History of Star Ferry comes alive in metaverse
SCMP game contains visual tour of the pier, giving players new way to experience culture
The Post has launched a metaverse experience on blockchain gaming platform The Sandbox, offering an immersive, gamified tour of Hong Kong’s iconic Star Ferry Pier.
The metaverse experience, Hong Kong Star Ferry Pier, is among more than 35 The Sandbox is offering with its new season, which will run throughout this month, and is open to the public for free.
The game is based on an extensive visual library of awardwinning photography, visual illustrations, data, infographics and associated journalism that the Post owns, covering more than 100 years of Hong Kong and mainland history.
“Our historical archives often feature visual artefacts that can be most widely accessed in the metaverse,” said Gary Liu, chief executive of South China Morning Post Publishers.
“SCMP’s collaboration with Sandbox’s interactive games will bring these visuals into an interactive digital world, allowing users to experience history and culture in an entirely new way.”
The Star Ferry, one of Hong Kong’s oldest forms of transport, began operations in 1888. The experience, built in collaboration with local metaverse studio Index Game, will feature a virtual portal that “teleports” players between the present day and moments in the past, where they can learn the ferry pier’s history and relive some of the city’s most iconic moments and events.
Players can move around the game, which features a backdrop of Hong Kong’s imposing skyline, and interact with game characters to understand the city’s history.
As part of the Post’s efforts to stay on top of the latest technology trends, the company has also ventured into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – data added to a blockchain that proves a digital item’s uniqueness and ownership. NFTs allow people to own and trade digital assets, and are considered a driver of the future metaverse economy.
In July, the Post launched ARTIFACT, a blockchain metadata standard for historical and archival NFTs. On March 14, it will also release its first collection of historical NFTs under the title of ARTIFACT by SCMP.