On October 11th, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism issued a notice on the collection and selection of innovative application scenarios for the Shanghai Cultural and Tourism Metaverse in 2025, with a deadline of November 7th.
The main directions are virtual reality entertainment spaces, virtual real integrated tourism scenes, and stage virtual performance projects.
Relying on cultural and museum venues, tourist attractions, commercial complexes, leisure streets, and other related spaces, with the core of enhancing the immersive experience of citizens and tourists, utilizing technologies such as virtual reality, ultra high definition, spatial computing, and artificial intelligence to create cultural and tourism scenes for consumers to deeply participate in and interact with.
Focusing on cultural and museum venues, tourist attractions, or open blocks, augmented reality devices are used to superimpose virtual elements in real space and interact with citizens and tourists, especially in applications such as accompanying tours, exhibition displays, and restoration of cultural relics and historic sites.
Focusing on stage performance scenes such as theaters, upgrading and transforming stage equipment, using technologies such as ultra-high definition, naked eye 3D, and mixed reality to create works, developing cultural, artistic, and innovative performing arts products, and upgrading traditional performing arts viewing experiences.
According to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC), it is predicted that by 2025, the global market size for VR large space solutions will exceed $12 billion for the first time. Among them, the proportion of the Chinese market continues to increase, growing from 18% in 2020 to 37% in 2024, and is expected to exceed 40% by 2025, demonstrating China's important position in the global VR large space solution market.
As the first city in China to implement the metaverse policy, Shanghai's metaverse core industry and related industries have exceeded 300 billion yuan in scale. At present, Shanghai has gathered more than 30 XR terminal manufacturing enterprises, with production capacity in core components such as optical modules and space computing chips accounting for over 40% of the national total, forming a relatively complete metaverse industry chain.
In the field of culture and tourism, Shanghai has clearly stated that by 2025, the "Culture and Tourism Metaverse" brand will have initially taken off, with a development level ranking among the top in the country, an industrial scale exceeding 50 billion yuan, and the formation of 2 to 3 new content creation industry cluster development zones. To achieve this goal, Shanghai encourages cultural and museum venues such as museums and art galleries, as well as commercial districts, to use virtual reality technologies such as XR, naked eye 3D, holographic projection, digital light and shadow, as well as equipment such as ball (ring) screens and intelligent perception, to create immersive cultural and tourism experience spaces with virtual real interaction.
Under the promotion of this policy, a number of benchmark projects have emerged in Shanghai, such as the immersive experience of "Fengqi Luoyang", the deep immersive exploration of "The Disappearing Pharaoh - Hu Fu Pyramid", and the national first LBE VR red culture immersion exhibition of "Digital One Big · Original Aspiration Journey". These projects utilize metaverse and big space technology to achieve digital twins of cultural relics and cross temporal narratives, giving new vitality to Chinese civilization through algorithm empowerment.
It is worth mentioning that in September this year, the Shanghai Economic and Information Commission issued a notice on the release of the third batch of "unveiling and leading" projects for major metaverse application scenarios in Shanghai. In the field of culture and tourism, it covers multiple projects such as the interdisciplinary digital new horizon of Zhongfu Youth Palace, the immersive metaverse scene of the walking planetarium XR, the National Treasure · Metaverse Digital Immersive Super Experience Scene, and the AI Metaverse Large Space Content Technology Collection Center, further promoting the application and development of metaverse in the field of culture and tourism.
