Driverless ice cream trucks, 3D avatar booths: Hangzhou shows off tech innovations at Asian Games

HANGZHOU: Hangzhou, the capital of China’s Zhejiang province, is known as an innovation powerhouse, and home to Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma.

It is also where the Asian Games are being held until Oct 8.

The city of 12 million is using the event as an opportunity to showcase the country’s cutting-edge technologies, including big data, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.

Roaming around the Asian Games venues are unmanned vehicles offering tours and ice cream, robot dogs that patrol power-supply facilities, and automated mosquito trappers that zap the pests.
 

Athletes and visitors can stop a driverless roving ice cream truck with the wave of a hand, and choose from over a variety of flavours such as avocado, peach and vanilla.

Photo booths equipped with 140 tiny cameras are able to create 3D avatars within five to eight minutes. The avatars can move, dance, play, and even take part in the Hangzhou Games metaverse, where visitors can play sports in virtual reality with the mascots.

At the media village, an unmanned bus takes journalists around the vicinity on 10-minute tours. The bus is not the usual - it does not have windows. Instead, it has screens that display a real-time camera view of the roads and scenery outside.

Hangzhou’s government spent about US$30 billion on Games-related infrastructure, with an aim to make the Games village smart and green.

For a start, all venues are powered by renewable energy.

Bike-sharing is highly encouraged and residents of the Games village can participate in environmentally-friendly practices to accrue points online that can be exchanged for gifts.

“In the construction process of this Asian Games village project, we incorporated the values of being green, intelligent, frugal, and