Supporters of Marcus Endicott’s Patreon can access weekly or monthly video consultations on this topic.
By 2015, Macau already hosts two permanent virtual character installations, one dating from the opening of City of Dreams in June 2009 and one from the opening of Studio City in October 2015. At City of Dreams, Melco Resorts had commissioned Falcon's Creative Group to create the Vquarium, a large-scale virtual marine display in which animated mermaids and sea creatures move across curved acrylic panels behind cascading water, filling the resort's main entrance atrium with synthetic marine life rendered through rear-projection. Visitor accounts confirm it was a fixture of the property during this period, though it was eventually removed during major renovations at an unspecified later date. At Studio City Macau, MDH Hologram had installed a permanent holographic performance featuring Dita Von Teese, activated for the resort's October 2015 grand opening using EyeMagicP technology.
In January 2018, MGM China opened MGM Cotai with a landmark digital art installation called The Spectacle, a four-story immersive environment wrapping the resort's interior atrium in 25 permanent LED screens spanning a 900-metre perimeter and holding more than 26 terabytes of artistic content. Created by Obscura Digital with audiovisual systems by Electrosonic, The Spectacle displayed works by photographers including Joel Sartore and Magda Indigo at a scale that had no precedent in Macau. Though the installation did not feature humanoid digital beings, it established MGM Cotai as the territory's most ambitious venue for technology-driven visual experience, and its infrastructure would later support far more sophisticated programming. The facility subsequently earned a Guinness World Record for the largest free-span gridshell glazed roof, confirmed in January 2019.
The next substantive event in digital character display at a Macau venue came in August 2019 with the opening of Legend Heroes Park at Studio City Macau. Located on Level 2 of the resort's East Wing in Cotai, the approximately 25,000-square-foot facility organised its programming into four themed zones combining virtual reality, augmented reality, motion tracking, and holographic technologies. Its most distinctive feature was a holographic K-pop concert experience presenting performances by G-Dragon, BIGBANG, 2NE1, and PSY through holographic projection, allowing visitors to stand in apparent proximity to life-scale virtual reproductions of the performers. Samsung served as a strategic partner, contributing professional display solutions, while Vega Global functioned as an audiovisual systems integrator for the display installation rather than as the park's developer, which was a Korean entertainment company behind the Legend Heroes brand; the park's chief executive was Daniel Ra, according to the SimEx-Iwerks press release associated with the opening.
The onset of COVID-19 in early 2020 brought Macau's economy to a near halt, and experimental entertainment technology was among the first categories suspended as the territory's gaming concessionaires concentrated on operational survival and, later, on licence renewal negotiations. Against this backdrop, teamLab's Macau venture opened quietly. In June 2020, teamLab SuperNature Macau soft-opened at Cotai Expo Hall F within The Venetian Macao as a 5,000-square-metre permanent digital art experience, originally planned for early in the year before the pandemic caused delays. Featuring interactive synthetic digital creatures that detect and respond to visitors in real time, teamLab SuperNature Macau represented the largest permanent deployment of responsive synthetic beings in the territory, even if the characters were not humanoid in the conventional sense. The installation remained in operation and would undergo significant expansion in subsequent years.
As COVID travel restrictions persisted through 2021 and into 2022, Macau's casino-resort sector concentrated on the government-mandated non-gaming investment commitments embedded in the new concession agreements finalised in late 2022. Experimental digital activations largely waited. By September 2022, however, a small venue at The Parisian Macao began hosting what was positioned as the territory's first metaverse-to-reality exhibition. Running from September 2022 through May 2023, Dreamspace: Metaverse New Wave occupied a retail space on the fifth floor of the resort and was organised by the Metaverse Industry Association Macau, a body founded by Au Ka Shing. Using face motion capture and three-dimensional scene rendering technology supplied by May.Social, visitors could create virtual avatar bodies and interact within metaverse environments, making this the closest analogue to a digital human deployment that had appeared in Macau before 2024. The exhibition also featured more than forty NFT artworks, and an extension in early 2023 added new works including pieces connected to musician Hanjin Tan.
In October 2022, Melco Resorts opened Artelli Art Space at City of Dreams, a 600-square-metre art venue designed by Malherbe Paris that combined physical artworks with digital art displays, augmented reality elements, and planned metaverse and NFT integrations. Artelli's opening represented one of the earliest hybrid art-technology spaces to open at a Macau integrated resort, signalling that the sector was beginning to treat digital experience as a legitimate cultural programming category rather than a passing novelty.
