When Shenzhen Becomes a Virtual City
“If we move the Shenzhen City into a virtual world like Minecraft, how many players would be attracted?” In the afternoon of October 11, Chen Guo, Secretary-general of the Urban Innovation Seeds Programs asked the audience at the press conference.
This is not a press conference of a new online game. This is about one of the Urban Innovation Seeds Programs of Shenzhen called Urban Sandbox.
This city innovation is led by Shenzhen Institute of Planning and Tencent, one of the game industry giants in China. Tencent will provide interactive technologies based on virtual reality, integrated with accumulated urban data collected by Shenzhen Planning Institute, to create a real Shenzhen City in a virtual world. In a sense, this will be a virtual city based on real world data. Users could find the corresponding presence of hospitals, streets and even newsstands of the real world.
As thousands of users and virtual operators settle down in the virtual Shenzhen, this virtual city will gradually present increasingly real life scenes : from traffic jam on the road to seeing a doctor at the hospital , smart users will achieve so much fun as well as business opportunities. Behind the busy scenes of the game, data flows of medical services, traffic planning and even consumer demands created by virtual users will make the virtual city a copy of the real one. “When most of users agree to build a school at a specific area, it will be so much easier for policy makers to make certain decisions.” Guo said this was exactly the wish of Urban Sandbox, “Express your opinion in the virtual world, we will give feedback in the real one.”
These Urban Innovation Seeds Programs may not get certain achievements in the short term, but personally I have to agree that Shenzhen is being a pioneer in urban system innovation of China, again.
Reference: He Huang, the Virtual Shenzhen
