The Meta City Hall, designed by the CAA LAB Metaverse Planning Bureau under the leadership of Liu Haowei, has been recently completed.
Located in the futuristic metaverse city of Yuanbang, this City Hall marks CAA LAB’s first completed metaverse building in China, situated within a utopia for the creative class.
In this digital utopia, we break free from the limitations of the physical world to enable growth like that of a tree—continuously self-repairing and evolving—to meet the needs of digital residents with a surreal Eastern futurist ideal. — Liu Haowei
The “Yuanbang” app officially launched on November 11th. As the creator of Yuanbang City Hall, CAA LAB also played a key role in the early planning and development of the Yuanbang Metaverse City.
Yuanbang Metaverse City
Incubated and developed by CAA Architecture Firm, the CAA LAB Metaverse Planning Bureau aims to create a parallel metaverse world for humanity in the Web 3.0 era — the future “City of Tomorrow”. Previously, CAA LAB’s five projects were launched on Decentraland, the world’s largest metaverse platform, earning awards at the Global Metaverse Architecture Competition they founded.
The City Hall in Yuanbang
CAA’s LAB team combined conventional digital techniques with surreal design elements to express an Eastern-style romantic architectural language, culminating in the Yuanbang City Hall, known as the “Tree of Life”.
The Tree of Life — Yuanbang City Hall
Yuanbang
Yuanbang is a virtual reality interactive platform for metaverse cities, co-founded by Meta Media Holdings, Baidu Xiliang, and BV Baidu Venture Capital. It is a surreal virtual city that deeply integrates art, culture, design, fashion, and technology.
This digital paradise blends idealism, futurism, and romanticism, and will also expand into physical spaces to deliver an ultimate virtual reality interaction experience within the metaverse.
△ Panoramic bird’s-eye view of Yuanbang
Mr. Shao Zhong, founder of Yuanbang and chairman and CEO of Meta Media, has pioneered a metaverse business model centered on technology, creativity, and content production. He unites top creative talents and brand resources from both domestic and international markets to build Yuanbang into a premier global digital creative collaboration platform.
Led by Mr. Ma Jie, Vice President of Baidu, the Baidu Xirang development team oversees Yuanbang’s program development and large-scale world construction, providing ongoing technical support. Baidu launched “Xiliang” in 2021 — its first domestically produced metaverse product — aiming to offer the industry a cloud-intelligent integrated metaverse infrastructure platform. Leveraging Xiliang’s independent metastack capabilities, various industries can rapidly develop their own metaverse applications.
Residents in “Yuanbang” City
Yuanbang City Hall
CAA LAB responded proactively to digital citizens’ needs for public services and social activities in Yuanbang, creating the administrative and civic center of this metaverse “City of Tomorrow” — the Yuanbang City Hall — using digital twin technology.
The City Hall’s architecture embodies a thriving, humane “Tree of Life”, with lush leaves growing on its branches and evolving into floating islands from bottom to top. Its decentralized spatial system allows these islands to operate independently without interference.
Upon entering the City Hall and passing through the multifunctional central hall on the first floor, users are quickly directed to their required services. At the building’s core is a vertical transportation core tube, connecting suspended independent spaces on each floor via aerial bridges.
After a preliminary consultation, users can access their respective municipal service areas from here.
The building is enveloped by holographic digital glass curtain walls shaped like flying wings. Once logged into the metaverse platform, users can view their personal information on screens. This decentralized system links each user’s exclusive account, verified and displayed individually, ensuring privacy and easy access to personal data.
The “Tree of Life” adapts continuously to meet the diverse public, municipal, and service needs of Yuanbang’s residents, constantly growing and evolving within this intelligent metaverse city.
Construction System of Yuanbang City Hall
Metaverse Arbitration Court
The world’s first metaverse arbitration institution, established by the Guangzhou Arbitration Commission, is housed within Yuanbang City Hall. The Libra symbol represents fairness and justice, deeply resonating with people.
CAA LAB incorporated this concept into the main structure of the City Hall — the “Libra Floating Island”.
On the scales of justice, everyone stands equal without bias. As Montesquieu famously said, “In the eyes of a loving mother in civil law, every person is a nation.”
The arbitration tribunal functions are embedded within the City Hall’s floating islands, suspended from bottom to top, ranging from 15 to 300 square meters.
Different tribunal sizes can be chosen based on case complexity and participant numbers.
Recently, the arbitration court resolved a property dispute within the metaverse, marking the first arbitration case of its kind worldwide.
The first urban master plan and implementation of Yuanbang was developed with the involvement of Yecheng Architectural Firm.
Alongside the Meta City Hall designed by CAA LAB under Liu Haowei’s leadership, the floating community building “DUOTOPIA” by artist Cao Fei, and a series of virtual architectural works — including the world’s first Meta Art Academy created by science fiction architect Yu Zhen and the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts team — have all been realized.
3-kilometer aerial view of Yuanbang
The metaverse is no longer confined to the realm of science fiction movies and novels. It represents a new wave of technological transfer, industry transformation, and social landscape reset — marking the dawn of a new era.
Duotuobang DUOTOPIA
Meta Art Academy
As Liu Haowei reflected, “For most people, the metaverse world we speak of today is like discussing Mars colonization — a distant future that’s imaginable but unreachable. Yet it has quietly entered our lives and is influencing the real world. As visionary and creative architects shaping the physical world, we embrace this arrival of utopian fantasy and embark on a journey to open a future where virtual and real worlds coexist for humanity.”
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