In the wake of Facebook’s highly hyped rebranding to Meta in October 2021, the public has been fascinated by an ephemeral entity known as “the Metaverse.” The term “metaverse” has been a frequent headline across the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and other mainstream media outlets – “What is the Metaverse Museum?” “What’s all this fuss about Metaverses? and “Is the Metaverse Just Marketing?”
Let’s dig deeper into this article and examine the possibilities that this nascent technology might hold for virtual museums.
Before that, what is metaverse?
There is a virtual world called ‘Metaverse’ encased in a chain of technology called a blockchain. It’s not a completely new concept, but it’s rehashed of one that has been around for many years: a virtual world with the ability to create a self and interact with others.
It operates based on blockchain technology, a distributed digital database that stores information about all transactions in its network. Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) are tokens that are exchangeable within this network and can store information about assets such as artwork. It is possible to utilize this distributed database as a resource to authenticate tokens and identify the owners of NFTs, which are just receipts or certificates of ownership. Blockchains provide decentralized storage for NFT receipts.
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Metaverse Museum Transformation – Future of Entertainment has begun!
Metaverse in Art
The art world also started to explore the metaverse, where artists and collectors are beginning to occupy the virtual world. It offers new potential for social exchange, showcasing, and purchasing digital artworks from one another. The creative media expert Dhiren Dasu touted that the “Metaverse present a possible future for artwork where collectors and artists can interact in a space unleashed from their physical location.
Metaverse in Galleries
On platforms like Veespace, metaverse native art galleries are booming across the world. Within the platform, users can build galleries, advertise to border audience, and host art classes in live streaming.
Metaverse in Museum
Exploring historical artefacts in virtual museums is a completely new experience. Likewise, several entities in the world have started to embark on their plan to construct extensive virtual museum tours with NFTs virtual wall. One among them is RaveSpace launched Musee Dezentral back in 2021 – the world’s first blockchain-built virtual NFT museum.
The project will give users a chance to showcase their own NFTs in the museum’s collection, allowing it to evolve organically and disrupting the traditional system of art curation.
Here comes the point,
Tips to make Metaverse Museum into Success
Digitization Embarks
Back in 2021, the head of the State Hermitage Museum claimed that the “metaverse will rule the museum world using NFTs, also called digital twin”. With this extreme claim in mind, numerous museums are already started to digitize their collections online and the remaining have fronted the recreation of their collections in augmented and virtual reality.
So, with help of VeeSpaces, shed light on our long-lost cultures via the digital twin concept.
Metaverse is using VR & AR
AR and VR have already started their play in numerous museums like V&A’s Curious Alice, Mona Lisa and many more. So, it’s clearly predicted that virtual reality has overcome the traditional scepticism in the arts and cultural space. Hence, the metaverse appears to be the next frontier for innovative exhibitions as extended reality gains support as a tool for cultural engagement.
The occurrence and the evolution of social media offers a drastic possibility for audience and community engagement by cultural organizations. Will metaverse opens a path for the #musesocial movement? Of course, yes!
One of the businesses took initiative for this #musesocial movement called Art & Coffee. They tap into this potential and host events on social media along with the metaverse for artists and collectors to share ideas and build communities.
Drive Engagement through Gamification
Gaming tactics have been gaining popularity as a means of engaging museum visitors for some time. Now, it appears the metaverse may power even more sophisticated gamification initiatives in cultural organizations.
Future Hold for Metaverse in Museum
Museum in Metaverse – well, it is a hypothetical one and we are still far away to get the answer for this. Since, metaverse is still in its infancy and it is an amorphous daydream.
With this, here comes the question, what role might museum play in shaping our virtual future?
This remains an open question. Given the proliferation and investment in metaverse technologies across music, sports, gaming, and commercial arts, it’s important to consider the possibility that immersive virtual experiences may become standard practice in entertainment.
Already, cultural institution is facing lots of barriers and one among them is they prefer another leisure activity such as sporting, event, movie, etc. This being the case, museums may not be able to afford to be outpaced by the innovation taking place in adjacent industries. To compete for the limited attention of consumers, entering the metaverse might be necessary for museums to offer relevant modes of engagement.
As cultural institutions continue to make sense of their role outside their own walls and embrace digital offerings as part of the new normal, it is crucial that they have a seat at the table when it comes to the new technologies that may alter the course of audience engagement, artistic creation, and cultural consumption.
Explore virtual museums with VeeSpaces now. Contact us to get new opportunities in the metaverse.