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China's first metaverse industry group held its unveiling ceremony on Thursday, marking an important first step for the country's pursue of healthy and sustainable development of the metaverse industry.

The Metaverse Industry Committee under the China Mobile and Communications Association (CMCA) officially announced its establishment on Thursday, after receiving approval on October 15. During the announcement it released a new book called Metaverse, expressing the new logic for the development of the next generation internet and the future digital economy in which metaverse is deeply involved.

As the only national social organization in the field of Chinese mobile communications industry, CMCA's members include state-owned industry conglomerates such as China Mobile and China Unicom.

The so-called metaverse is widely understood as an alternate digital reality where people work, play and socialize. The metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet.

While this fancy concept may still be a new thing for many people, it has already been on the radar of domestic and overseas technology companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and ByteDance.

Yu Jianing, executive director of the committee, said that their major tasks ahead will include strengthening technological innovation and application integration for the industry, organizing the training of professionals, and promoting new thinking related to metaverse.

Talking on the sideline of the opening of the committee, an industry insider surnamed Zheng told the Global Times that the Metaverse is now on the high speed lane in China and will primarily focus on the development of corresponding infrastructure.

The CMCA also proposed on Thursday that the metaverse, as the third generation of the internet, will be a new milestone for global innovation and competition.

The infrastructure of the metaverse includes a large variety of 5G communication networks, VR, AR, WIFI6, wearable devices, blockchain, cloud computing, edge computing and AI+GPU, analysts said.

As an integrated body of cutting-edge digital technology, the metaverse is to be applied to various operating scenarios of the whole society as part of the efforts to achieve high-quality development of the digital economy, according to the CMCA.