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Future

K-Pop To Catalonia: How The Metaverse Can Turn Local Culture Global

Glitchy online museum tours are a thing of the past. From Barcelona to Bollywood, the metaverse is bringing immersive cultural experiences right into our homes.

K-Pop To Catalonia: How The Metaverse Can Turn Local Culture Global

A metaverse experience at the Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona

Rozena Crossman

Between environmental costs, COVID and criticisms of digital nomads hurting local economies, the world is questioning the magic of travel — and increasing the time spent in front of screens. Although the meager form the metaverse has taken today can’t replace the smells, tastes, or exact luminescence that make discovering new corners of the world so thrilling, it may soon be dropping local adventures from far away lands into our living rooms.

While the guided tours of museums and online concerts that we all tested out during lockdowns were often glitchy and underwhelming, the beginning of 2022 has seen regional cultural initiatives from around the world flocking to the metaverse, a virtual reality world where people can interact and have experiences as they do in the real world.


“One of the qualities we have in virtual reality is embodiment, that sense of being present in a different environment,” said Louise Claassen, an executive fellow at Henley Business School Africa, to Forbes. “Your body is responding to where your mind believes that you are. There are all sorts of very interesting opportunities that this convergence into the metaverse present.”

From learning the Catalan language to Bollywood performances, here are three breaking examples of cultural institutions developing projects that offer the kind of total digital immersion in their community’s art and heritage — experiences that were, until now, accessible only by boat, train or plane.

Promoting Catalan language and culture virtually

This autonomous region in Spain is famous for its die-hard investment in keeping its language and traditions alive. Now, the government of Catalonia and the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce are launching a virtual world to promote the Catalan language and its culture.

Spanish daily La Vanguardia reported on the launch of the Catalan metaverse, named “CatVers,” in January. CatVers is a digital space where avatars can go to art galleries, concerts and even attend university classes. It all happens exclusively in Catalan.

For the first two months, entry to this digital Catalan world will be free of charge. But organizers hope they will soon be able to offer accessible rates, and they eventually hope to have their own currency within the Catalan metaverse.

Bollywood's next big move is virtual

Looking for a new way to engage audiences and fans, India’s renowned Bollywood industry is making moves in the metaverse, reports The Economic Times of India.

Pooja Entertainment, one of the country’s leading movie companies, paid over $5,000 for a plot of virtual land in the metaverse. They subsequently made the first-ever Indian film announcement within the metaverse for BadeMiyan ChoteMiyan, its upcoming film, which will be an immersive experience.

Meanwhile, actors such as Deepika Padukone and Kamal Haasan have created metaverse avatars, and NFTs of film art for upcoming Indian movies from major production houses are about to drop.

South Korea hopes to become a Metaverse superpower

In January, the South Korean Ministry of Science and ICT announced an investment of $7.5 billion into developing both AI and its own metaverse. Culture is very much a part of the program, as the space will include a Korean language institute.

With the aim of becoming the fifth largest metaverse market in the world within the next five years — which seems plausible, given that they currently harbor the fourth biggest video game market — the government is clearly hoping to export Korean culture en masse with the “K-metaverse”.


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Society

Big Brother For The People: India's CCTV Strategy For Cracking Down On Police Abuse

"There is nothing fashionable about installing so many cameras in and outside one’s house," says a lawyer from a Muslim community. And yet, doing this has helped members of the community prove unfair police action against them.

A woman is walking in the distance while a person holds a military-style gun close up

Survellance and tight security at the Lal Chowk area in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India on October 4, 2022

Sukanya Shantha

MUMBAI — When sleuths of the National Investigating Agency suddenly descended on human rights defender and school teacher Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s house on October 11, he knew exactly what he needed to do next.

He had been monitoring the three CCTVs that are installed on the front and the rear of his house — a chawl in Vikhroli, a densely populated area in suburban Mumbai. The cameras told him that a group of men and women — some dressed in Mumbai police’s uniform and a few in civil clothes — had converged outside his house. Some of them were armed and few others with batons were aggressively banging at the door asking him to immediately let them in.

This was not the first time that the police had landed at his place at 5 am.

When the policemen discovered the CCTV cameras outside his house, they began hitting it with their batons, destroying one of them mounted right over the door. This action was captured by the adjacent CCTV camera. Shaikh, holed up in his house with his wife and two children, kept pleading with the police to stop destroying his property and simply show them an official notice.

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