China's Tech Juggernauts Form Metaverse Research Institute

COMMENT While Meta has been hemorrhaging billions trying to bring CEO Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse to life with little to show for it, China has decided it too will take a crack at the virtual-reality concept.

This week reports emerged in China's state-owned Shanghai Securities Journal that some of the nation's most powerful tech companies have joined forces to form the "Joint Research Institute of Metaverse and Virtual-Real Interaction" in Shanghai.

Participating companies include Tencent, which owns a slice of most large game-makers in China; Huawei, the comms giant which is famously a favorite target of US sanctions; and Epic Games, of which Tencent owns 40 percent.

Also in the mix is China Mobile's Migu as well as top universities including Fudan, Peking, Renmin, Zhejiang, and Nanjing, which have been named the "the research co-construction units for 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 Governance Experimental Base, has been hired as dean.

According to Shanghai Securities Journal, Zhao said that "Shanghai has valuable experience in digital transformation and construction, as well as strong support from metaverse talents, technology, industry, urban environment, and consumption capacity, which constitute the core reasons for the establishment of the Institute in Shanghai."

China is now on its 14th "Five-Year Plan for Digital Economy Development" as of January, which has resulted in "new digital formats" being "laid out all over the country," Pandaily said, with the metaverse "one of the most important emerging growth points." Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Xiamen, and more are all said to have launched metaverse development policies of their own.

Shanghai is at at the forefront of this movement, with metaverse-related industries in the city predicted to reach ¥350 billion ($51 billion), driving the software and information services industry to exceed ¥1.5 trillion and the electronic manufacturing industry to more than ¥550 billion. The Joint Research Institute of Metaverse and Virtual-Real Interaction is also calling Shanghai home.

• Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there
• That was fast: MetaGuard emerges as an 'incognito mode' for the metaverse
• Surprise! The metaverse is going to suck for privacy
• Meta pours cash into servers and AI as ad revenue falls

It looks like Meta has its work cut out. Zuckerberg announced Facebook's pivot to metaverse-related activities in October 2021 and described his vision thus:

Almost a year later, despite the advent of Nvidia's Omniverse for digital twins and other work in the space, Meta is no closer to stemming the flow of money into the project. Reality Labs, the division responsible to breathing life into the metaverse, recorded a $10.2bn loss, after spending $12.5 billion to earn $2.3 billion in revenue, in fy2021.

While it's not "nail in the coffin" territory for the social network, which made $39.37 billion in net income last year from $117.9 billion in revenues, investors are watching the Reality Labs numbers with concern, and Meta appears to be nowhere near a working metaverse that people want to spend any time in.

Domestic social media companies in China arguably have some advantages over their western counterparts. For example, heavily censored yet feature-rich Weibo has more users than Twitter and some research [PDF] has found that the former's userbase has a higher level of social reciprocity, meaning more of a user's followers will actually respond when they talk.

The foundation of this research institute could mean that Chinese citizens will be surfing the metaverse sooner than the rest of us. Although we're not sure which hellscape we're more afraid of – one that bows to the Chinese Communist Party or one born from the worst excesses of late capitalism.

We have asked Huawei for comment. ®