Shanghai Municipal Corporation includes metaverse in its 5-year development plan
China’s most crowded city, Shanghai, has reported to have been looking for ways of using a metaverse in public services in the coming five years.
According to the latest news, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology has made metaverse a mandate in its five-year development plan under the supervision of the electronic information industry besides the other four frontiers for exploration.
According to an official CNBC report, the paper has called for promoting the metaverse’s usage in business offices, public services, social leisure, production safety, industrial manufacturing and electronic games.
The commission has plans of encouraging further study and development in the field of underlying technologies, namely, real-time interactions, sensors and blockchain technology.
China’s interest in new technology has been deeply committed in recent years alongside its dedicated efforts to establish a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The country’s usage of digital biometric hardware wallets for the virtual yuan has actually cemented it among the leaders in the issuance of CBDCs.
In March 2021, China’s State Council had released its five-year development plan that included some fronts for exploration – among which features metaverse. The term “blockchain” had been used for the first time in the Chinese 14th five-year plan, a document that has outlined the country’s economic goals for the forthcoming five years, running from 2021 through 2025.
Not just in China, the metaverse has become a great area of interest for many major nations and industrial giants in recent months. In October, Facebook had changed its name to Meta as a step to bank on the popularity of the term metaverse.
Despite the warning from the central financial authority, the People’s Bank of China’s regarding metaverse and nonfungible tokens in November, more than 1000 Chinese businesses have notably filed thousands of trademark applications that have made reference to the term. Over 1360 Chinese businesses have also applied for 8534 trademarks, as per a report by the South China Morning Post.
Chinese companies are at present in the process of developing metaverse technologies, in coordination with Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, among the others who are aggressively working on related projects.
Last week, Baidu had debuted its XiRang metaverse app, which is due to a full launch in six years.
