[비즈한국] “Which bus should I take to get to Nami Island?”
I pack the items I need into my travel bag one by one. Once prepared, I purchase a train ticket at Cheongnyangni Station, then transfer between trains and buses to reach Nami Island. This journey from Cheongnyangni Station to Nami Island has been recreated as a game, incorporating the actual ITX-Cheongchun train and bus routes. It is ‘Mate-trip,’ a travel training content created to help people with developmental disabilities achieve independence.
We are moving from an era of creating and consuming content in a fixed, set manner to an era where various technologies and ideas converge. As the boundaries of the content industry dissolve rapidly, methods of creation are also diversifying. New forms of content that utilize AI in the production process are appearing one after another. The ‘New Content Academy (NCA)’ is a place that fosters professional talent to create such convergence content in line with these changes.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) held the ‘2026 New Content Academy (NCA) Showcase’ from the 19th to the 21st at the Content Human Resources Campus and Content Culture Square in Hongneung, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul.
This showcase featured 21 projects created by the 2nd and 3rd cohorts of the New Content Academy. The projects were categorized into seven areas: △Business Incubation, △University-linked Programs, △Virtual Production, △Virtual Visualization, △Interaction Design, △Immersive Space, and △Individual Projects.
The event offered a variety of content, ranging from horror-thriller games to animations for children. There were various ways of incorporating new technologies, such as using AI in content production or allowing visitors to directly experience the spaces within the works through VR.
Team Ketchup’s ‘Regarding the Case Where I Woke Up as a Water Deer’ is a horror-thriller game about a driver whose body is swapped with the water deer they hit, attempting to return to their original body while driving through the night in Gangwon Province. At the showcase, they unveiled a stage featuring a scene of driving on a mountainous national road around midnight and a rural village in the middle of the night.
Team Leader Jo Soo-in explained, “When creating 3D assets, it was surprisingly difficult to find materials with a Korean feel, so we generated them with AI and utilized them for modeling.” The team aims to release the game on Steam next April after enhancing its quality through game competitions and further development.
The AI animation ‘Nuri’ tells the story of Nuri, a glowing yellow frog, growing through new encounters and trials. As a work aimed at children, the production process utilized an AI-based production pipeline. In particular, it automated part of the production process by automatically generating the necessary prompts for each cut based on the content of the scenes.
There was also content where visitors could directly enter and experience the story. ‘Day Dream’ is a VR interactive cinema that allows visitors to peer into a child’s anxiety contained within a Hanji paper lantern and experience the process of resolving it. When wearing a headset, a virtual space unfolds instead of the exhibition hall in front of your eyes. Visitors can look around the space, interact with elements in the story, and follow the child’s emotions. It is a method where the visitor’s actions become part of the content experience process, rather than just watching a fixed video.
At the 2 PM Open Stage, Director Jang Hang-jun and Song Eun-i, CEO of Media Lab Seesaw, attended and discussed the process of discovering and developing new ideas. The two emphasized that everyday observation and consistent training are more important than flashes of inspiration to create new content.
Director Jang explained, “There is nothing new under the sun,” adding, “You just need to go one step further and twist it slightly,” suggesting that existing stories can also be developed into new content if viewed from a different perspective or setting. CEO Song also said, “Thinking about new ideas and what would be fun to do was always the start of planning,” and added, “I think I have consistently pondered how to spend time in a fun way in my daily life.”