Baidu Plans to Hold China’s First Metaverse Conference 

Metaverse gained popularity all over the world. Social media giant Facebook jumped into the trend in October, changing its name to Meta and announcing plans for $10 billion in related developments in 2022. Meta is not alone as other companies are also interested in Metaverse, and Baidu is one of them.

It plans to hold its annual developers’ event on Monday in the virtual world of its metaverse app, XiRang. Baidu claims it will be China’s first metaverse conference.

Still, at a preview event on Tuesday, Ma Jie who is in charge of the XiRang downplayed expectations by noting how many aspects weren’t yet up to par. Baidu’s vice president stated that it would take years to launch XiRang. 

XiRang, as it exists at the moment, can host 100,000 virtual attendees for Monday’s conference. Furthermore, the company wants to create an open-source platform for metaverse developers – an infrastructure for a virtual world. Baidu’s metaverse conference marks the opening of XiRang to developers, primarily in China for now. 

Baidu and other companies

Baidu as well as other companies are willing to spend more time on the Metaverse. Tech giant Alibaba has a special webpage. The company is using that webpage to promote its metaverse cloud offerings.

Last month, Tencent’s President Martin Lau mentioned metaverse in an earnings call. Martin Lau expects that the Chinese government will support the development of metaverse technologies, with regulations specific to the local market. 

Bill Gates also understands the importance of the metaverse. This month, Gates said he expects that in two or three years, most virtual meetings will move to the metaverse. 

Moreover, Facebook’s parent company Meta announced its virtual reality ecosystem, Horizon Worlds, would end its invite-only phase and become freely available to anyone age 18 and older in the U.S. and Canada. Users have the opportunity to interact with other avatars and build their own worlds and games in the system.