Tech startup Creative Digital Living is joining forces with 17 Thai universities and other partners to build a metaverse education community to revolutionise the country's education industry by leveraging the power of the virtual technology.
The Aniverse Metaverse project is a virtual world of learning based on the Edu GameFi concept and a learning management system (LMS) model. It is expected to become Thailand's largest metaverse education community.
The project aims to attract more than 1.3 million people to the platform, including 500,000 students and teachers as well as 800,000 other users.
Thomas Hongpakdee, executive chairman and co-founder of Creative Digital Living, which was established last year, said the Aniverse platform offers educational opportunities through Edu GameFi under the "learn-to-earn" concept.
The platform plans to roll out ANIV, a non-fungible token (NFT) that can be used in the digital world.
The Aniverse offers a differentiated transaction fee in the blockchain, called a gas fee, of only 10-25 satang -- a tangible rate which eliminates the problem of coin price manipulation.
It can help estimate the costs incurred by both universities and students in advance.
Mr Thomas said the online learning system has been successful overseas; for example, the German government deployed the LMS platform for schools in Berlin for tens of thousands of teachers and students, but now the number has jumped to 400,000.
Many foreign universities are adopting the metaverse to support the expansion of their online education, he said.
Mr Thomas said the Aniverse has developed a course with universities to bring 500,000 teachers and students into the metaverse world with an LMS developed by its team in conjunction with teachers and students.
"We believe the Aniverse system will be able to scale and replicate most of the steps of teaching and learning," he said.
The platform could also reduce the number of children who are forced to leave the education system, with the figure reaching 65,000 in 2021, he said. This will also be a new opportunity for another 1.2 million poor students to take part.
He said xCHAIN, a leading blockchain platform, helps support the critical infrastructure of blockchain tech that can reduce the gas fee, creating opportunities for all users to participate.
With a massively multi-player MMORPG (massively online role-playing game), students can create their own virtual identities to access the Education Zone, a learning space for completing missions to get items (NFT items), and various experience points.
The Edu GameFi system will cover three areas: an academy system, a lecturer system, and students, with a focus on solving various educational problems.
The Aniverse is collaborating with the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, which supports tools that are accessible to all users and effectively integrates the world of study and play.