ChinAI #206: China's Virtual Reality Push Gets Real
Emmie Hine translates the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Action Plan on VR
Greetings from a world where…
the DC metro stations are stunning
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Feature Translation: China’s VR Action Plan
*This week’s translation comes from Emmie Hine, a software engineer who received her MSc in Social Science of the Internet at Oxford in 2021 and has just started a PhD program in Law, Science, and Technology at the University of Bologna in November. What follows is her analysis (lightly edited by me):
Context: On October 28th, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released the “Action Plan for the Integration and Development of Virtual Reality and Industrial Applications (2022-2026)” (the Action Plan), a conceptual follow-up to the 2018 “Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Development of the Virtual Reality Industry.” The Action Plan lays out goals for the development of the VR sector (which it defines as including AR [Augmented Reality] and MR [Mixed Reality]) and a wide array of application scenarios to pursue. It’s a rather dry read (as many of MIIT’s tech releases tend to be) but has a wealth of details on the government’s goals and areas of focus.
Key takeaways: The Chinese and global VR industries are going to get a lot bigger and more entrenched…
Currently, China’s VR industry revenue is estimated at ~140 billion RMB (over 10% of the global market, valued at over 1 trillion RMB) and the plan wants to hit 350 billion RMB by the end of 2026. It anticipates a flood of new companies, aiming to cultivate 100 “backbone” enterprises and support SMEs and “little giants.”
Extended Reality (XR) hardware will become more widespread. It’s estimated that at the end of 2021, there was a cumulative base of 16.44 million VR headsets. China wants to have sold 25 million VR terminals (likely to be mostly headsets) by the end of 2026, which would be 150% of the current number of VR headsets that have ever been sold. They’re probably working from a base of a few million headsets, but this would be a huge increase regardless.
The tech breakthroughs the Action Plan hopes for would make VR far more usable and integrated into peoples’ lives, which envisions XR being applied in fields from industry to education to health to entertainment and culture.
These goals are far more ambitious than in the December 2018 Guiding Opinions,1 which listed mostly generic aims like establishing a solid foundation for the VR industry chain by 2020 and becoming a world leader in VR by 2025. It included some specific technology and applications, but the Action Plan goes far deeper.
…if there’s enough effort behind implementation.
The document is full of technological goals: it exhaustively details seven “key technology integration innovation projects” including microdisplays, rendering technologies, and sensory interaction tech; five supply-chain projects; ten multi-industry applications ranging from industrial production to entertainment to disability assistance; five multi-scenario application projects; and seven assurance measures. This will require a huge amount of R&D effort from the public and private sectors.
The amount of investment required will be substantial, and it’s not clear where it’ll come from. It’s possible that this will be where the fragmented authoritarianism model will come in handy (where provinces essentially compete to find the best approaches, which are then adopted more broadly). However, China’s technology research has been criticized for focusing on application scenarios over basic research. This document has a lot of goals in both areas; basic research will likely be supported by the National Natural Science Foundation (NSFC, essentially China’s NSF), while applications will be managed by a combination of private sector, local governments, and partnerships between the two.
The 2021 NSFC Guide to Programs mentions “sensing and interactive computing of 3 dimensional space for man machine and object (sic)” (including VR) as a “main research direction.” VR display technology is also mentioned under one of the “key project” funding areas.
Private-sector VR funding more than doubled in 2021 and reached 6.19 billion RMB in the first half of 2022, which tracks with the goal of building more enterprises.
The Action Plan mentions linking ministries and provinces and encouraging localities to promote cooperation and applications, which would point towards a fragmented authoritarianism model. Cities and provinces have been launching various VR initiatives, but currently most of the hype seems to be around the metaverse.
While the Action Plan doesn’t directly address the metaverse, the State Council-run Economic Daily cautioned last month against “feverishly following suit and betting big on [the metaverse] while detached from reality.” It’s possible that the government could conclude that certain applications of VR aren’t socially desirable and put the brakes on development. Speaking of desirable applications of VR:
Xi really wants kids to get off the couch.
The Action Plan details applications in “VR + sports and health” which aims to integrate VR into sports areas including “outdoor and indoor, aerobic and anaerobic, individual and group, and leisure and competitive.” It also wants to launch a “VR/AR Mass Fitness” project aimed at promoting the country as a “sports power“ (体育强国).
Notably not mentioned are video games (with the exception of “game social networking” being included in a long list of “integrated media content production” fields), even though video gaming is the biggest application of VR right now. Xi has been promoting a “national fitness dream” while also limiting the amount of time kids can spend gaming and what games can be livestreamed, so it’s possible that this is an attempt to promote technology development while molding a new kind of citizen more in tune with their physicality.
VR could be a way to gamify fitness and further Xi’s hope that children will “civilize the mind, make savage the body” (“文明其精神，野蛮其体魄”, a Mao quote) through sports.
FULL TRANSLATION: Action Plan for the Integration and Development of Virtual Reality and Industrial Applications (2022-2026)
ChinAI Links (Four to Forward)
Must-read: Dangerous Changes: When Military Innovation Harms Combat Effectiveness
In International Security, Kendrick Kuo, an Assistant Professor at the U.S. Naval War College, puts forward an essential theory of self-defeating military innovation. Studying the history Britain’s armor innovation in the interwar period and its army’s poor performance North African campaign during World War II, Kuo suggests that “The perils of innovation deserve attention, not just its promises.”
Must-read: One Venue, Two Conferences: The Separation of Chinese and American Citation Networks
Bingchen Zhao, incoming PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and Yuling Gu, investigator at the Allen Institute for AI (along with Jessica Forde and Naomi Saphra) have posted a preprint that should spawn a lot of further research and thinking. Based on papers accepted at NeurIPS 2020 (the top conference in AI), they find: “American and Chinese institutions cite papers from each other’s regions substantially less than they cite endogamously. We build a citation graph to quantify this divide, compare it to European connectivity, and discuss the causes and consequences of the separation.”
Should-read: China has big economic plans for its “little giant” companies
The VR Action Plan mentions a goal to cultivate “little giants” in this domain. Mary Hui, for Quartz, has a useful explainer of that concept, characterizing little giants as smaller firms that occupy key nodes in a range of important supply chains that China in which China seeks to enhance its self-sufficiency.
Should-read: Position Paper of the People's Republic of China on Strengthening Ethical Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Michael Selitto, Head of Geopolitics and Security Policy at Anthropic, had some good notes on this new position paper from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Thank you for reading and engaging.
These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.
Check out the archive of all past issues here & please subscribe here to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay for a subscription will support access for all).
Any suggestions or feedback? Let me know at chinainewsletter@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jjding99
Emmie: As of April 19, the MIIT link to this document 404s (thank you Wayback Machine). I’ve noticed this with a few AI ethics documents as well—that is, when a superseding document comes out, older ones are scrubbed from the issuing ministry’s website. Would love to hear if anyone knows if this is a common practice.