The tempo of digital technology activity in Macau accelerated in May 2023 when BEYOND Expo 2023 returned to physical format at The Venetian Macao following years of online-only editions during the pandemic. The event drew more than 600 exhibitors and featured prominent Chinese digital human technology companies, including SenseTime (商汤科技), Huawei (华为), and Alibaba Cloud. SenseTime co-hosted a Web3 Summit as part of the expo's programming. The collective presence of major mainland AI companies at Asia's largest technology exhibition, held in Macau, marked a turning point in the territory's positioning as a venue for showcasing advanced AI applications to an internationally oriented audience. That same month, on May 26, 2023, teamLab SuperNature Macau held its grand opening with three new artwork spaces added to the existing installation, representing the facility's full public launch after three years of COVID-constrained operation.
Between July and September 2023, MGM China presented an exhibition titled To Infinity and Beyond: The Art of Hsiao Chin at MGM Theater as part of Art Macao 2023. The presentation transformed the abstract artist's works into three-dimensional digital formats integrated with audiovisual elements, using the theater's advanced display infrastructure to create what organisers described as an art-technology-entertainment hybrid experience. While the exhibition centred on digitised artworks rather than interactive virtual beings, it further developed MGM Theater's identity as a venue at the intersection of art and high-resolution digital display technology, establishing the space's credentials ahead of far larger productions to come.
By April 2024, Macau's digital landscape shifted in ways that would define the remainder of the year. In April 2024, MGM China held an announcement event at MGM Theater for what was at that stage called MGM 2049, a large-scale immersive theatrical show to be directed by Zhang Yimou. More than 600 guests attended as Zhang Yimou presented the concept, which from its earliest public description included a mix of cultural performance, holographic visual design, and advanced display technology integrated across the theater's 12K screen infrastructure. Also in April 2024, at the Macau International Tourism Expo held at The Venetian Macao, the Macau Government Tourism Office, CTM (澳門電訊), and Baidu Smart Cloud (百度智能云) jointly announced the launch of Makmak, Macau's first AI-powered tourism customer service application. Powered by Baidu's Ernie large language model and supporting multiple languages, the platform achieved a self-resolution rate exceeding 96 percent in testing, and officials noted at the time that digital humans represented a potential future direction for tourism IP creation within the platform ecosystem, though Makmak itself was a text-based AI assistant at launch rather than a visually embodied digital person. The service formally went live on September 27, 2024.
Beginning in April 2024 and running through October 2024, the Macau Science Center hosted Discover Yangxin Dian, a digital experience exhibition co-organised with the Palace Museum (故宫博物院) to mark Macau's twenty-fifth return anniversary. The exhibition recreated the Hall of Mental Cultivation from the Forbidden City using body-sensing interaction, three-dimensional modelling, and virtual reality, allowing visitors to move through digitally reconstructed imperial spaces and engage with the environment in real time. The collaboration between one of China's most prestigious cultural institutions and the Macau Science Center brought large-scale VR experiential design to Macau's cultural programming for the first time.
In May 2024, BEYOND Expo 2024 convened at the Venetian Macao Convention and Exhibition Centre from May 22 to 25, and for the first time the event featured demonstrably concrete digital human technology at a Macau venue. iFlytek (科大讯飞) exhibited what it described as an Einstein AI Virtual Human at its booth, a demonstration integrated with the company's Spark Smart Blackboard educational product in which an AI-generated likeness of Albert Einstein conducted interactions with visitors. Macau Chief Executive Ho Iat Seng visited the iFlytek booth during the expo. Huawei presented programming under a Technology Lecture series focused on Macau's economic diversification, including a segment explicitly addressing digital human applications in commerce, describing how its digital human technology combined AI, image generation, and voice recognition to enable interactive retail experiences. These demonstrations at BEYOND Expo 2024 constituted the most direct and documented presentations of digital human technology at any Macau expo to that date.
