Reuters footage of Baidu’s Metaverse product “Xiran” exposed: What will happen in the first domestically produced Metaverse?

On December 20, Baidu released Reuters footage of its first domestically produced metaverse product "Xirang", and announced that Baidu Create 2021 (Baidu AI Developer Conference) will be held on the Xirang APP on December 27. This is the first conference held in the metaverse in China, which can accommodate 100,000 people interacting on the same screen at the same time.

By then, every user can create an exclusive virtual image and log in to "Xirang" on personal computers, mobile phones, and wearable devices to attend meetings, go shopping, communicate, and visit exhibitions. By putting on headphones, you can experience the immersive audio and visual effects of a venue with 100,000 people; by turning on the microphone, you can immediately connect to the microphone and realize multi-person voice communication.

Highlight 1: 100 important guests, 1 main forum and 20 sub-forums, discussing the future of AI

In order to more comprehensively showcase Baidu's progress in related fields, explore the application of AI in different scenarios and the conception of the future world, Baidu Create 2021 set up 1 main forum and 20 sub-forums in "Xiran", and invited nearly 100 guests to attend, including academicians, well-known professors, and corporate and industry leaders.

Astrochemist and geochemist, the first chief scientist of China's lunar exploration project, and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Ouyang Ziyuan, 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Kip Thorne, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Pan Yunhe, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Chen Zuo Ning, founding editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly, Intel Corporation senior vice president and Intel China chairman Dr. Wang Rui, NVIDIA global vice president and Asia Pacific president Zheng Yitao and other big names will all appear in Xirang.

Highlight 2: Standing on the shoulders of experts, exploring the mysteries of science and technology and the universe

At the main forum on the afternoon of December 27, Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li will deliver a speech titled "China Welcomes the Golden Decade of AI in the Era of Human-Machine Symbiosis", explaining from the perspectives of "Era·Golden Decade", "Creation·AI Toolbox", and "Exploration·New Development Space for AI". Robin Li will also have a dialogue with Academician Ouyang Ziyuan to discuss how China's AI is applied in China's aerospace field.

Dr. Wang Haifeng, Chief Technology Officer of Baidu, will decode China's path to technological self-reliance and self-improvement, release a series of the latest AI technology products, and announce the latest progress of the purely domestic "AI operating system" PaddlePaddle.

Kip Thorne will give a speech titled "Exploring 'Time and Space Warps': Traveling to the Other Side of the Universe", and will analyze whether it is possible to travel through wormholes. Kevin Kelly will use the theme of "Mirror World" to imagine the future Internet world.

The future city night view of the main venue of "Xiran"

Highlight 3: Grand setting, "traveling 80,000 miles a day while sitting on the ground"

In order to more comprehensively present the future life scenes, "Xiran" has built a main venue with a futuristic sense of technology and ten speech scenes, which can switch scenes intelligently according to the different contents of the speakers, creating a subversive online conference and meeting experience. At the same time, the audience can also feel the sound effects of a concert of 100,000 people in the main venue and experience immersive participation.

The speech stage and future city scene in the main venue of "Xirang"

In terms of spatial layout outside the main venue, "Xirang" introduces a large number of Chinese elements to create the first metaverse space with Chinese narrative as the core. In terms of urban layout, it refers to Chang'an City in the Tang Dynasty and Beijing City in the Ming and Qing Dynasties; in terms of urban decoration elements, it pays tribute to ancient wisdom. The dome of the venue refers to the Suzhou stone astronomical map and the world's earliest stone star map in the Southern Song Dynasty; and the design scenes refer to iconic landmarks such as Shijiazhuang Zhaozhou Bridge, West Lake, and London Bridge, bringing users a visual feast.

Shaolin Temple in "Xiran"

In short, in Xirang, you can see mountains, rivers, cities and villages, as well as cyber-based silicon-based life. This will be a complex world, with different forms, different cultures, and different dimensions intertwined in the same world. Users can travel through various scenes without leaving home, just by moving their fingers, and immersively experience the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the movement of the stars, and truly achieve "traveling 80,000 miles a day while sitting on the ground, and looking at a thousand rivers from afar in the sky."

The moon scene at the main venue of "Xiran"

Highlight 4: Visit the Shaolin Temple cloud lottery, listen to the Sanxingdui rock band, and experience the same AI coach as the national diving team

Baidu AI Developer Conference specially set up a technical experience area and a cloud diving hall. Here, users can get the same AI coach as the national diving "Dream Team", complete diving movements through finger operations, get scores from AI coaches, and get closer to the lives of Olympic athletes. You can visit the virtual industrial park, personally experience the actual cases of Baidu AI solutions, and feel how AI empowers traditional industries.

The Cloud Diving Hall in the "Xiran" Experience Area

You can also transform yourself into "Cangjie" and create characters through the input method AI to generate your own font poster; you can also chat with Baidu's dialogue robot "Plato". Plato has built-in the industry's first dialogue model PLATO-XL with over 10 billion parameters. Its dialogue ability can represent the highest level in the industry, and "speaking, learning, entertaining and singing" is no problem.

Plato's Grocery Store in "Greek"

If users feel tired, they can also visit the art exhibition area, where nearly twenty art collections are displayed, including the country's first green public welfare art collection, unlocking the form of art in the metaverse. It is said that several of the works were composed by Hu Yanbin, Xiao Ke, Dong Dongdong, and Hao Yun, advocating the practice of a new concept of green development.

In addition, in the entire space, users can not only encounter Spider-Man, Optimus Prime, and Bumblebee, but also visit the thousand-year-old Shaolin Temple and practice martial arts with the monk Sanbao; they can also explore Sanxingdui and unearth thousand-year-old national treasures; visit the Three-Body Museum and watch the Three-Body fleet shuttling back and forth overhead.

Sanxingdui and the Three-Body Museum in the “Xiran”

Highlight 5: Immersive experience of a metaverse scene that is close to reality

Different from the online games we are used to, the identity system, social system and anytime, anywhere needs of the Metaverse require us to place users on the same server as much as possible and ensure a low-latency, highly immersive user experience. The main venue of the Baidu Create Conference uses technologies such as spatial sound field reconstruction and AI acoustic modeling to achieve a more realistic sense of space, layering and immersion.

With the help of data transmission algorithm tuning and local rendering engine tuning, this Baidu Create conference supports mutual visibility among 100,000 users and real-time interaction based on the different locations of participants, achieving large-scale real-time status synchronization without triggering broadcast storms.

If you put on headphones, you can immediately experience the immersive audio and visual effects of a venue with 100,000 people; if you turn on the microphone, you can immediately connect to the microphone and realize multi-person voice communication. As the user's position changes due to walking, the user will also meet more people and hear new chat content, simulating the sound effect scene in the real world.

The human-machine symbiosis scene at the main venue of "Xirang"

There is also a little easter egg: Baidu Maps spokesperson Shen Teng will play an "NPC (non-game player)" and interact with players. As for which scene Shen Teng will appear and how he will interact with users, it is still unknown and will be revealed after users enter Xirang on December 27.

The City of Creators in "Greek"

The theme of Baidu Create 2021 is "Creator Spirit". Adhering to Baidu's mission of "making the complex world simpler with technology", Baidu will release its technological progress and applications in many cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, quantum computing, and biological computing, and invite global developers and creators to participate in it, and work with creators to explore the stars and sea of ​​artificial intelligence.