South Korean university creates Minecraft metaverse, holds entrance ceremony

Minecraft is a game with limitless potential that is always being showcased in impressive new ways. With everything going on in the world, many important in-person activities have been suspended. But one college decided they would head to a Minecraft metaverse to combat this.

A Reddit user shared a video of an entrance ceremony for Yeungnam University in South Korea being held in Minecraft. This creative effort by Yeungnam University allowed for students to celebrate an important first step into their college lives through a virtual Minecraft space constructed to reflect the campus they’ll spend the next few years of their lives attending.

The clip highlighting the event features an auditorium full of students with unique Minecraft skins, staff speakers onstage, a detailed campus to explore, engaging games for participants, and explosive fireworks to mark this special day.

Yeungnam University discuss the “metaverse university” and the impressive students who created the project here. The students behind this feat are members of the Yeungnam University Minecraft Server Club (YUMC). Despite only being founded in February, the club already has 300 members. Students majoring in many different fields came together within the club to create their campus in Minecraft.

“I felt bad over the loss of the value of communication and interaction within school due to the prolonging of COVID-19,” said Seo Seung-wan, president of YUMC. “I organized this club thinking that it would be nice to form a student community for engaging in interactive activities in the virtual space of Minecraft.”

The members of YUMC worked together to construct the virtual version of their campus and even put little details in the build only students of the university would notice, such as their favorite restaurants on campus. They built all the important locations of their campus including the Central Library, the Chunma Art Center, the Student Hall, the Outdoor Auditorium, and the International Exchange Center.

The Minecraft metaverse version of their campus has proved useful for Yeungnam University and has continuously been used for other important occasions, such as meetings and military send-off ceremonies.

“We held the new ‘21 freshmen admissions ceremony via metaverse in March of this year,” student Lee Bo-gyeong said on the entrance ceremony that Yeungnam University held in Minecraft. “We wanted to hold an admissions ceremony prepared by seniors of freshmen who did not get to have a proper admissions ceremony due to COVID-19. We worked day and night for about two weeks for the admissions ceremony to construct the interior of the Chunma Art Center and invited the new freshmen.”

“Though not many new students were able to participate, it was a meaningful event to our YUMC clubs by holding the admissions ceremony, which is the first step to life in college, via metaverse,” Lee Bo-gyeong said. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the detailed metaverse space created in Minecraft available to them, many of Yeungnam University’s students “have now become more familiar with the metaverse campus than the real campus.”