In August 2024, Galaxy Entertainment Group (银河娱乐集团) opened a major location-based virtual reality installation at Galaxy Macau in collaboration with iQiyi (爱奇艺). The Love Between Fairy and Devil VR Immersive Experience, based on iQiyi's 2022 fantasy drama series of the same name, occupied approximately 16,000 square feet across five themed zones. Built using Unreal Engine 5, optical motion capture, AI-generated content, and location-based mixed augmented reality technology, the installation placed visitors inside a virtual world populated by characters from the source IP. Actress Yu Shuxin, who starred in the original drama, attended the opening ceremony alongside Macau government officials. The Galaxy Macau installation was the global premiere of this concept and was designed to operate through June 2025, with further deployments planned across mainland China. It represented the first large-scale VR character-interaction venue at a Macau integrated resort and introduced a model of IP-driven immersive digital character experience to the territory's entertainment landscape.
In November 2024, Macau's schools and civil society participated in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Youth AI Dream Camp, a gathering held on November 9 and 10 at Macau Kaoyip Secondary School as part of the territory's twenty-fifth return anniversary celebrations. More than 130 participants engaged in activity tracks that included two-dimensional graphical coding, three-dimensional metaverse art design, and AI-generated content creation using Tencent's (腾讯) Hunyuan AIGC system. A concurrent Greater Bay Area Digital Education Development Forum convened alongside the camp and made reference to an Education Digital Human Working Group, signalling institutional interest in digital humans as a pedagogical category even as the youth activities themselves centred on coding and AI content creation rather than digital human demonstrations specifically. The event was organised in connection with the Central Government Liaison Office in Macau.
Later in November 2024, a more directly digital human-focused installation opened in Macau's historic Barra district. On November 23, 2024, MGM China launched cAI: Soul Scan at Navy Yard No. 1 within the Macau Contemporary Art Center. The work was built around cAI, a multimodal AI model custom-developed since 2017 by artist Cai Guo-Qiang (蔡国强) to embody more than ten distinct AI personas, including versions of Einstein, Nietzsche, and Ptolemy, as well as a poet named Vale, a figure named Psychic, and a persona called Storm. Over the course of the exhibition, visitor interactions with these AI personas generated nearly 80,000 digital fireworks through a participatory co-creation mechanic, and the installation also featured AI-directed fire powder paintings and an AI fortune-telling component. The exhibition was produced by MGM China with Pansy Ho as a central figure and was scheduled to run through June 2025, making it the longest-running AI persona installation that Macau had hosted.
The final weeks of 2024 brought two further events of significance. On December 3, 2024, the 2024 Macau International Convergent Media Forum convened at Macau University of Science and Technology (澳門科技大學), organised by the Macau New Media Alliance and attended by nearly 200 participants. The forum's theme, Human-AI Coexistence: Future, foregrounded the role of artificial intelligence in media and communications, and the opening ceremony premiered a video titled AI · Macau 25 Years. The event also saw Macau Business Press International Media Group sign an AI Development White Paper with Shenzhen Qianzhan, establishing a formal commitment between the two organisations to collaborative AI research and media development. Then, on December 15, 2024, MGM China premiered Macau 2049 at MGM Theater in MGM Cotai, the most technically ambitious theatrical production Macau had seen. Directed by Zhang Yimou and produced under Pansy Ho, the show's holographic visual design was overseen by British holographics specialist Dominic Faraway. Macau 2049 runs approximately 80 minutes across eight chapters — Drumming and Shadows, Khoomei and Etherea, Miao Songs and Transcendent, The Crossroads Inn and Masks, Yangge and Robots, Yi Song and Ocean, Lion Dance and Radiance, and Storytelling and Origin — combining live performance with holographic projection and AI-generated visual sequences on Asia's first 12K ultra-widescreen dynamic theater. The production involved 582 professionals from more than 20 countries across 20 production teams and performs five days per week as a permanent Macau residency, marking the territory's most significant convergence of holographic and AI-driven visual storytelling in a theatrical context.
In March 2025, CTM and Baidu Smart Cloud formally opened the City Digital Economy Innovation Center at a CTM retail location on Gaodi Wu Street. The centre showcased Baidu's PaddlePaddle AI platform and hosted AI training courses recognised by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, developed in collaboration with the Macau Productivity and Technology Transfer Centre. The centre's opening reflected the increasingly institutionalised nature of Macau's engagement with artificial intelligence infrastructure, building on the commercial AI demonstration work that had characterised 2024's accelerated activity and establishing a dedicated physical venue through which mainland AI capabilities could be formally introduced to the Macau market.
[Apr 2026]