The “Coming-M 2021” metaverse conference kicked off Monday, with representatives from around 50 companies from 11 different countries taking part.

Hyundai Futurenet announced Friday that it was co-hosting the interactive metaverse conference with The Korea Herald to “make an arena where global corporations, governments, and individuals preparing for the post-pandemic era can share ideas and work together.”

The conference will be held for five days from Monday to Friday on Coming-M, a metaverse platform that Hyundai Futurenet is developing.

Renowned figures such as Zhiyun Duan, vice president of Chinese gaming giant LuoBu, a joint venture between Tencent and Roblox, David Chung, undersecretary for innovation and technology of Hong Kong, and Wei Xianhua, executive director of Joint Laboratory of CAS- Reuters Financial Risk Management are taking part.

South Korean companies working in the field of metaverse, Wysiwyg Studios, Locus, EVR Studio, d’strict, and Digisonic, are also participating in the conference.

“Metaverse is not just an expanded version of a game but it’s a technology track in which contents and blockchain, AI, network, display and data are combined,” said Ryu Seong-Taek, representative director of Hyundai Futurenet.

“To actualize that, a lot of related companies must build an ecosystem and that is why we are holding this conference.”

Choi Jin-young, CEO of The Korea Herald, said, “Legacy industries such as the press face a stage where they must change if they do not want to go downhill. Through this conference, I hope that many companies, not only the press, can find a way to lead the future.”

Yang Byung-seok, CEO of an open metaverse platform company, said they are developing an SaaS service based on WebXR to make a metaverse that can easily be used by their B2B clients.

“We are glad to test out the metaverse through this conference,” Yang said.

Metafactory, a company under Hyundai Futurenet that operates the Coming-M platform, said it aims to create a metaverse for the education and event sector.

“This conference is just the start of an event platform. We will launch a function-centered platform that takes into account profit and data and that can easily be used on PC, Web and VR environments,” said Song Min-jae, a representative of Metafactory.