[Lieyun.com Beijing] According to reports on June 21, three people familiar with the matter said that Tencent Holdings announced to its employees on Monday the formal establishment of an "Extended Reality" (XR) department, officially betting on the virtual world. On the concept o

[ Lieyun.com Beijing] Report on June 21

According to reports, three people familiar with the matter said that Tencent Holdings announced to its employees on Monday the formal establishment of the "Extended Reality" (Extended Reality, abbreviation: XR) department, officially placing bets on Betting on the metaverse concept of the virtual world.

According to VR Gyro, Tencent officially confirmed the above news. It is reported that Tencent’s XR business belongs to the IEG business unit, and the general manager is Ma Xiaoyi . The specific business is handled by NExT Studios Shen Li, and will be deployed in both XR software and hardware.

extended reality is the collective name for immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). These technologies are considered to be the building blocks of the metaverse .

In fact, as early as the end of 2020, Ma Huateng emphasized the importance of the "metaverse" for the first time, which he called the "all-real internet".

An internal information shows that Tencent said that the XR business is a new business that the company is vigorously building in response to the real Internet. The goal is to build a world-class hard technology team under the leadership of industry leaders to compete for the next piece of the hard technology era. Tickets. This business focuses on laying out a full-link XR ecosystem, including XR devices on the hardware side, perceptual interaction technology on the software side, and content and developer ecology on the content and industry sides.

In November last year, Tencent also told analysts that the company had many "technologies and capabilities" to approach the "Metaverse" opportunities, but did not disclose specific details.

In February this year, it was reported that Tencent had launched a new XR business and was starting active recruitment within the company - that is, internal cross-department job transfers.

This information is basically consistent with the revelations made by the above three insiders that the department was established for the first time earlier this year but has been kept "secret".

Two of the people familiar with the matter also said that Tencent’s XR department will eventually have more than 300 employees. People familiar with the matter also pointed out that there is still uncertainty about the recruitment plan because Tencent will adjust the number of employees in the department based on performance.

It is worth noting that in May this year, according to Sina Finance, it was reported that Shen Li, general manager of NExT Studios, began to serve as the head of Tencent’s XR game studio. NExT Studios is an independent game studio under Tencent Games . The games it developed such as "Sanzhuli", "Death Comes" and "Nishan Shaman" have received widespread attention and praise from the market.