During this year's National Day holiday, new technology-driven cultural tourism formats became the main draw for visitors.

AR script-based tours, metaverse immersive theaters, and digital cultural exhibitions are bringing "symbiotic virtual-physical" immersive experiences into museums, exhibition halls, and major commercial districts, offering consumers a refreshing retail experience.

Industry observers believe that as generative AI, spatial computing, and embodied intelligence technologies converge at an accelerating pace, the metaverse industry has officially moved from the technology demonstration stage into commercial实战.

How to identify the right evolutionary direction, land real-world scenarios, restructure content formats, and complete the commercial loop has become a common challenge for practitioners.

In the view of Xing Jie, executive vice president of the Metaverse and Carbon Neutrality Research Institute and chairman of Youshi Capital, the industry's underlying logic has undergone a fundamental shift in recent years.

"Metaverse 1.0 was dominated by VR, bringing people into virtual worlds; the 2.0 phase has shifted to AR, integrating an intelligence-driven digital world into the physical world," Xing said.

He predicts that people will gradually become accustomed to working and living in parallel, intersecting, and integrated ways across digital-native virtual worlds, digital twin real worlds, digitally-physically fused realities, and the physical real world.

As underlying technologies mature at an accelerating pace, applications such as "AI agent + AR" first-person real-time assistants, real-time environment generation, and rapid spatial digitization are expected to land first, while vertical industry AI solutions and spatial digitization services will also usher in broad business opportunities.

This trend has already been validated in industrial practice.

At the recent "Meta Shanghai, Digital Intelligence Renewal" 2026 Metaverse Industry Carnival, Lu Wenhui, general manager of Shanghai Shenteng Information Technology Co., Ltd., cited the "Walking Planetarium" project as an example.

"We hope to break the physical boundaries of brick-and-mortar venues and turn the Shanghai Planetarium's top-tier science education IP into a flowable digital product," Lu said.

According to Lu, the project relies on AI tools to shorten the 3D content production cycle and already has multiple product lines adaptable to lightweight small spaces, large exhibition halls, science courses, and inflatable touring planetarium scenarios.

A single set of digital content can flexibly adapt to different venues such as schools, commercial districts, and communities—it can deliver science courses or be deployed in shopping areas to create experiential consumer products.

The project has reportedly attracted more than 300,000 visits and has expanded overseas to Thailand and Malaysia.

Hardware manufacturers are also shifting from "selling hardware" to "building scenarios."

Liang Ziyu, general manager of digital culture international business at Lingban Technology (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd., said: "In the past, we had a hardware mindset, fixated on specifications and metrics. Now the industry has entered a scenario mindset and operations mindset—technology must address tourists' genuine emotional value needs."

Liang said the company has packaged AI large models and spatial computing capabilities into AR glasses cultural tourism solutions, deployed in hundreds of cultural tourism projects including the Liangzhu Museum and Tanzhe Temple.

Tourists wearing the glasses can identify exhibits simply by looking at them, enjoy AI multilingual guided tours, and see digital storylines overlaid on real scenes—no longer limited to playing prerecorded commentary videos.

A backend operations platform also helps venues manage devices, analyze visitor flow data, and push secondary consumption content, shifting from pure hardware sales to a long-term co-building and revenue-sharing operational model.

"The metaverse is not a 'castle in the air' but an industrial project that requires down-to-earth, sustained effort," said Qiu Wei, chief engineer of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization.

Shanghai's core and related metaverse industry scale has already exceeded 300 billion yuan, with XR key component production capacity accounting for more than 40% of the national total, Qiu said.

Relying on product selection and an application scenario "open challenge" mechanism, Shanghai has mobilized more than 800 market entities for collaborative innovation, with a number of benchmark projects emerging, including COMAC's industrial metaverse, Meta Yuyuan, and the Hongqiao International Hub digital twin.

However, interviewees also noted that the industry still faces two real challenges: insufficient content supply and a lack of standardization.

Li Linlin, assistant to the general manager of Shanghai Broadcasting Film and Television Production Co., Ltd., believes that while XR hardware is rapidly iterating, what the industry truly lacks is high-quality narrative content with lasting value.

XR is merely a carrier, and the industry should leverage AI empowerment to tell local cultural stories well through a dual-track model of "virtual production + offline immersive spaces," Li said.

Tang Yicheng, CEO of Shengshi Wanhe (Shanghai) Culture Technology Co., Ltd., believes that the large-space entertainment industry still faces development bottlenecks.

The industry does not lack the ability to create hit experiences, but content is difficult to reuse across venues and devices, he said.

In his view, the industry urgently needs a "common language" for spatial entertainment to push projects from highly customized models toward a cinema-style distribution model, achieving scalable replication and improving the per-square-meter efficiency of offline venues.

Industry observers believe that from concept demonstration to industrial实战, the curtain has just risen on the deep integration of AI and the metaverse.

AI is becoming the middle and back-office infrastructure of the metaverse industry, and commercialized samples of museum-enterprise collaboration such as the "Walking Planetarium" have already emerged.

However, achieving large-scale adoption still requires continuously improving content production tools, unifying technical standards, and exploring sustainable business models.