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Chinese Big Tech firms led by Tencent, Baidu among world’s top-ranked filers of VR, AR patent applications as metaverse interest surges
- Tencent filed a total of 4,085 virtual reality and augmented reality patent applications in 2020 and 2021, ranking second in the world behind Samsung
- Baidu took the No 3 spot with 3,094 VR and AR patent applications in the past two years
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Chinese Big Tech companies, led by internet giants Tencent Holdings and Baidu, comprised more than half of the world’s top 10 filers of patent applications for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies over the past two years, showing a strong effort to establish a foothold in the emerging metaverse market.
Tencent, which runs the world’s biggest video gaming business by revenue and China’s largest social media platform, filed a total of 4,085 VR and AR patent applications in 2020 and 2021 to rank second in the world behind the 4,094 filings made by Samsung Electronics in the same two-year period, according to a report published this week by Chinese-language intellectual property information portal IPRdaily, citing data from research and development analytics provider PatSnap.
Chinese internet search market leader Baidu, which launched its metaverse app Xi Rang in December, took the No 3 spot with a total of 3,094 VR and AR patent applications in the past two years, according to the IPRdaily report.
The other Chinese companies that ranked in the top 10 include Android smartphone vendor Oppo, Ping An Insurance (Group) Co, artificial intelligence firm SenseTime and telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies Co, formerly China’s biggest smartphone supplier.
VR and AR are regarded as the fundamental technologies behind the development of the metaverse, the concept of a shared virtual environment that users access online, which is widely considered as the next generation of the internet.
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