Metaverse Development Forum / Shanghai Metaverse Innovation Conference
- Chinese name
- 元启上海元宇宙发展论坛
- Organizer
- Shanghai Yuanqi Metaverse Industry Promotion Center (上海元启元宇宙产业促进中心)
- City
- Shanghai
- Held
- September
- Cadence
- annual
The Metaverse Development Forum, also referenced under the name Shanghai Metaverse Innovation Conference, is an annually recurring Shanghai-based convening organized by the Shanghai Yuanqi Metaverse Industry Promotion Center (上海元启元宇宙产业促进中心) under the guidance of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization. Its editions have combined policy-and-industry release programming with hands-on exhibition experiences where digital humans function as the primary visible interface for demonstrating spatial computing, AR interaction, and real-time content generation. The 2025 edition, themed “元启上海·数智新界” and staged at the Caohejing Conference Center on September 28–29, showcased the city’s metaverse progress through “virtual–real integration” demonstrations combining video, XR devices, and digital human personas, and served as a release platform for a first batch of 40 metaverse innovation products and solutions that explicitly include digital humans alongside digital content, XR hardware, service platforms, and 3D engines, linking these to Shanghai’s application-scenario rollout and district-level project signings within a claimed metaverse industry scale exceeding 300 billion yuan. Across editions, practical demonstration formats have included phone-based AR activations that render digital human scenes in designated exhibition spaces — such as a dancing digital human girl — illustrating how digital humans are positioned less as standalone products and more as an application layer that makes metaverse infrastructure legible to ordinary users, deployable for guided experiences, interactive presentations, and immersive brand or public-service demonstrations that depend on device-mediated perception and scene anchoring.