Chongqing- With Facebook's announcement last October that it would rebrand to "Meta" to reflect its commitment to developing new metaverse-related technologies, "metaverse" has become a hot search term.
"The Metaverse is the future of the internet, the spacial internet," said Cristiano Amon, the president and CEO of Qualcomm, at the 2022 World Artificial Intelligence Conference this September in Shanghai.
Yang Jiansong, the CEO of Linkon Technology in Chongqing Liangjiang New Area, said that the special internet refers to projects connecting the virtual world to the physical world. With it, the visual experience can be expanded from a plane to a 3D display for a more immersive experience.
Digital entertainment is a gate to the metaverse
"The development of each generation's internet will increase a city's prosperity, such as Tencent in Shenzhen and Alibaba in Hangzhou. There is also an opportunity for Chongqing with the progress of the metaverse," said Yang.
Yang thinks that Chongqing's metaverse development can be boosted by digital entertainment. "Digital entertainment is close to people's daily lives, which is the key to spiritual life consumption. A huge user community is much easier to promote on the market," he said.
Reputed as a magical "8D city" with its cyberpunk scenarios, Chongqing naturally provides materials for digital entertainment and metaverse modeling.
Linkon Technology sets an early foot in this field. Focusing on the digital entertainment metaverse, the company and Sanxingdui Museum jointly produced the world's first Mediated Reality (MR) guided film in the field of cultural and exposition named The First Chapter of Ancient Shu - Bronze Tree.
MR-guided movies will enable cultural relics to seem alive in reality when visiting the museum. For example, wearing MR glasses will allow visitors to see the bronze tree at Sanxingdui Museum in real life and see ancient people praying around it with birds flying above.
Linkon also cooperates with Guizhou Telecom to build a digital entertainment metaverse. The 5G screen can be customized with multiple applications such as immersive mobile theater, livestream, short video browsing, split-screen games, e-books, and other augmented reality (AR) thanks to Linkon's space presentation of AR glasses and Guizhou Telecom's operation platform.
Talent is also an indispensable factor in the development of the metaverse. "The reason we chose to settle in Liangjiang New Area is that there are more IT talents," said Yang Jiansong. "Many software and information-related companies choose to settle here."
Cyberpunk Chongqing. (iChongqing file photo)
China's metaverse market to make a breakthrough
In the Annual Report on Metaverse Development in China 2022, China's output for the metaverse upstream and downstream industry exceeds 5.73 billion U.S. dollars, mainly composed of games, entertainment, VR, and AR hardware.
Metaverse integrates the latest advanced technologies, such as AR, 5G, AI, and cloud computing, covering upstream and downstream industrial chains, including intelligent terminals, enablement, computing, and content creation.
Several Chinese tech giants are stepping into this field, including Tencent, ByteDance, Huawei, and Baidu. In addition to building their own VR and AR brands, they explore different application scenarios such as digital collection, VR games, digital virtual humans, in-vehicle entertainment, etc.
"Take AR glasses, for example, a pair of AR glasses valued at about 286 U.S. dollars," said Yang. "There will be 2.86 million U.S. dollars if selling to 1 million customers."
The Chinese metaverse market will reach 28.7 billion U.S. dollars in five years, according to the 2022 China's metaverse development report.
On top of the owned industrial chains, the metaverse also supports the real economy, which encompasses smart manufacturing, agriculture, culture, tourism, and exhibitions. It will turn out to be the key component of the real economy.
For example, in the field of smart manufacturing, metaverse technology can complete the design, simulation, and optimization process before creating a new product, advancing the industry's high-quality development.
Liangjiang New Area gathers huge software and information enterprises (Photo/Zhang Yi)