Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology has renamed its 25-year-old Information Engineering Department as the Metaverse Engineering Department. The university says it’s the first in China to offer a metaverse major, according to a local media report.

See related article: South Korea and Meta to ramp up metaverse safety 

Fast facts

• Without further details about the curriculum, Pan Zhigeng, dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence — to which the metaverse department belongs — said it plans to jointly train masters, doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows focused on the metaverse with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in the future, according to Hong Kong media HK01.

• In August, the university reached an agreement with the Yalong Intelligent Equipment Group to set up a Metaverse Research Institute. Yalong is a firm that provides robot and digital transformation solutions for enterprises.

• The metaverse is generally considered as a set of technologies related to the interaction with virtual worlds; among them, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are considered virtual assets that will be applied to the metaverse.

• Metaverse research organizations started popping up in China in 2022. In August, Tencent, Huawei, and Epic Games started a research institute for metaverse and virtual reality interaction with multiple Chinese universities. In April, Renmin University of China set up the Metaverse Research Center.

• The local governments in Shanghai and Beijing have incorporated the metaverse in local development plans to boost the economy and investment.

See related article: The metaverse is here. What’s holding back the party?