What Surprises Did the Metaverse Bring Us This Spring Festival?
A joke from this year's Spring Festival Gala sketch "Huan Huan Bu" made the metaverse a hot topic on streets and alleys once again. The "Dog King" mentioned in the sketch caused the digital asset of the same name, Doge King, to surge 542 times in the short term.
In the past year, the metaverse has continuously broken through boundaries, from open-world games and digital exhibition halls to virtual humans, new marketing scenarios, immersive experiences and interactions. The metaverse's sectors continue to expand, and business models are becoming more mature. During this Spring Festival, it combined with various traditional cultures to create a series of unique new experiences. Metaverse, this wonderful and harmonious new world, seems to be getting closer and closer to us.
Shopping for "New Year Goods" in the Metaverse
In 2021, NFTs exploded in growth, becoming one of the most well-known concepts in the metaverse. During the Spring Festival, various NFT artworks rich with strong New Year flavor were launched one after another, becoming a unique landscape of the new year.
On Chinese New Year's Eve, the Chinese and Korean encryption communities kicked off the 2022 New Year party in Cryptovoxels with a "Metaverse Concept Exhibition" format. Six exhibition halls with different themes displayed works from over 126 digital artists. Each hall was redecorated according to the New Year theme. The event tour was conducted in both Chinese and Korean, allowing users to view the exhibition while listening to explanations and freely purchase their favorite digital artworks.
Red Hole Digital Collection launched the programmable NFT artwork "Metaverse Fireworks," beautifully blending traditional culture with technology to add luster to the metaverse New Year. All fireworks NFTs were issued in blind box form. Users can use the purchased fireworks NFTs for any commercial activities and retain all commercial income generated. Multiple fireworks can also be combined to obtain brand new, rarer, and higher-level fireworks. At the same time, all fireworks held by users will ultimately be combined into a brand new large-scale digital artwork "Fireworks Universe." Each purchaser of metaverse fireworks will become a co-creator of this work, sharing some of the returns brought by the Fireworks Universe.
Metaverse Fireworks
In addition to fireworks, New Year paintings are also essential during the Spring Festival. On the day before Chinese New Year's Eve, the first digital New Year painting NFT work of the Ren Yin Year, "Fire Tiger Door God," was released. This series of New Year paintings combines the images of fire tigers and door gods, symbolizing warding off evil and disease, and guarding the home. Each New Year painting holds a unique code, becoming an unreplicable limited collection.
Internet giants such as Alibaba and Baidu also took advantage of the metaverse trend to expand Spring Festival marketing, combining New Year red envelope activities with digital collections. Starting from January 19, 2022, the rush to purchase digital collections for the New Year once made it to the top ten of Baidu's hot search list. On January 27, Xiaohongshu's Spring Festival "Metaverse Temple Fair" opened, selling Spring Festival-themed digital artworks through digital blind boxes. Users who purchased blind boxes can unlock and experience these digital collections in 3D form in their personal homepage's R-Space function module. In addition to 360-degree rotation, zooming in or out for viewing, users can also experience the new AR photo feature, taking photos together with their digital New Year goods. Like all digital collection platforms in China, Xiaohongshu's digital collections emphasize uniqueness and scarcity supported by blockchain technology. Moreover, most digital collections come with physical goods consistent with the display images. In addition to owning a digital collection online, users can also receive physical goods such as paintings, statues, dolls, etc. in real life.
The metaverse and NFTs have brought a brand new value capture dimension to cultural dissemination. The explosion of the metaverse and NFTs over the past year has prompted major well-known internet companies and tech companies at home and abroad to layout their plans one after another, trying to seize the opportunity. During the Spring Festival, the repeated breakthroughs of various NFT collections brought various concepts from the crypto circle into thousands of households, also proving the feasibility of the relatively mature business model of NFT collection exhibition and sales.
