Metaverse(s) and Cultural Heritage: overview and perspectives of the Italian scenario
Augusto Palombini · 2023
The paper sketches an overview of the current italian situation in relation to the concept of metaverse describing the spreading enterprises in terms of platforms, tools and knowledge leveraged.At the same time, the perspectives of such initiatives (and of the metaverse itself, as final goal of a long-lasting dream in human story) are discussed. I. INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF STORY OF A LONG-LASTING DREAM The metaverse may be seen as the final goal of a long lasting history, in which Virtual Reality represents the ultimate reconjunction of words and images, of narration and visual representation of reality [1].It is fascinating to check the historical traces of such a dream (literally a dream: recreating as in dreams the world scenarios and being able to interact into them) along human history.Although the general idea of fantastic worlds, alternative to reality, has been present since the dawn of human civilization, and represents the very core of art and creativity, the earliest example of shaping virtual words, in a sense quite close to modern digital ones, can be found in the 1940 novel "Morel's invention" [2], where the protagonist, victim of a shipwreck on a ghost island, is involved in an strongly exciting situation, meeting odd persons but being not able to completely interact with them, even when he tries to pursue a girl.The environment around him will finally show up as the virtual reconstruction of a party held decades before.It is interesting to gradually realize, during the reading, how the virtual scenarios building is imagined in the novel, in a time when digital technologies were still too far to be even drawn in a science fiction work, that is to say: referring to the industrial scenarios of the thirties.Such an example shows how the dream of virtual interactive and participative worlds is well older than computer science.Nevertheless, the earliest sketch of a metaverse in the current meaning came in the 1992 Neil Stephenson's novel "Snow crash" [3], where a unique, world-wide metaverse is the parallel playground of a reality dominated by big corporations.This work was conceived in an age when the technical