Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Jenny Taimei, Mr. Aviation and Daniel Wu in South China for the delivery of clues! According to news from IT House on January 13, in June last year, it was reported that Tencent Holdings had formally set up a "extended reality" (XR) department to bet on the next race track on the concept of virtual meta-universe. However, half a year later, according to information obtained by Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily from a number of people familiar with the matter, Tencent's XR business has been suspended.

According to the report, Tencent set up a high-profile XR department in June 2022, with Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent and actual trader of game business, as the chief executive, and Shen Li, head of NExT Studios of Tencent Games Studio, as the head of XR specific business. People familiar with the matter told reporters that the XR business team, which now has more than 300 people, is a "big project". Shen Li, the head of the business, left in November 2022, and it is unclear whether there will be any personnel changes next.

IT House learned that the full name of XR (extended reality) is Extended Reality, which refers to the combination of real and virtual through computers to create a virtual environment for human-computer interaction, which is also the general name of AR, VR, MR and other technologies. Through the integration of the three visual interaction technologies, it brings a "sense of immersion" of seamless transformation between the virtual world and the real world.

According to previous sources, Tencent said in an internal document that the XR business is a new business that the company has made great efforts to build in response to the Quanzhen Internet, with the goal of building a world-class hard-tech team led by industry leaders to compete for the next ticket to the hard-tech era. The business focuses on the layout of full-link XR ecology, including hardware-side XR devices, software-side aware interaction technology, content and industry-side content and developer ecology.

Tencent is not only a shareholder in Roblox, the first share in meta-universe, but also holds a 40 per cent stake in Epic Games. In addition, QQ Music also launched the VR album function, which carries the function of VR music room for musicians such as Jay Chou.

In terms of hardware, Tencent demonstrated its first VR head display device, the TenVR, in 2018. TenVR was independently developed by Tencent's Intelligent Innovation Business Unit (InLab), but IT House found that the business unit had not demonstrated its iterative products since then.

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