Space-Themed Metaverse Experience Center: Technical Architecture and Engineering Practice

1. Project Background and Positioning

Driven by the growing convergence of space science education and cultural tourism, immersive venues built around satellite launch bases and metaverse concepts are becoming a new form of tourism infrastructure. The case examined in this article is located in a core commercial plaza in Xichang, Sichuan Province—a city best known for its satellite launch center. Covering roughly 6,000 square meters, the venue opened to the public on May 1, 2025 and is positioned as a space-themed metaverse immersive experience space. It integrates large-space entertainment (LBE), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and extended reality (XR), combining science education, immersive interactive experiences, and space culture communication, and has won a scene-category award at a national science fiction competition.

From a technical perspective, the core value of such venues lies in transforming abstract aerospace knowledge into perceivable, interactive, and participatory multi-dimensional experiences, while relying on modern cloud computing, edge rendering, and AI capabilities to support large-scale concurrent access and real-time interaction. The following sections discuss the technical architecture, core experience modules, the intelligent guide system, and operational iteration.

2. Core Technology Stack and System Architecture

2.1 Fusing Multimodal Sensing Technologies

Rather than depending on a single technology, the venue builds a layered technology stack:

• LBE (Location-Based Entertainment): A multi-station positioning system (such as UWB ultra-wideband or a visual SLAM fusion solution) delivers sub-meter, real-time positioning across several hundred to over a thousand square meters, supporting free-roam, walk-through VR experiences.
• AR: Digital information layers are overlaid on physical exhibits—such as a 1:1 space station return capsule model and simulated lunar and Martian surfaces. Visitors can view details like crater structures and terrain data through handheld terminals or AR glasses.
• VR: The dome flying theater and the VR astronaut experience zone use head-mounted displays with six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) tracking to simulate immersive space walks and extravehicular activities.
• XR: As a fusion of AR and VR, XR is applied in specific zones (such as Interstellar Rift) to blend the physical environment with overlaid planetary terrain and interactive elements.

2.2 Cloud-Edge-Device Collaboration and Edge Rendering

Large-scale immersive experiences place extreme demands on compute power and latency. The venue adopts a three-tier “cloud-edge-device” architecture:

[Cloud] Asset management / AI inference / content delivery
  ↓
[Edge nodes] Real-time rendering / pose estimation / positioning fusion
  ↓
[End devices] Display / interaction / sensor capture

Specifically, high-precision 3D scene models and physics simulation run on edge servers to keep end-to-end latency within 20 ms and prevent motion sickness. At the same time, general-purpose cloud platforms such as Baidu AI Cloud provide foundational capabilities including object storage (for managing massive 3D asset libraries), container services (for elastic scaling of rendering nodes), and logging and monitoring services (for operational observability).

2.3 Multisensory Interaction Design

Beyond visuals, the venue adds haptic (vibration platforms), auditory (spatial audio), and environmental stimuli such as wind and temperature effects. In the “Flowing Light Illusion” sprint tunnel—about 50 meters long—visitors receive synchronized lighting changes and spatial sound effects while running, forming a tightly closed immersion loop.

3. Experience Zones and Key Technical Implementations

3.1 Dome Flying Theater

The 360° dome projection uses multi-channel blending and stitching technology, combined with a six-DoF motion platform, to simulate rocket launch, orbital flight, and atmospheric re-entry. The main technical challenges are projection geometric correction (non-linear distortion compensation on a spherical surface) and motion synchronization (visuals and physical acceleration cues must be strictly matched).

3.2 1:1 Space Station and Return Capsule Models

The full-scale models on display are not static exhibits but interactive terminals integrating touch screens, voice narration, and AR annotations. Through AR terminals, visitors can “see through” the capsule walls to inspect internal structures and even simulate docking procedures. These interactions rely on precise spatial anchoring and lightweight 3D rendering techniques such as LOD levels and GPU Instancing.

