Give a comment While Meta is bleeding billions into bringing CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s transformation to life without much notice, China has decided to take a crack at the virtual-reality concept.
This week, the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Securities Journal reported that some of the country’s tech companies have teamed up to establish a “Joint Research Institute for Metaverse and Virtual-Real Interaction” in Shanghai.
Participating companies include Tencent, which owns a chunk of the biggest game makers in China; comms giant Huawei, a favorite target of US sanctions; and Epic Games, of which Tencent owns 40 percent.
In addition, China Mobile also has top universities including Fudan, Peking, Renmin, Zhejiang and Nanjing, which have been designated as “research joint construction units of the institute,” Beijing news outlet Pandaily reported.
Professor Zhao Xing from the Big Data Research Institute of Fudan University and the National Intelligent Evaluation and Management Experiment Base was hired by Dean.
According to Shanghai Securities Journal, Shanghai has valuable experience in digital transformation and construction, as well as strong support from Metaverse talent, technology, industry, urban environment and consumption capacity, which are the main reasons for the establishment of the construction. Institute in Shanghai”.
China is now in the 14th “Five-Year Digital Economy Development Plan” in January, which “new digital formats” are “spread throughout the country,” Pandaili said in Metaverse, “one of the most important development points.” Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Xiamen and others are said to have launched their own Metaverse development policies.
Shanghai is at the forefront of this movement, with Metaverse-related industries in the city predicted to reach ¥350 billion ($51 billion), the software and information services industry at over ¥1.5 trillion, and the electronics manufacturing industry at ¥550 billion. A joint research institute for metaverse and virtual-real interactions is calling Shanghai home.
Meta seems to have his work cut out for him. Zuckerberg outlined his vision for Facebook in October 2021, announcing a multi-faceted venture.
Nearly a year later, despite the advent of Nvidia’s Omniverse for Digital Twins and other work in the space, Meta isn’t about to stop the flow of money to the project. In the year After spending $12.5 billion on 2021 revenue of $2.3 billion, Reality Labs, the division responsible for breathing life into the Metaverse, posted a $10.2 billion loss.
While last year’s net income of $39.37 billion isn’t a “nail in the coffin” for the social network region, which generated $117.9 billion in revenue last year, investors are eyeing Reality Lab’s numbers with concern, and it doesn’t seem like Metaverse is going anywhere. People want to spend any time.
Local social media companies in China arguably have some advantages over their Western counterparts. For example, the heavily censored but feature-rich Weibo has more users than Twitter and some studies [PDF] We found that the former user base had a higher level of social engagement, meaning that more users’ followers responded when they spoke.
The premise of this research institute is that Chinese citizens are drawn into the metaverse faster than the rest of us. Although we’re not sure which aspect of hell we fear more – one that panders to the Chinese Communist Party, or one born of the high profits of late capitalism.
We’ve asked Huawei for comment. ®
