Chinese tech giant Baidu could take six years to build a metaverse as part of the XiRang project. Writes about it CNBC with reference to the vice president of the company Ma Jie.
Baidu started work on the XiRang project late last year. On December 27, the company plans to host an annual developer conference in its virtual space.
According to Ma, at its current implementation level, the company’s metaverse can accommodate about 100,000 users at a time. He stressed that Baidu is committed to creating an open source platform – an infrastructure for the virtual world.
# 2021BaiduCreate is China’s first-ever conference hosted in the #metaverse platform #XiRang with close to 100 speakers sharing their thoughts on an AI-enabled future. The platform also enables up to 100,000 online attendees to get up close and personal. 👉 https://t.co/msdfor6zOh pic.twitter.com/AC6atIBEXt
– Baidu Inc. (@Baidu_Inc) December 24, 2021
The company showed the XiRang to reporters last Tuesday. CNBC noted that the platform is really far from perfect. In particular, the virtual space is slow to load, and user avatars behave too unrealistic.
Ma noted that XiRang does not support cryptocurrencies and other digital assets like NFT. However, according to him, the platform is based on technology “similar to blockchain”.
Previously, the Chinese authorities named the NFT and the metaverse as potential Ponzi schemes.
