Meta-universe: Baidu plans to create an infrastructure for meta-world
The Chinese tech giant Baidu may take six years to create a meta-universe under the XiRang project. It writes CNBC citing the vice-president of the company Ma Jie.
Baidu began work on the XiRang project late last year. The company plans to hold an annual conference for developers in its virtual space on December 27.
According to Ma, at the current level of implementation, the company’s meta-universe can accommodate about 100,000 users at a time. He stressed that Baidu aims to create an open-source platform, an infrastructure for the virtual world.
Last Tuesday, the company demonstrated XiRang to journalists. CNBC noted that the platform is indeed far from perfect. In particular, the virtual space is slow to load, and user avatars behave too unrealistically.
Ma noted that XiRang does not support cryptocurrencies and other digital assets like NFT. However, he said, the platform is based on technology “similar to blockchain.”
Earlier, Chinese authorities have called NFT and meta-assets potential Ponzi schemes.
Recall that in December, the media learned of Alibaba and Huawei’s plans to enter the meta-universe market.
Alibaba and Huawei plan to enter the meta-universe market
Chinese online retailer Alibaba has registered a subsidiary in Beijing, Yuanjing Shengsheng, which will test the gaming potential of the meta-universe. The corporation-owned South China Morning Post writes about it.
The subsidiary is wholly owned by Alibaba’s investment arm. Its registration details state that it will engage in software development and will provide related services. The company has a registered capital of $1.6 million.
Earlier, Alibaba’s cloud-based gaming division launched a new brand with a similar name. According to the report, it is a gaming platform. The corporation also said that the structure will offer game developers free computing resources for small and medium-sized projects.
According to 8btc, another Chinese bigtech, Huawei, is also interested in the concept of a meta-universe. The company registered the trademark 元OS (the character 元 can be translated as “meta”).
