Chinese video creator builds a virtual internet memes museum in VRChat

A Chinese video creator on Bilibili recently built a 3D virtual museum of Chinese memes featuring popular Chinese internet memes from the past 20 years. The museum is accessible on VRChat with VR headsets or on PCs. Siji, the museum founder, said he wanted to build the virtual institution to expose ordinary Chinese people to the metaverse concept and help them understand the next iteration of the internet. He decided to build the museum around memes due to their broad accessibility and existing popularity among Chinese internet users. The project has seven sections, arranged in chronological order to show 20 years of Chinese internet memes. Although the memes museum is built on VRChat, it first gained traction on China's video platform Bilibili. The platform is popular with Chinese youth and has been a fertile breeding ground for internet memes due to its large fanbase of animation, comics, and gaming enthusiasts. Many of the memes from the museum originated from Bilibili and subsequently spread across the Chinese internet.