KAIST held the Metaverse Daejeon declaration ceremony at Hotel Onoma on November 14. Metaverse Daejeon is part of a larger metaverse collaboration between the city of Daejeon and New York City. KAIST President Kwang Hyung Lee was present for the ceremony alongside more than 100 graduate students and Daejeon citizens.

To realize the vision of Metaverse Daejeon, the KAIST Metaverse Graduate School pledged to dedicate the next ten years of its research to Metaverse Daejeon. New York University will also establish the Post Metaverse Research Center (PMRC) as a platform for cooperative research. PMRC is scheduled to finish construction in late 2024.

The first representative project of Metaverse Daejeon is the Meta Museum led by the PMRC. Meta Museum is an exploration of the metaverse as an expanded virtual world that connects people around the globe beyond the constraints of time and space. Through the Meta Museum, guests in the KAIST Art Museum will be able to visit the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Performances at Carnegie Hall will also be made accessible via the KAIST auditorium. 

Daejeon Mayor Jang Woo Lee, New York Mayor Eric Adams, and New York University President Linda Mills all shared congratulatory speeches by video during the declaration ceremony. "Daejeon is a world-recognized scientific capital, and just like the slogan that all metaverse paths are to Daejeon, Daejeon should be the center of all national strategic technologies in Korea,” said Mayor Lee.

President Lee commented , "The metaverse is a new way of experiencing the world with imaginary eyes and will have a great impact on our lives." Professor Woontack Woo, Dean of the Metaverse Graduate School, shared that he hopes to expand the application of the metaverse to education, medical care, and other industries to realize the dream of Metaverse Daejeon.