A visitor enjoys a visually immersive experience with a device at a metaverse hall in Nanjing city, Jiangsu province. (PHOTO: VCG)

By CHEN Chunyou

The metaverse has begun to integrate with people's lives and production, and has a positive role in enhancing people's access to quality education and healthcare, as well as in some disaster management, such as earthquake monitoring and response.

As a new move to drive innovative development of the metaverse industry, a three-year action plan was released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and four other departments on September 8, with an aim of making the metaverse industry become a significant growth pillar of the digital economy before 2025.

The plan maps out a blueprint covering 2023 to 2025, and specifies five tasks to boost the growth of this sector. These include developing advanced technology and industrial systems, creating a 3D interactive industrial metaverse, designing immersive and interactive digital life applications, establishing comprehensive industrial support systems, and implementing a secure and credible industrial governance framework.

Meanwhile, the plan calls for cultivating three to five metaverse companies with global influence, and building three to five industry clusters by 2025, and breakthroughs in metaverse technologies, industries and applications are anticipated.

To address the challenges such as limited core technologies, insufficient product supply and weak industrial scale, the plan proposes leveraging the integrated advantages of artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, virtual reality and other related technologies to drive industrial innovation. The plan advocates cultivating leading and specialized enterprises, as well as building pilot areas, sci-tech parks and industrial parks for innovative applications of the metaverse.

Furthermore, the plan encourages enterprises to explore new models and formats of technological innovation and content production in which users participate. As an incentive, tax and fee reduction policies will also be introduced for the metaverse enterprises.

In addition, the plan vows to promote the application of the metaverse in various sectors, such as home appliances, automotive and aerospace. Procedures-oriented manufacturing industries, such as steel and textiles, are encouraged to adopt related technologies to optimize production processes, like scheduling and material calculation.

Efforts will also be made to enhance the quality of metaverse products and services, and the protection of intellectual property rights in this sector will be strengthened.

As a necessary support for all of these initiatives, key laboratories, manufacturing innovation centers, and content production bases will be constructed to support technology research and development as well as new product testing.

China is expected to actively engage in formulating metaverse international governance rules and standards, and see that domestic standards are in line with international standards, according to the plan.