Feature · The metaverse is back

The metaverse everyone wrote off is back: Korea's "online temple" drew 100,000 people a day, and 37 copycats from cathedrals to coal mines followed within days

"You can sit together, but you can't talk." That is how solo developer Metamong describes Sansa, an online Buddhist temple. All you do is walk a little monk character into a prayer hall, bow and roll prayer beads, yet the site drew 100,000 visitors in a day. Within days Korean developers shipped the same idea as a cathedral, a church, a sauna, a campsite, a pool, a nightclub, a coal mine and even an airplane cabin: places where strangers quietly hang out together. The metaverse that tech wrote off has come back as tiny websites built with AI in a day. Here is how it spread.

1. The original: Sansa, an online temple where you bow and roll beads

   Sansa opens in a phone or desktop browser with nothing to install. Pick a room and you get an auto-named little monk. Walk the hall, sit on a cushion, bow, roll your beads, or just sit and listen to the Heart Sutra or nature sounds. There is no chat. The developer said the idea came from days when "going to a temple sounds nice, but actually going takes effort," and invited people "too tired to make it to a temple" to sit for a while.

2. Rooms went from 20 seats to 10,000

   When traffic crashed the servers, the developer apologized and raised the per-room cap from 20 to 100, then 1,200, then 10,000. On the morning of Oct. 30, 4,679 people sat across 100 servers of the 'Cheongyeon Hall', and five rooms were full at 100. One visitor asked, "1,200 people and it's full, is this right?" It now also runs as a Toss mini-app.

3. "I'm not religious, but it calms me down": one X clip hit 2.1M views

   A 27-second clip of Sansa posted on X on Oct. 29 by @8daytp passed 31,000 likes and 2.1 million views. Visitor comments quoted by Korean outlets included "I'm not religious, but I feel calmer" and "I'm a big introvert, and here I can sit in the front row."

4. A cathedral, a church, a sauna: Sansa clones arrived several a day

   Copies followed within hours. InPeace, an online cathedral modeled on Seoul's Myeongdong Cathedral, lets you light candles under stained glass, step into a confessional and wear a mass veil. There is an online church built as a Claude artifact, a silent sauna (Sauna Goyo), a riverside campfire, a pool where you listen to water, and a rooftop club overlooking the Han River.

5. The opposite, and further: a coal mine, a plane, the Camino

   Some went the other way. The maker of Online Coal Mine said, "Online temples are trending, so I built the opposite," a place for workaholics to mindlessly mine coal (1,300 likes on X). Skyroom seats you on the same flight as strangers, Online Camino walks the 763.7 km Camino de Santiago at real walking speed, Stray Cat Books turns you into a cat browsing a bookstore, and an online Gatbawi Buddha follows the real time and weather.

6. Why a temple: young Koreans' 'hip Buddhism'

   Hankyung Magazine tied Sansa to a Buddhism boom among young Koreans. A moktak-sound keyring sold about 6,000 restocked units at Bongeunsa temple in a single day in September, and April's Seoul International Buddhism Expo drew about 250,000 visitors, 73% of them in their 20s and 30s. On Threads, one post said the viral temple had people looking again at the metaverse they thought was dead.

7. @choi.openai · Threads ↗

   AI makes a copy in hours, and the original still wins

   AI coding tools explain the speed. Threads user @choi.openai wrote that what once took days can now be copied with AI in hours, so software alone has almost no moat, but added that the episode made originality feel more important than ever. In the vote, the original Sansa is still in first place.

8. All 37 on one page: vote for your favorite

   AI News Daily collected all 37 so far in 'Trending now · Metaverse' on its Launches page. Vote with a heart; voting never closes. As of Oct. 31 morning, Sansa leads, followed by the InPeace cathedral and the riverside campsite. Anyone can add a missing one, and we add new ones as they appear. (The sites themselves are in Korean, but most need no words at all.)