Metaverse Art Market Platform 'Fantastic Island'
- The Crossing Lab was developing Fantastic Island, a metaverse and NFT art market platform.
- Artists open studios in the metaverse; visitors browse as avatars and buy works as NFTs.
- The company planned to grow it into an open metaverse art platform.
In a January 4, 2022 article by reporter Shin Jae-yu, Sports Seoul framed the metaverse as an emerging business frontier and introduced Fantastic Island, the metaverse and NFT-based art market platform then under development by The Crossing Lab. The paper described the company as an experimental metaverse platform culture business.
On the platform, artists set up their own studios inside the metaverse and keep their works on permanent display for sale. Users move freely as avatars, visiting multiple artists' studios without limits of time or place, viewing works, talking with the artists, and buying pieces they like as NFTs.
The article cited the benefits of NFT art trading: ownership information is stored on the blockchain, so a work's originality and ownership are protected and forgery or alteration is not possible. It also projected that the platform would serve as a channel connecting talented emerging artists with the global art collector community.
CEO Shin Ji-ho is a professor in Konkuk University's Department of Film and Video and served as CEO of Sojen Games until January 2021. He had been exploring the possibilities of alternative galleries since the late 1990s before taking up platform development with metaverse developers and artists, and was named to Sports Seoul's 2021 Innovative Koreans & Power Korea life feature. He said the metaverse and NFTs could become a medium that changes both the existing art market and the concept of art itself, and that the platform would grow into cultural content spanning the MZ generation through older audiences. After establishing Fantastic Island, the company planned to expand it into an open metaverse art platform where artists and art lovers worldwide form their own forums and communities.
Source : 스포츠서울(https://www.sportsseoul.com/news/read/1088677?ref=naver)