anywhere to get an immersive experience.
Jointly built by United States Madison Square Garden Entertainment and Las Vegas Sands, MSG Sphere creates a multi-modal and immersive entertainment experience through the use of 8K cameras, adaptive acoustic systems, custom tactile floors, intelligent olfactory systems and other technologies.
The "Cloud Tour China" project, a cloud platform for the cultural tourism metaverse, plans to use cutting-edge technologies such as big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and cloud reality to develop digital twin applications for China's cultural tourism scenic spots.
With the advancement of metaverse technology, the immersive experience of new forms of cultural tourism will be further developed, and the multi-sensory experience effect will be greatly enhanced.
The future picture of the new form of cultural tourism empowered by the metaverse is to cross the digital divide between the virtual world and the physical world and form a new ecosystem of virtual and real symbiosis, thereby empowering the development of the cultural tourism industry in the real world.
According to the "Metaverse White Paper (2023)" released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the metaverse ecosystem will mature after 2050, when the scale of metaverse users will reach the current mobile Internet penetration rate, and the 3D digital world and the physical world will be seamlessly integrated.
At this stage, the real world is the entrance to the metaverse, and the metaverse virtual world provides many new scenarios for the cultural tourism industry to expand and break the circle. The virtual world of cultural tourism and the real world are closely integrated in economic, social, identity and other systems, resulting in a series of new forms of cultural tourism characterized by the integration of virtual and real.