How can heritage benefit from metavers without losing its value?

Diaa Elyaacoubi, CEO of Monnier Frères in an interview that can be found on the website La tribune states

"The challenge of the metaverse is to seduce its audiences, to offer innovative, creative and cultural experiences. In this sense, France can become a central player in the metaverse, because of its cultural heritage."

While this position is commendable in terms of the creativity that can embark the cultural and creative industries, from a heritage perspective (as recognized by Unesco), there is a good chance that we are in a posture that makes the limitations of heritage apparent. Thus, how can heritage adapt to the metaverse without losing its "authenticity"?

The heritage we are talking about is the one defined by Unesco through the two main conventions, namely the 1972 convention on cultural and natural heritage and the 2003 convention on intangible heritage. The first one refers to ensembles, sites and monuments. As for the second, it refers to "oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills required for traditional craftsmanship. Depending on whether one is in one or the other typology, metavers can be better used.

Metavers is an adequate tool for the promotion of sites

The 1972 convention had the ambition of constituting a world heritage while the 2003 one recognizes rather the particularity of groups, communities. However, the aim is to be able to present the heritage to the different cultural areas of the world, to transmit them to future generations by keeping the authenticity in the case of tangible heritage and by protecting the intangible while accompanying its evolution.

In this sense, the metavers which is an animated and virtual representation can serve as a tool for disseminating the different heritages in the world. During the presentation of the exhibition "On the road of chieftaincies" which highlighted the cultural richness of the peoples of the Grassfields of Cameroon, a 3D representation intended for the very small allowed to reach this public, a stroke of communication.

The metarvers allows to preserve the sites from overexploitation

In an article titled "Ten Places Threatened by Mass Tourism," published about ten years ago, several sites are suffering the throes of mass tourism: Venice, the Galapagos Islands, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Everest, Machu Picchu, Petra, Angkor, Easter Island, Egyptian tombs and the Mediterranean. These sites are as diverse as the tourists who visit them and their effects, as the article demonstrates, is catastrophic in that they deteriorate these heritages.

Despite the promises made by the managers or those in charge of managing these sites, their accelerated degradation does not stop because of the economic windfall they generate. Some solutions are taken such as reducing the number of daily tourists, setting up virtual tourism or virtual exhibitions. The latter has generally been used as a complement to the physical visit and has helped to "bring" the works or cultural goods closer to the audiences.

In the age of metavers, these solutions generally used for museums can be accentuated and especially turned to the most visited sites in order to reduce physical visits. A virtual tour, even if it is economical, cannot replace the physical visit but can strongly contribute to the regulation of visitors .

Reconstructing the disappeared heritage

Some wonders of the world now disappeared are "recreated" through the reality of 3D, even without the authenticity. The metaverse has this particularity of being able to go back in time. The lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in Mesopotamia (Iraq), the gold and ivory statue of Zeus in Olympia in Greece, the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, the tomb of Mausoleus in Halicarnassus in present-day Turkey, the Colossus of Rhodes are six of the seven lost wonders.

Using available documentation, architects and engineers have been virtually recreating these wonders in order to immerse visitors in these wonders of the past, in a reconstructed and partly fictionalized reality. These initiatives are in the process of multiplying to the recreation of less popular but equally interesting cultural heritage assets that will only gain visibility and recognition.

The metavers a know-how for other know-how

Unlike tangible and natural heritage, intangible heritage has the peculiarity of being evolutionary. It is in perpetual creation and recreation. In this sense, the metaverse, itself becomes an artistic medium, a facilitator and even a tool that contributes to the creation of cultural expressions. It is a heritage that is not based on authenticity and therefore likely to evolve.

"The metaverse is a combination of virtual worlds, augmented reality and the Internet that envisions an immersive, decentralized and global community." (Pierre Berendes)

So defined, it is an ideal instrument for cultural heritage. It will never replace the sensation of physical visits but it can amply participate in the safeguarding and popularization of cultural heritage. Still, one must consider the fact that it can appropriate the authentic value of heritage and risks dispossessing communities of their knowledge (cultural appropriation), insofar as these communities do not necessarily have the same means to set up their own virtual realities and control them.

Still, it is up to the authorities to look into the matter just as one would look into any novelty in order to frame it. Intangible heritage will only thrive with the metaverse if communities find it to their liking.

Illustration: Colmar, a French village in Malaysia - Bryanoool - Pixabay