Tongji University
- Chinese name
- 同济大学
- Pinyin
- Unified Social Credit Code
12100000425006125J- Website
- 1865154537
Classroom and campus · Market observers and rankers
Tongji University (同济大学) in Shanghai builds and runs its own campus digital human. Its Smart Campus Digital Human (智慧校园数字人), grown out of the university’s smart-campus cockpit — a “digital-intelligence hub” formally switched on in January 2025 whose control screens track some 600 indicators across 21 scenario domains — was selected among the four-ministry 2025 national metaverse typical cases, announced in May 2026 and covered by both the university’s news site and Shanghai Science & Technology News.
The digital-human thread runs through its teaching as well: a career-guidance instructor built a digital double of herself as a student-facing tool inside a four-course career-education curriculum.
Tongji also anchors the Cultural Creativity Metaverse (Shanghai) Research Institute (文创元宇宙（上海）研究院), a think tank unveiled in Shanghai on 18 November 2023, during the Fourth Yangtze River Delta International Cultural Industries Expo, with the Shanghai Municipal Cultural and Creative Industry Promotion Leading Group Office as guiding unit and the university’s School of Humanities as lead organizer, and with the virtual digital human as a central concern. It operates as a multi-institution consortium platform rather than as a registered institution of its own: the university’s research-platforms directory lists the internal unit that carries it as Cultural Creativity Metaverse (Shanghai) Research Center (文创元宇宙（上海）研究中心), while Research Institute (研究院) is the name used in press releases and co-organizer credits. Professor Xie Xuefang (解学芳) directs it, with Zang Zhipeng (臧志彭) and Huang Song (黄松) as deputy directors. The institute frames digital humans as a key medium connecting virtual and real worlds and empowering cultural communication: domain-specific expert digital humans powered by Tongji’s digital-intelligence cultural large model for cultural-museum science popularization, research into AIGC-driven upgrades of virtual digital humans, and digital humans in the overseas expansion of China’s digital culture industry. It is a recurring co-organizer and endorser of national metaverse solicitation programmes, among them the National Metaverse 1000 Outstanding Products Directory and the 2024 and 2025 AI Metaverse outstanding product, demonstration case and star-rated supplier roadshows, each with a dedicated virtual digital human category. It also anchors the Digital Culture Industry Research and Chinese-Style Cultural Metaverse Frontier book series, and its launch coincided with the release of the China Cultural Metaverse White Paper.