Local governments’ metaverse craze turns out to be nuisance

A view of the \'Jinju Castle Metaverse\', a virtual reality platform built by Jinju City, Gyeongnam Province. Screen capture of Jinju Castle Metaverse

The Cheongju city government has created online virtual reality at a website of 'Suamgol Metaverse' (www.suamgol.com) so that people can experience tourist attractions near Suamgol in the city similar to real life. By creating an avatar and accessing the metaverse, people can look around the Suamgol Mural Village, an observatory, a cafe street, and the Hyanggyo Street in the virtual world.

However, when a reporter created an avatar and entered the metaverse, there were very few people visiting the virtual place. When looking around the cafes on the cafe street there, most of them failed to show information about the stores.

A cafe that stopped operating in November last year was provided with incorrect information that it is still "operating" in the metaverse. The same was true for the Hyanggyo Street there. An owner who ran a cafe in Suamgol said, "The Suamgol metaverse is not helpful to run my business at all."

The metaverses, which were built at great expense by local governments across the country to capitalize on the popularity of the virtual reality world, are being ignored by citizens.

The Cheongju city government started the Suamgol metaverse service in January 2023. The project cost 484 million won, but the number of users was small. In December last year, 1,601 people used the service, which means that 51.6 people logged in a day.

An official from the city government said, "We have built a metaverse platform to provide local residents with unique attractions and help local merchants," adding, "Since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been few interest in the service and as it costs a lot of money to modify graphics, it is not easy to update the service."

Metaverse platforms created by other local governments are in a similar situation. Although it was made with a budget of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of won, there are cases where there are only about 20 users.

The Daegu Gyeongbuk New Airport Metaport, which opened in November last year at a cost of 3 billion won to promote the Daegu Gyeongbuk New Airport, which is set to open in 2030, is currently closed. As of January 16, only 277 people have signed up to visit the virtual place. The program was also downloaded from the Google Play Store only about 100 times.

In the case of the Metaverse Experience Center, which North Gyeongsang Province invested 1.3 billion won and installed in the provincial government building in December 2022, about 4,200 visitors visited the experience center last year, averaging only 12 per day. Jinjuseong Metaverse (www.metajinju.co.kr), which was created in February last year by the Jinju city government with a cost of 250 million won, was accessed by only 31 people in December last year.

The Gwanghanluwon Metaverse (play.namwon.go.kr), which the Namwon city government created last year at a cost of 400 million won, was accessed by only 2,456 people in a year, and only 26 people accessed the Daegu Nam-gu Restaurant Metaverse (www.apsan.co.kr) in December last year, which introduces restaurants in the region. The Gochang county office, which introduced the country's first metaverse shopping mall in October 2021, suspended its service.

Experts pointed out that this is another example of the problem of local governments jumping on the bandwagon without prior review. Park Yong-sun, a member of the North Gyeongsang Provincial Assembly said, "The metaverse project should be reexamined completely.“

Jang Sung-bok, head of the Department of Digital Media Design at Cheongju University, said, "As local governments are mandated to create metaverses to consume their budgets, there are no experts and there is a lack of related content,” adding, ""We shouldn't stop at making a metaverse, but continue to organize events related to it."

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.