Changsha polishes blueprint for tech-culture integration

BEIJING, Dec. 3, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- A report from China Daily

Innovative approach spurs expansion of tourist industry

Limitless potential for revamping tourism is created when a city melds its dazzling culture with cutting-edge technology. Such is the case in Changsha, capital of Central China's Hunan province, where a whirlwind of "culture plus technology" is sweeping the city, spurred by concerted efforts to blend industries with culture and shape new paradigms for tourism.

New business modes

Located on the bank of Liuyang River, Changsha's Malanshan Video Cultural and Creative Industrial Park is home to more than 60,000 professionals who are excelling in the field of audio and video creation and production. With the support of technology, new cultural business modes have emerged there, forming a complete digital cultural industry chain that encompasses links such as content production, creativity, storage, broadcasting and trading.

At Skymedia, a large audio and video multimedia model released by Wondershare at Malanshan park, users can upload a photo and get a dynamic 3D effect video, or input text commands to generate music. The model boasts a wide variety of functions, including text-to-video generation, image-to-video generation and soundtracks, and is in commercial use. With the Skymedia model, creators can complete audio and video content production and editing more efficiently, significantly enhancing both the efficiency and quality of their creations.

As part of another project at Malanshan park, two people far apart don special pairs of "glasses" to become "close neighbors" in a virtual scene. Zou Jun, who is responsible for the project, said: "We define it as the next generation of communication, enabling real-time face-to-face interaction for remote business meetings, family communications and educational activities."

The deep integration of culture and technology has led to the continuous emergence of new business modes and new scenarios at Malanshan park. According to statistics, over the past two years, more than 60 percent of leading enterprises attracted to the park are engaged in new business modes.

The animation and video game industry has become one of the fastest-growing new cultural sectors in recent years. Thanks to new infrastructure such as a video cloud platform, a supercomputing center and shared production center, Malanshan park has reduced the rendering time and costs for animation and game production by 30 percent. This has led to a strong trend of enterprises clustering together and scaling up capacity in the three-dimensional animation industry.

Currently, Malanshan park focuses on new technologies, new applications and new industries. It has established 16 scientific and technological innovation institutions and attracted 3,000-plus upstream and downstream enterprises.

By deeply applying digital technologies such as panoramic scanning, virtual reality and glasses-free 3D into the field of cultural heritage, other Changsha projects have brought precious historical relics back to life.

In August, Hunan Mango Digital Art Intelligence Technology launched a digital cultural museum application called Shanhai. This platform uses digital technology to present museum relics in a 3D form, allowing people to explore exhibitions anytime and anywhere on their mobile devices. The app offers vast digital collections and integrates functions such as 3D artifact appreciation, AI interaction and personalized museum experiences. It has quickly become popular online.

Digital technology helps relics be "reborn", allowing audiences to seemingly travel back thousands of years while gaining an immersive understanding of the history and culture behind them. This year, Hunan Museum released a 3D digital image of Lady Xin Zhui, a woman whose remains have been well preserved for more than 2,000 years. Through the integration of advanced AI technology, motion capture technology and multiple disciplines including medicine and archaeology, the "sleeping beauty" has been brought back to life.

Besides relics in the museum, heritage in the wild can be "revived" with the help of high-tech solutions. The Wuxi site of stone tablets in Hunan's Qiyang city is a large open-air site that preserves stone inscriptions from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), making it a rare treasure trove of calligraphic carvings. Due to natural causes, the surfaces of the inscriptions have experienced varying degrees of weathering, rendering many characters blurred and difficult to discern. The Malanshan cultural digitization innovation center, in collaboration with a team, utilized various digital technologies to rejuvenate the historical and cultural heritage, collecting images of each stele, employing techniques to achieve high-precision digital imaging, and forming a stele database.

Today, the database stores basic information about the inscriptions, which have been made clear and distinguishable, and provides things such as original photos and micro-trace images, as well as calibrating relationships between several hundred steles and hundreds of famous individuals. In the future, it could facilitate secondary creations around the inscriptions by experts, scholars and design teams.

Cultural tourism

Changsha's innovative integration of culture and technology has given rise to new cultural tourism scenarios and business modes. From traditional real-world sightseeing to immersive experiences that blend the real with the virtual, new technologies can be found in the creation and dissemination of cultural content and interactive methods in cultural tourism, providing visitors with entirely new experiences.

In September, a digital exhibition hall, located next to Tianxin Pavilion, officially opened. The hall houses a vast collection of relics related to figures from Hunan history and also offers an immersive cultural experience via new digital and intelligent technologies. In one example, a digital image of Zhu Xi, a renowned philosopher from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), appears on a screen and can answer questions asked by visitors. The "digital human" Zhu Xi was created based on national supercomputing. Through AI technology, the great scholar's attire, expressions and movements have been interpreted and he can engage in precise conversations with visitors. They can ask him abstract questions such as the meaning of "seeking truth from facts", as well as trendy enquiries like "What are some of the best foods in Changsha?" or "What drinks did people in the Song Dynasty enjoy?"