Celebrating Chinese New Year in the Metaverse
In addition to various NFT "New Year goods," many offline festive activities and gala evenings this year were also moved into the metaverse, bringing users magnificent immersive sensory experiences to enjoy Chinese New Year in all aspects.
One lamp illuminates ancient and modern times, one night to view the world. Before the Spring Festival holiday began, "China Zigong Lantern World Cloud Viewing" kicked off, bringing an immersive interactive digital scenic spot new gameplay that integrates traditional Chinese culture to all online audiences, allowing the vast audience to experience an immersive ultimate audio-visual experience in the metaverse. Beijing Primitive Digital Art produced the Chinese Spring Festival folk culture art collection "Tiger Year Temple Fair," showing the most exciting moments of 12 temple fair folk performances such as stilt walking, handstands, fire breathing, storytelling, clapper talk, sword juggling, lion dancing, etc., filled with New Year atmosphere.
During the Spring Festival, Guangzhou also specially held "Guangfu Metaverse," using the familiar Beijing Road as a prototype, adding historical and cultural architectural elements such as the City God Temple and arcade buildings, creating an online virtual space. People can freely roam the decorated Beijing Road online, checking in at various performances and foods. The New Year flavor in the metaverse breaks the limitations of space and time, bringing us closer together.
On the first day of the Chinese New Year, China Military Network held the "2022 Metaverse Military Camp Network Spring Festival Gala" in a self-built metaverse space. This gala integrated artificial intelligence, 5G applications, digital scene construction, augmented reality AR/virtual reality VR and other technologies, providing an immersive experience of cross-domain interaction in specific scenarios while enriching the visual experience. Previously, the gala organizer distributed 400 admission tickets on multiple platforms. Netizens obtained tickets through online interaction and could enter the "Metaverse" Avenue of Stars according to the verification code received. During the live broadcast, the host also incarnated as a virtual character to enter the metaverse main venue.
Dragon City development team Metaverse Labs held a metaverse event "2022 Dragon Soaring Tiger Leaping New Year Carnival" on Decentraland. The Metaverse fantasy theme park Fantastic Land, newly built by the team, also served as the main venue for this event and opened to everyone for the first time. During this Spring Festival activity, six outstanding musicians from the mainland and Hong Kong and numerous industry leaders at home and abroad presented an unprecedented "immersive Spring Festival Gala" on the metaverse stage. Besides the wonderful performances, global players could also experience interactive treasure hunt games and receive limited edition wearable NFTs and Dragon City exclusive commemorative badges.
Decentraland "2022 Dragon Soaring Tiger Leaping New Year Carnival" Scene
In the metaverse, any participating player is a world builder and content creator, so we also see many Spring Festival activities spontaneously designed and organized by users or communities. Some users built Spring Festival Gala scenes in The Sandbox and uploaded the construction process recording to video websites. Although this "Spring Festival Gala Creation Project" is still relatively rough, it can be foreseen that in future Spring Festivals, perhaps more and more ordinary users will participate, leaving unique Spring Festival memories in the metaverse.
Source: bilibili (uploader: A4 La Guo Xia)
The metaverse brings users the supratemporal environments and sensory stimuli that cannot exist in the real world, creating more and more immediate, immersive, interactive, and "New Year-flavored" scenarios, while also creating more and more feasible business models, including pre-event registration, receiving gifts, grabbing tickets, large amounts of advertising display during events, and one-click direct purchase entry, etc. At the same time, various Spring Festival activities held in the metaverse are also integrating and empowering tourism resources, stimulating more commercial value of traditional culture. Driven by AR, VR, wearable devices, haptic sensing and other technologies, more immersive consumption may become the norm.
Of course, the metaverse we can see today is still rough and simplified, still a long way from the utopia we aspire to. The technology ecosystem and content ecosystem are not yet mature, and scenario entrances need to be broadened. But we believe that the metaverse will continue to enter thousands of households, and we look forward to the next New Year, when the metaverse will bring us more surprises.
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