On February 21, the awarding ceremony of the 2021 "Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage Person of the Year" and the release ceremony of the 100 shortlist of the 2022 "Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage Person of the Year" with the theme of "Telling Intangible Cultural Heritage Stories Well and Enhancing Cultural Self-confidence" were held at the China Arts and Crafts Museum • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum. At the meeting, Guo Xiaozhe, partner of the virtual IP brokerage business of Blue Universe and producer of "Su Xiaomei", said that in the world of the metaverse, decentralized production and consumption is the consensus of everyone. We hope that we can break time and space, fill in the narrative, and tell intangible cultural heritage stories through the metaverse. Let everyone participate and become a digital inheritor. We also hope that we can use this method to open up the digital customization and production of intangible cultural heritage, and realize the industrialization of the entire intangible cultural heritage.
The following is an excerpt from the speeches:
"Su Xiaomei" is the first virtual ancient character we created last year, everyone knows that Su Xiaomei is the sister of the legendary Su Dongpo, she is fictional in history, leaving many legends. She is a very co-creative figure, so we recreated it with the help of virtual technology.
Today I want to share intangible cultural heritage from the perspective of the metaverse. We believe that the metaverse is a new media means, and we are using new virtual and real interaction technologies to carry out diversified development, with characters as the core, to create twin worlds that can loop indefinitely. In the content technology metaverse of the blue universe, our underlying core is traditional culture. Focusing on different types of traditional cultures, we accumulate a lot of data and create our own digital personas. Relying on these roles, we can decode traditional culture to fill the time and space distance between us and the Chinese civilization thousands of years ago.
We made two groups of characters, one is the "Su Xiaomei" that everyone just saw, and the other is the Chinese style virtual girl group "Wuyin", which comes from the Chinese myth and legend "Linglun Creation Law". Legend has it that Le Guan Linglun was ordered by the Yellow Emperor to go to Kunlun Mountain and was inspired by the Phoenix Divine Bird to create five sounds. We created the character "Wuyin" based on this story.
These two groups of characters carried out a lot of activities after their birth. "Su Xiaomei" is already a virtual character with high influence in China, with millions of fans, and is also a virtual person who has created the greatest transaction value in the domestic digital collection market. She connected many industries last year, such as domestic tea brands and some financial brands. "Su Xiaomei" also became the "digital spokesperson" and "Song Culture Recommendation Officer" of Meishan City last year, helping to promote Meishan's cultural tourism products. The second group of virtual humans we created, "Wuyin", is a five-member Chinese style girl group, each character will perform a different traditional instrument, they are mainly engaged in the inheritance and fusion of Chinese style music content creation. We hope that we can reproduce the beauty of Chinese traditional music culture in this way, so that more young people can accept Chinese traditional culture.
Virtual humans are actually digital non-genetic inheritors. "Su Xiaomei" produced a lot of content in combination with non-heritage last year, such as going to Hangzhou to worship teacher Chen Jinxin, the non-genetic inheritor of the tea whisk making skills, and going to Meishan to worship the teacher of Qingshen bamboo weaving non-genetic inheritor Chen Yunhua. Through the combination of virtual and real content, the subtlety of various intangible cultural heritage skills is presented. These contents have received a lot of positive feedback on social platforms, and many people have learned more about and liked intangible cultural heritage skills because of these videos. Since its debut, "Wuyin" has also carried out many adaptations and interpretations of traditional music, such as Beijing Opera, Suzhou Pingtan and so on. These contents are also popular with young people.
The biggest dilemma of intangible cultural heritage lies in the difficulty of passing it on. In the past, it was difficult for us to carry out market-oriented operation of intangible cultural heritage, and without commercial generation, there was no way to improve economic efficiency and allow more people to participate. But today, in addition to virtual humans, other technologies and contents of the metaverse can also help the inheritance and development of intangible cultural heritage. For example, we can restore and reproduce some intangible cultural heritage skills through digital technology; Through digital research and learning experience, the public can immerse themselves in the beauty of intangible cultural heritage; Decentralized production and consumption can also greatly promote the digital transaction of intangible cultural heritage.
Today, we hope to break time and space, fill in the narrative, and tell intangible cultural heritage stories through the metaverse. Let everyone participate and become a digital inheritor. We also hope that we can use this method to open up the digital customization and production of intangible cultural heritage, and realize the industrialization of the entire intangible cultural heritage.