Bringing the castle town into a virtual space — the metaverse “Virtual Hiji Town”

Recreating the entire castle-town street of Hiji Town, Oita Prefecture, on “VRChat,” the world’s largest social VR platform — the student team “Virtual Hiji Town” of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) built Ninomaru Street, lined with Ninomaru Hall and the Kimon Yagura, in 3D modeling, and developed and released “Virtual Hiji Town,” a world where you can experience the town’s history, tourism, and local products in virtual space. After release it drew many visitors, becoming a new gateway that delivers the town’s appeal to younger generations and users of digital spaces.

Contents

1. The trigger — the challenge that “our message isn’t getting through”

2. Building from the field — the stone walls and the roof tiles, all from the real thing

3. Creating the content together with the community

4. Release — 300 people “walked” Hiji Town in a single day

5. What didn’t go well

6. Going forward

The APU College of Sustainability and Tourism offers a hands-on course, “Field Practicum,” in which students take the lead in projects to solve local challenges. This project was one of them, active from April to July 2026.

1 The trigger — the challenge that “our message isn’t getting through”

Hiji Town has historical resources such as its famous Joka-garei (castle-town flounder), once presented as tribute to the shogunal family, and the ruins of Hiji Castle. However, the means to deliver such appeal to younger people and users of digital spaces were limited, and for small businesses, online outreach and opening sales channels were themselves a challenge.

What the team focused on was “VRChat,” a social VR platform where you can interact in virtual space using avatars. You can join from a PC or smartphone even without VR goggles, and in recent years its users have grown rapidly, especially in Japan. If they built a space recreating Hiji Town here, they could convey the town’s appeal — in a form you can walk through, see, and touch — to a segment the town’s information had never reached. That was the starting point.

2 Building from the field — the stone walls and the roof tiles, all from the real thing

Production was done fully from scratch using the 3D modeling software Blender and the game engine Unity. The first task was collecting textures (material images applied to 3D models) on-site. We actually photographed and gathered the materials that make up the street — stone walls, tiled roofs, wooden walls, stone pavement, and so on.

What becomes important in building a recreated space is measuring scale (size). The team chose a stone lantern on the street as a reference point, measured its real size, and adjusted the sizes of the ground and buildings based on it. After that, we visited the site several more times, repeatedly collecting missing materials and checking building structures, and assembled the castle-town street from Ninomaru Hall to the Kimon Yagura in virtual space.

3 Creating the content together with the community

Once the rough framework of the world was done, we could show it to stakeholders as reference material, and the activity advanced to the stage of “creating the content together with the community.” In consultation with the Hiji Town Tourism Association, we selected the products to display inside the virtual Ninomaru Hall, and also set up an exhibition booth for a Joka-garei restaurant. Alongside product intro panels and 3D models you can pick up, the displays include QR codes and purchase buttons, providing a path from the virtual space to each business’s e-commerce site leading to actual purchases. The recreated buildings and the historical descriptions were also checked with the Hiji Town History Museum.

In parallel with production, we kept posting progress on X and Instagram. Posting repeatedly without waiting for completion built the foundation for people to see it at release.

The main course of activity was as follows.

4 Release — 300 people “walked” Hiji Town in a single day

After finishing the modeling in Blender, we imported the data into Unity and adjusted it to run on VRChat. In addition to lighting and physics settings, we implemented post-processing to refine the visual expression, mirrors, a large screen that plays videos from Hiji Town’s official YouTube channel, a BGM switching function, and more.

And so, on July 13, “Virtual Hiji Town” was released on VRChat. Within 24 hours of release, 300 people visited, and the official X account’s followers also reached 100 after release. Walking the cherry-tree-lined street, looking up at the Kimon Yagura, viewing the display of karei manju and goshuin at Ninomaru Hall — another Hiji Town became a place anyone can visit.

5 What didn’t go well

The biggest challenge was widening the scope of the activity too much at the start. As a result of trying to advance product-display negotiations and event planning at the same time as building the world, we exceeded what we could take on within the course period. Because the members with 3D modeling skills were limited, we could not divide the work, and the burden concentrating on some members is also a point for reflection.

Also, displaying products or shops in the virtual space requires posting permission, but because we prioritized production and were late contacting stakeholders, the confirmation came right before the course ended, and as a result we had to give up on one business we had planned to feature. The event we had originally planned was also not held within the course due to time constraints. We should have clarified the final deliverable and priorities at the planning stage and worked on it as one united team — this is the team’s summary.

6 Going forward

The team plans to continue operating and expanding the world. It envisions producing other landmarks such as the Hiji Castle ruins, attracting shops and businesses, building a shop mechanism using virtual space, and opening sales channels that introduce and sell products of the town’s small businesses and farmers in digital space and e-commerce.

In the near term, it is considering holding a virtual event using the world as the venue. If realized, it would be an opportunity to experience “Virtual Hiji Town” more deeply through history guides and product explanations.