Zhongxin Finance, January 13th: Zhao Xing: Metaverse has a real "entrance", Shanghai should use "agile governance" to control the new situation - an interview with Zhao Xing, professor of the Department of Information Management and deputy director of the Department of Economics and Management, East China Normal University
Author Fan Zhonghua
At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, with the popularity of the "metaverse", Shanghai took the lead in proposing "an important platform to step up the research on the interaction between the virtual world and the real world in the future", and subsequently became the first country in the country to write the metaverse into the local "14th Five-Year Plan" information. Industrial planning of the city.
"Shanghai is expected to become the forerunner of Metaverse's industrial layout," said Zhao Xing, professor of the Department of Information Management and Deputy Director of the Department of Economics and Management at East China Normal University. In recent years, Shanghai has achieved remarkable results in urban digital governance. In the future, Metaverse will It will bring "multiple social scenarios combining virtual, reality and virtual reality and their interconnected complex governance 'ultimate challenge', and the concept of agile governance can be more comprehensively and deeply experimented and applied."
At the China International Import Expo, professional audiences experience virtual reality photo by Tang Yanjun
"Pre-governance" escorts the healthy development of Metaverse
In Zhao Xing's view, the "metaverse" is actually an old thing under a new concept. From the emergence of the PC and the construction of the information superhighway, to the underlying technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing, they are all laid for the metaverse. infrastructure.
In its technology chain, including perception and interaction technology, core devices, supporting peripherals, terminal hardware, game engines, related application development, etc., all of which are the frontier and focus of industrial development in the past ten years, and the scale of related industries in the world has reached several billions of dollars.
Therefore, "the metaverse is technically and industrially real, not 'unreal' at all."
Because of this, Zhao Xing believes that how to guide emerging technologies and industries to develop better, and how to avoid previous disputes such as Internet monopoly and Internet finance, have all promoted the "establish first and then break" when industrial changes are roaring. The pre-governance model of Metaverse has become an important option for escorting the development of the Metaverse.
"So far, the governance of virtual space is still a problem for all countries in the world. Under the new industrial imagination brought by the Metaverse, we should avoid repeating the mistakes of first barbaric development and then strong governance," Zhao Xing said. The three major risks of reality versus virtuality, game first, and unforeseen governance are the four major practical problems of virtual world governance.
To this end, Zhao Xing proposed that we should gradually explore and apply the theory of "agile governance" to the metaverse.
"Agile governance is a set of predictable, real-time and dynamic governance principles, and it is also an adaptive, people-oriented, inclusive and sustainable decision-making process. , is already a beneficial practice of agile governance.”
He further explained that for Metaverse governance, agile governance can first start from subdivided scenarios, establish an open supervision channel of "physical government + open platform + virtual office", and carry out pilot projects with agile evaluation, feedback and accountability mechanisms, and continuously Extend and superimpose industry and field entry; the second is governance intelligence, which combines multi-source heterogeneous big data, new artificial intelligence algorithms and domain expert wisdom to form a mutually constrained "digital sapiens" decision-making model to study and judge industrial development predict.
In addition, Zhao Xing suggested that a "triple-helix innovation" collaborative governance mechanism of government, industry and academia should be formed.
"In this regard, in September 2021, my country has forward-lookingly built a number of national experimental bases for intelligent social governance. Shanghai's Fudan University, East China Normal University and Yangpu District have been selected as construction units. China is in the process of intelligent social governance. To be at the forefront of the world,” Zhao Xing said, the future intelligent social governance that combines virtual and real will also require revolutionary progress in regulatory technology. Can China make breakthroughs in this regard and create the world’s best model for virtual world governance? Opportunities coexist with challenges.
Photo courtesy of the staff using AR to conduct power grid inspections
The Metaverse Can Create Huge Social Value
According to previous analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence, the global metaverse market is expected to reach $800 billion by 2024.
As an industry spanning multiple levels such as infrastructure, human-computer interaction, decentralization, spatial computing, and creator economy, Metaverse is believed to vigorously promote technological innovation at all levels of society and provide more impetus for economic development.
Zhao Xing believes that the real explosion point of the Metaverse should be 2-3 years later when the first explosive product of the Metaverse appears, "Just like the smartphone industry, Apple's first product was released, which really ignited the market. And a series of metaverse applications involving games, art, work, life, education, industry and other fields may gradually become a reality within 10 years."
"The technological development of the Metaverse and the creation of scene content are mutually reinforcing and spiraling, which requires the joint efforts of a large number of innovative enterprises, governments and scientific research institutions," Zhao Xing said. Conducive to the simultaneous leap of technology and content in related fields.
In Zhao Xing's view, the Metaverse is a complete collection of digital virtual worlds. Its development can be divided into three stages. The first stage will be in the next few years, using games and other platforms as the entrance to socialize and interact in the virtual world to form immersion The second stage is more than ten years later, and the real elements such as consumption, logistics, and life services will be widely connected in the virtual platform, so that the metaverse will be fully integrated into social life; the third stage will be decades later. The world is inseparable, forming a new state of the virtual world, "but the ultimate shape of the metaverse cannot be predicted."
This means that the metaverse has opened an "entrance" to the real world, "some of which, such as immersive interaction, can be realized soon, while others, such as new civilizations and decentralized economic systems, want to be fully realized in the short term. It is more difficult.”
Zhao Xing pointed out that the landing of the metaverse should not only be games, it has a more important and broad application space.
As far as the field of knowledge exchange is concerned, in the education industry, the Metaverse classroom can present a large amount of knowledge and innovation in the form of real-life participation; the Metaverse virtual meeting scene can solve the current difficult problem of instant interaction in remote meetings; the Metaverse library , The museum will be able to realize the dissemination and inheritance of culture through immersive scene reproduction.
"More valuable applications can also focus on the elderly, disabled and other groups. For example, Metaverse can provide the elderly with more accessible and understandable augmented reality scenes to help them cross the digital divide; Complete life experience, and even provide them with employment opportunities in Metaverse service industries such as virtual customer service and virtual clerks," Zhao Xing said, which is a greater social responsibility that Metaverse should take the initiative to shoulder.
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