Baidu to Launch XiRang MetaStack, Enabling Metaverse Construction in 40 Days

Ma Jie, the vice president of Baidu, said on January 4 that the tech giant is set to unveil a metaverse solution called XiRang MetaStack at the company’s annual flagship developers’ conference on January 10. The solution enables the creation of an independent metaverse based on a series of metaverse infrastructure and one-stop development platforms in only 40 days, which would have otherwise taken from six months to a year to complete.

As the first metaverse platform in China, XiRang has launched a series of important functions including a conference system, an exhibition art center, a co-creator space, a digital collection platform, metaverse auctions, urban transportation systems and more in the past two years. In 2022, XiRang completed more than 120 metaverse activities and spaces, covering more than 20 core fields such as cultural tourism, art, education, automobile and consumption.

As a combination of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and blockchain, the metaverse has been given more and more attention by major enterprises in recent years. However, for ordinary enterprises, the metaverse consumes a lot of manpower, capital and time, and the threshold for building an independent metaverse product is extremely high.

During XiRang’s R&D and operations in the past year, Baidu found that the developer’s demand for metaverse showed the following characteristics: high desire for independent metaverse products, metaverse platform needs continuous operation capability, high personalized requirements but low investment. “Building a metaverse through XiRang MetaStack could improve R&D efficiency by 300% as well as reduce operation and maintenance costs by 50% compared to systems of the same size,” said Ma.

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Artificial intelligence and cloud computing are the core capabilities of metaverse’s underlying architecture. Because the metaverse platform needs continuous operation and user interaction on a large scale, the demand for computing power is almost infinite, relying more on the support of cloud computing technology. For this level of demand, Ma said that XiRang MetaStack is equipped with capabilities such as a client kernel, cross-network transmission services and a services engine, solving the difficulties of low efficiency R&D and high operating costs.

A major feature of XiRang MetaStack is high-level intelligence, which lowers the threshold and still integrates more than 20 important AI capabilities in nine technical directions, such as intelligent vision, intelligent voice, natural language understanding and real-time audio and video.

In addition, Baidu announced its first batch of projects based on XiRang MetaStack, including a surreal virtual city created by Meta Media Group and an official metaverse platform for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference. At present, XiRang MetaStack supports VR, Android, iOS, Windows and smartphones, and is compatible with Unity, Unreal and cocos.

At the upcoming tech conference, XiRang will access WeChat mini programs for the first time, and users can quickly experience metaverse products without downloading apps. “Compared with the app, mini programs can give everyone more ways to experience conference in metaverse,” Ma said.