Baidu steps back from metaverse

By CUI Peng

Baidu’s metaverse ambitions appear to be in tatters as MA Jie, the person in charge of the “XiRang” project, has reportedly left the company. Earlier this year, Tencent also disbanded its extended reality team.

Sources say Baidu has chosen artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC), which makes a profit, over the metaverse, which doesn’t.

The sun rose and trumpets sounded on XiRang in November 2021, when Baidu was fully occupied banging its gong about the first Made-in-China metaverse product.

Baidu’s AI developer conference that year was held inside a futuristic virtual world (a video game) imaginatively named Creator City on the XiRang platform.

XiRang reportedly set up more than 120 metaverse spaces last year and in January of this year, Baidu released MetaStack. Metastack was touted as reducing the development period of a metaverse platform from a year to 40 days.

Now that Ma is gone, the future - if there is one – of Baidu’s metaverse team is lost in space.