Tech giants bank on VR for metaverse opportunities - China Daily

A visitant plays a VR crippled astatine the accumulation country of HTC Corp during the 2022 World 5G Convention successful Harbin, Heilongjiang province, successful August. [ZHANG SHU/FOR CHINA DAILY]

HTC Corp volition measurement up popularizing the usage of virtual world exertion successful some the user marketplace and the endeavor marketplace arsenic portion of its broader propulsion to amended pat into the metaverse, a elder enforcement said.

As a blistery tech buzzword, metaverse refers to a shared virtual situation oregon integer abstraction created by technologies including virtual world and augmented reality.

Charles Huang, firm vice-president of HTC, said determination is surging request for VR devices successful a wide scope of segments, specified arsenic distant conferencing, training, education, healthcare, plan and exhibition, with the COVID-19 pandemic bolstering the exertion of VR equipment.

According to Huang, HTC is banking connected the business-to-business conception and attaches large value to practice with manufacture partners to make caller applications.

"Metaverse is not a slogan oregon a precise distant future," Huang said, adding that HTC is moving hard to fortify technological exchanges and accusation sharing successful the metaverse and striving to physique an interconnected, mutually beneficial and compatible metaverse ecosystem.

HTC has unveiled an unfastened metaverse level called Viverse, which provides seamless experiences that are reachable connected immoderate instrumentality anyplace and is enabled by VR, AR, high-speed connectivity, AI and blockchain technologies.

Data from marketplace consultancy International Data Corp showed that the concern standard of the planetary AR and VR marketplace was adjacent to $14.67 cardinal successful 2021 and is expected to summation to $74.73 cardinal successful 2026, with a compound yearly maturation complaint of 38.5 percent.

IDC said the IT-related expenditure successful China's AR and VR marketplace reached astir $2.13 cardinal successful 2021 and volition summation to $13.08 cardinal successful 2026, making it the second-largest marketplace successful the world.

Pedro Palandrani, a exertion expert astatine probe institution Global X ETFs, said aboriginal versions of metaverse present exist, offering investors a glimpse of its tremendous potential. However, a palmy metaverse is expected to diagnostic a decentralized unfastened level accessed by VR headsets and powered by blockchain technology.

"A genuinely immersive metaverse experience, for instance, engages each the senses — sight, sound, touch, odor and taste. Today, VR mostly involves dependable and images," Palandrani said.

To accelerate the improvement of metaverse, different Chinese tech companies are besides moving fast. Huawei and Alibaba, for instance, are among the archetypal radical of companies, on with Meta, formerly known arsenic Facebook, and Microsoft from the United States, to signifier a standards radical that aims to accelerate the improvement of metaverse.

Participants successful the Metaverse Standards Forum see galore of the biggest companies moving successful the sector, from chipmakers to gaming companies, arsenic good arsenic established standard-setting bodies similar the World Wide Web Consortium, according to the group.

"Industry leaders person stated that the imaginable of metaverse volition beryllium champion realized if it is built connected a instauration of unfastened standards," the radical said. "Building an unfastened and inclusive metaverse astatine a pervasive standard volition request a constellation of unfastened interoperability standards."

The determination signified that companies are racing to physique the conception of a metaverse and privation to marque their nascent integer worlds compatible with each other, said Pan Helin, co-director of the Digital Economy and Financial Innovation Research Center astatine Zhejiang University's International Business School.

That could marque it easier for developers to physique the aforesaid contented for antithetic metaverse platforms oregon for users to export information from 1 work to another, which volition assistance physique a thriving ecosystem successful the future, Pan said.

Seven of China's large exertion companies, including Huawei, Tencent, Baidu, Oppo and Alibaba, are among the apical companies that filed the astir virtual world and augmented world patent applications globally successful the past 2 years, said Singapore-based probe and improvement analytics supplier PatSnap.

Bloomberg Intelligence forecasts that metaverse gross globally could scope astir $800 cardinal successful 2024.