The SM Culture Universe (SMCU) is a shared universe produced by SM Entertainment.
Development
By 2004, SM Entertainment had been working to produce their own culture universe. During the planning stage, Lee Soo-man thought of creating a worldview with "innovative and powerful" storytelling. He presumed that creating, delivering stories, and entering the worldview is a competition. Instead of a worldview interpreted as a symbol or a metaphor, they created storytelling content that contains a completely "new and very attractive" character and story, and Lee believed that this story is an essential element for expressing artists and music, and is the key to success.
Lee Soo-man attended the First World Cultural Industry Forum (WCIF) as a representative of Korean culture and gave a keynote speech under the theme of "The Future of the World Entertainment Industry After COVID-19 and Culture Universe". In one of the highlights on his speech, Lee stated that they are one step closer to the future entertainment world they have dreamed of. He added that in the year 2020, they will realized SMCU as a vision for the future entertainment world, through the new girl group Aespa, and move forward with "new and innovative" ways as they have done so far.
On November 11, 2020, Park Jun-young, the executive director of SM Entertainment, attended the UAM Seoul Demonstration and Drone Taxi Demonstration Flight Event "City, Open the Sky" hosted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Park explained the importance of cultural technology in the future mobility industry. It was stated that SM has continued to challenge convergence of culture and technology under the future vision of Lee Soo-man and has been preparing for the future as a "technology company" that goes beyond entertainment. Lee mentioned SMCU as the "core value and vision" of SM. He asserted that it aims to "create a culture-connected entertainment world" and is preparing to predict that the future will be a world of AI and celebrity.
On November 12, 2020, Lee Sung-soo, the CEO of SM Entertainment, together with Choi Si-won, a Super Junior member, attended the Korea-World Chinese Entrepreneurs Business Week 2020 for Chinese businessmen around the world on behalf of the Korean cultural industry. It was held simultaneously around the world as a real-time online forum and was broadcast on YouTube due to COVID-19 concerns. Choi addressed SMCU as the "core value and vision of future entertainment" presented by SM. He presented that SMCU is "not just a worldview" that is interpreted as a symbol or a metaphor, but a "new vision and project" to express artists and music through storytelling content that contains "attractive" characters and stories. Choi talked about Aespa as the "beginning" of the SMCU project, and added that the worldview and stories of various groups such as Exo, Red Velvet, and NCT will unfold independently and sometimes connect to new stories. Additionally, he added that Super Junior is also part of SMCU and hopes that people will see what different stories the group will unfold in the future.
On June 23, 2021, SM Entertainment and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for a joint metaverse study. Previously, Lee Soo-man had teamed up with Marvel, Creative Artists Agency, and Intel, among other global companies, to make the culture universe. Through the MoU, SM and KAIST plans to mutually carry out technological cooperation in fields such as content, artificial intelligence and robots, common projects related to digital avatar production, and collective academic research on Culture Technology (CT). Through the joint research with KAIST's College of Culture and Technology, SM will focus on researching metaverse performance technology using avatars. Based on the collaboration, KAIST and SM plans to carry out research that seeks both the "perfection" of performances and the "advancement" of technology.