Experts gather in Nanchang to discuss virtual reality

The 2023 World Conference on VR Industry, which took place on Thursday and Friday in Nanchang of Jiangxi province, brought together experts to envision the future of virtual reality and explore its role in fields such as manufacturing, neurosciences and education. The conference also highlighted the host city's outstanding potential in near-eye display technology.

Hosted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Jiangxi provincial government, the conference featured 24 events encompassing forums, business matchmaking sessions, exhibitions and competitions. The global gathering attracted more than 3,000 participants from more than 20 countries and regions, with nearly 200 speakers taking the stage.

The forums addressed a range of topics including manufacturing, the metaverse, artificial intelligence models and digital education. The competitions were centered around domains such as VR teaching and fitness.

The conference showcased nine innovative features, including the metaverse conference room, a digital emcee, VR postcards and high-definition livestreaming, to create an immersive experience for visitors. A total of 116 projects were signed during the conference, with a combined contract value of 45.62 billion yuan ($6.25 billion).

At the opening ceremony, Jiang Fengyi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor at Nanchang University, said in his speech that the first generation of the internet was personal computer-based, followed by the second generation represented by mobile internet on smartphones. The developing third generation is the immersive extended reality-based internet.

"The third-generation internet primarily takes the form of VR glasses, augmented reality glasses and so on. The manufacturing process for VR glasses is not highly challenging and has attained a reasonable level of maturity. As a result, they are widely applied in realms such as entertainment and education," said Jiang, who is also the director of a national research center on silicon-based LED engineering and technology at Nanchang University.

"On the other hand, the manufacturing complexity of AR glasses is very high and currently the manufacturing technology has not yet matured. Nonetheless, AR glasses have immense potential for extensive applications in areas including entertainment, tourism, intelligent manufacturing, healthcare, assisted driving and military," Jiang continued.

He highlighted that Nanchang boasts a complete light-source technology and industry chain, an edge that the city has gained over other parts of the world. This will play a crucial role in supporting advancement of the near-eye display technology and industry in the future.

Edvard Moser, a professor of neurosciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and a Nobel laureate, said that VR technology serves as a valuable tool for studying neurosciences and establishing such laboratories.

Shum Heung-yeung, chairman of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Council, said he believes that in the future, a vast AI world will coexist with the real world. AI entities will connect the human world with the virtual world and participate in the interaction between humans and the natural world.

Hugo Swart, vice-president and general manager of XR at Qualcomm, emphasized that extended reality technology will drive the internet into its next stage of development. In the XR-enabled spatial web, physical screens will disappear and every object can act as a screen.

The VR conference's exhibition area spanned around 30,000 square meters and featured more than 200 exhibitors from diverse sectors such as education, film and television, gaming, aviation and sports. They showcased cutting-edge products, technologies and applications in the VR industry.

The exhibition space of telecom operator China Mobile covered an area of 10,000 sq m and exhibited more than 50 innovative achievements in VR, such as naked-eye 3D displays and VR-based vocational education solutions, reported local news portal Hongguan News.

Another exhibitor, H3C, is a digital solutions provider under Tsinghua Unigroup. Zhu Jianghua, director of technology at H3C's Jiangxi branch, told Hongguan News that with only 72 employees, their "future factory", which spans more than 30,000 sq m, achieved an annual output of 500,000 servers and a production value of 13 billion yuan.

This impressive feat has been made possible by utilizing nearly 2,000 cameras to cover the entire plant and by leveraging technologies such as industrial internet, 5G, AI and AR. It connects various elements within the plant, encompassing materials, machinery, warehousing and logistics, thereby enabling automated production according to Zhu.