3.3 Mars Climbing and Interstellar Rift

Mars Climbing combines a physical climbing wall with projection mapping: the wall renders Martian terrain in real time, while climbers’ positions are tracked by the positioning system and reflected in the visuals. Interstellar Rift uses LED screen arrays and interactive floor projection to switch between two landscapes—a Martian canyon and an Earth rainforest. Visitors’ footsteps trigger different environmental sound effects and visual feedback, essentially a real-time interaction system based on computer vision or pressure sensing.

3.4 Interstellar Sky Park and Thousand-Star Forest

Interstellar Sky Park targets children aged 4 to 14, emphasizing safety and ease of use. Its interaction logic is deliberately simple, relying mostly on body-sensing recognition such as skeleton tracking instead of complex handheld controllers. Thousand-Star Forest uses large quantities of optical fibers and procedural generation algorithms to create an immersive starry-sky atmosphere; the backend typically implements dynamic effects with particle systems and shaders.

4. AI-Powered Intelligent Guide System

The venue is equipped with an AI guide named “Xiaoluo” (also referred to as “Alo”). Such systems are typically built on large language models (LLMs) combined with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities, and—backed by a venue knowledge base—provide the following services:

• Real-time voice guidance: Automatically triggers narration for the exhibit at the visitor’s current location.
• Knowledge Q&A: Multi-turn, conversational space-science explanations on aerospace topics.
• Route recommendation: Plans the optimal visiting route based on visitor interests and remaining time.

From an implementation standpoint, this type of system requires a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) architecture that combines the venue’s proprietary knowledge base with general LLM capabilities to ensure accurate, domain-relevant answers. Service degradation and caching strategies must also be considered for high-concurrency, multi-user scenarios.

5. Operations and Iteration

5.1 From Soft Opening to Official Launch

The venue followed a typical iteration path: soft opening (January 2025) → feedback collection → phase-two construction → official opening (May 2025). The core goal of the soft opening was to verify technical stability and the reasonableness of visitor flow, which imposes requirements on stress testing and fault-tolerant design for large-scale interactive systems.

5.2 “Interstellar Fantasy City 2.0” and Phase-Two Planning

The phase-two project added modules such as Mars Climbing and Interstellar Rift, reflecting an operations philosophy of “hardware first, continuous content updates.” From a software architecture perspective, this model requires experience content to be modular and hot-updatable—new scene packages are pushed remotely through a content management system (CMS) without modifying the underlying hardware.

5.3 Themed Events and Science Outreach

On special occasions (such as Space Day or film releases), the venue hosts special lectures and public screenings, essentially connecting offline immersive experiences with online content distribution. This requires event management and live-streaming capabilities, which can be implemented with general cloud platforms’ video-on-demand and real-time communication services.

6. Technical Challenges and Best Practices

Challenge	Specific Problem	General Approach
High concurrency	Holiday crowds put pressure on positioning and rendering	Elastic edge node scaling + zone-based traffic scheduling
Content updates	Space knowledge evolves quickly; exhibits need constant refresh	Modular content pipeline + remote hot updates
Operations monitoring	Multiple subsystems are hard to observe in a unified way	Unified log collection + linked alerting + visualization dashboards
Motion sickness	Discomfort during VR experiences	Low-latency rendering + high-refresh-rate displays + dynamic FOV adjustment
Accessibility	Usage barriers for children, seniors, and other groups	Multimodal interaction (voice/gesture instead of controllers) + easy-mode switching

7. Summary and Outlook

Space-themed metaverse experience centers represent a new paradigm of deep integration between hard technology and cultural tourism. Their technical core is not a breakthrough in any single technology, but the system-level integration and engineering deployment of LBE positioning, real-time rendering, AI guidance, and multisensory interaction. For developers, such projects offer rich practical scenarios—from large-scale spatial computing and edge rendering optimization to multimodal interaction design and content operations platforms—and every layer is worth in-depth study.

Looking ahead, as general-purpose LLMs keep improving and cloud-edge-device collaborative architectures mature, these venues are expected to deliver more personalized experiences (for example, dynamically adjusting narration depth based on a visitor’s knowledge level) and lower-cost content production (for example, AIGC-assisted generation of virtual scenes), moving space education from “viewing exhibits” toward true metaverse exploration.