A research team from Kyoto University and others plans to develop “Terraverse”, which expresses the spiritual world of Buddhism in a metaverse.publicationdid. As a prototype, we have developed an augmented reality (AR) service “Terra Platform AR Ver1.0” that allows you to interact with “Buddha”.
Image from Terraverse (Source: Kyoto University)
Terraverse combines the traditional wisdom of Buddhism with technologies such as AR, Virtual Reality (VR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a multi-level spiritual world that frees humans from the constraints of physical space. Also, the “tera” in Terraverse has the meaning of 1 trillion, or 10 to the power of 12, i.e. “Tera”, as well as the meaning of “temple” in “temple”.
The Terra Platform AR Ver1.0 prototype can call a Buddhist dialogue AI avatar “Buddhabot” in real space seen through the smartphone camera. The Buddhabot has a dialogue function, and when asked a question, it gives an answer based on Buddhist scriptures. The scriptures used for AI learning are “Suttanipata” and “Dhammapada”.
Terra Platform AR Ver1.0 (left), Buddhabot usage image (Source: Kyoto University)
Terra Platform AR can be expected to add functions such as the appearance of Buddhist avatars based on location information obtained by smartphones, and the ability to build avatar temples in cyberspace and worship. . Additionally, it is also possible to synchronize a real temple in real space with the “avatar branch” in cyberspace that belongs to that temple, and have people participate in the same events in both spaces.
In order to prevent abuse, it will be provided for academic and monitoring purposes at this time, and will not be open to the public. Additionally, since Buddhist materials deployed on the Terraverse are items of faith, they should be handled with care.
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