Seoul will start offering counseling services to students struggling in school. This is cutting-edge assistance because it will be done in the metaverse or virtual world.

The city of Seoul in South Korea will create a metaverse platform dedicated to helping young students cope with school life. The main goal of the service is to help the students maintain their composure while going through hardships, such as dealing with friendship problems and academic concerns.

The setup on the metaverse is expected to be especially helpful since the students do not have to reveal their faces while communicating with experts or teachers. They will be able to talk to advisers without any worries or getting conscious since they will be talking to their teachers through avatars that recognize various emotions.

As per Aju Business Daily, the total of young people who feel positive emotions has decreased by a large number since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It was reported that based on the survey conducted by the state-run counseling agency, Korea Youth Counseling & Welfare Institute, in 2021, those who felt positive emotions declined by three times compared to 2020.

The survey revealed that 53.2% of the 862 respondents aged between nine and 24 said the emotions they mostly felt are anxiety and concern rather than happiness or calmness. Some 39.3% of the respondents said what they felt was irritation.

With the results, the institute said there is a need to use different platforms to get teenagers to talk about their problems and be given sound advice by expert adults. It added that online counseling may be a good option since many teenagers prefer social media like Facebook and Instagram.

"We hope many students who feel uncomfortable with face-to-face counseling to use virtual spaces where anonymity is guaranteed so that more students in Seoul can become psychologically and emotionally stable through this new type of counseling services," Cho Hee Yeon, education superintendent of the Seoul government, said in a statement earlier this week.

Meanwhile, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education launched the counseling platform on Metaforest metaverse in cooperation with Yatavent virtual reality (VR) platform developer. This will provide counseling services for elementary, middle, and high school students.

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