From silent to sound, from black and white to color, from film to digital, movies have continuously reshaped artistic boundaries through technological iterations. Nowadays, virtual reality technology offers multi-dimensional interactive immersive experiences, making it possible for audiences to "step into" the parallel worlds constructed by films.

The National Film Bureau recently issued a "Notice on Promoting the Orderly Development of Virtual Reality Films," encouraging the exploration of virtual reality film technologies by all parties, improving the full-process supervision from script registration to public screening permits, and injecting standardized momentum into the industry by expanding virtual reality film screening spaces in theaters.

This year's government work report proposed to unleash the consumption potential of culture, tourism, and sports.

The metaverse, which integrates the digital and physical worlds, is unlocking new cultural tourism consumption scenarios one by one.

Shanghai has created a metaverse cultural tourism private board meeting, digitizing historical landmarks such as Yu Garden and the Bund. Tourists can "time-travel" to Republican-era street scenes through virtual reality (VR) technology; Gansu has developed an augmented reality (AR) tour system based on Dunhuang murals, allowing tourists to interact with flying apsaras murals by scanning codes; Beijing has seized the opportunity of the renovation and reconstruction of the Workers' Stadium to create the Workers' Stadium Metaverse Center, launching "Digital Football" and Workers' Stadium Metaverse live broadcasts, where tourists can transform into "digital goalkeepers" in the metaverse space and engage in penalty shootouts with international top star digital humans...

By reconstructing time and space through digital technology, transforming cultural and sports resources into interactive consumption assets, the metaverse is unleashing infinite potential in the cultural tourism industry.

Fig. 1: "Tang Palace Night Banquet" stage photo. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Li Jianan / Fig. 2: A girl using VR glasses. Photo provided by Visual China

Inventec's metaverse technology has reached a new milestone! The virtual idol singer Mila Mii developed by the group recently held eight ticketed online concerts on the VRSTATE Platform over the weekend, demonstrating the group's capabilities in metaverse applications and marking the official commercialization of its metaverse technology. Inventec's Metaverse Technology Division recently granted an exclusive interview to Economic Daily, unveiling the latest trends, challenges, and future plans for the VRSTATE Platform in 2025. Below is the complete interview transcript:

At the first plenary session and opening ceremony of the Sixth Session of the Seventh Municipal People's Congress held on February 25th, several foreign consular officials were invited to attend. They listened to the meeting through simultaneous interpretation headphones. However, there were no human interpreters present; instead, four screens in front of the consular officials displayed the meeting content translated into English in real-time, shifting many consuls' attention from the printed reports to the screens.

Behind Li Fei-Fei's team's attempt to reduce model costs, breakthroughs in open-source, data, and technology are key elements.

Recently, it was reported that researchers from the team of Chinese-American scientist and "AI Godmother" Li Fei-Fei trained an s1 model comparable to DeepSeek-R1 for less than $50. According to sources, this s1 model was not trained from scratch but involved supervised fine-tuning based on Alibaba Cloud's Qwen model.

Li Fei-Fei's team's publicly available paper shows that after supervised fine-tuning of the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct language model, the resulting s1-32B model outperformed o1-preview in competition math problems by up to 27% (MATH and AIME24), achieving performance comparable to top-tier reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 in mathematics and coding capabilities. In this process, Li Fei-Fei's team primarily used a small dataset s1K containing 1,000 questions and their reasoning trajectories and developed budget forcing technology to extend model thinking, building a high-quality model at ultra-low cost.

How can the simplest method be used to expand model testing time (i.e., allowing AI models to think more before answering) and achieve strong reasoning performance? Behind Li Fei-Fei's team's attempt to reduce model costs, breakthroughs in open-source, data, and technology are key elements.

The metaverse has become a prominent focus in the digital realm, serving as a new carrier for technological innovation and cultural dissemination. It significantly expands digital living spaces, facilitates deep integration of technology and culture, and delivers unprecedented interactive experiences with infinite possibilities. With the release of the "Virtual Reality and Industry Application Integration Development Action Plan (2022-2026)", the deep integration of virtual reality technology with various industries has become an integral part of national strategy.

Amidst this technological wave, MarsX Digital Platform emerges as a pioneer in empowering cultural development through technology. Aligning with national policies and adhering to the philosophy of "utilizing and exploring cutting-edge technologies to materialize a comprehensive metaverse digital ecosystem," MarsX actively engages in innovative practices that integrate virtual reality technology with cultural industries, having achieved multiple digital scene innovations.

Since the release of DeepSeek-V3 and R1-Preview-Lite, which attracted the attention of the entire network, DeepSeek has released another blockbuster achievement.

On January 20, DeepSeek released a new open-source reasoning model DeepSeek-R1, which achieved a performance level comparable to OpenAI o1 in multiple tasks such as mathematics, programming and reasoning, while reducing the cost of calling the application programming interface (API) by 90-95%.

Source: DeepSeek

According to our survey, the surge in AI-related topics and application demands in 2024 has significantly benefited relevant industries. Taiwan's major tech companies commenced their year-end celebrations in late December last year, inviting top-tier singers and bands to perform at employee appreciation events. While these performances generated substantial revenue, scheduling conflicts remained challenging. Through the integration of AI technology with musical culture, Inventec's self-developed virtual artist platform enables simultaneous multi-venue performances using robust computing capabilities.

After a successful performance at Taipei Arena, the 18-year-old virtual artist Mila Mii, created by Inventec VRSTATE and gold medal producer Chen Zihong, will land on the VRSTATE platform again on March 1 ~ March 2, 2025, bringing a unique online concert to fans around the world.

This concert is not only the latest attempt to integrate music with Metaverse technology, but also an important milestone for the music industry to explore new ways out.

The future belongs to AI, and also to manufacturers and users who are more capable of using AI

The penetration of AI into the field of consumer electronics is still accelerating.

At this year's CES 2025, AI is still the core topic and main indicator of this international technology feast. In the exhibition areas of major brands, we can see all kinds of novel and fun AI+ consumer electronics products and solutions everywhere.

Of course, the discussion on AI this year seems to be more profound and comprehensive than in previous years. In addition to discussing what kind of products and applications AI can enable consumer electronics to land, more manufacturers are also paying attention to how to better use AI to empower the field of consumer electronics. The former focuses on "output" and the latter focuses on "input".

For example, in the exhibition areas of Tuya Smart, NVIDIA, AMD, and Amazon Web Services, we see that these well-known manufacturers are either consolidating the construction of underlying infrastructure, or taking the lead in building a more open large-scale model ecosystem, or directly opening up a one-stop AI development link, etc.

In December 2024, the domestic artificial intelligence sector market performed well, and the industry index rose 8.66% in the past month. This month, the AI ​​sector continued to rise sharply. On the one hand, Shanji released AI glasses, catalyzing the theme of AI glasses, and the sector performed well. From the industry perspective, next year will be the year for AI glasses to go from 0 to 1, and many manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Baidu and Samsung will release new products. On the other hand, ByteDance AI assistant Doubao became popular, driving Doubao AI-related concept stocks to rise sharply. At present, computing power is no longer a constraint on the AI ​​industry, and AI applications will usher in a great era of development in the future.