Clockwise from left: Two livestreamers sell oranges at a fruit trading company in Xunwu county, Jiangxi province, on Aug 28, last year. A visitor interacts with a robot at the Zhongguancun Forum exhibition in Beijing on Sept 21, 2021. Workers enter a canteen to have lunch using a face-recognition payment system at an industrial park in Beijing's Daxing district on Oct 15, 2021.

A farmer shows how to use a mobile phone to control a drone used to water farmland in Weishi county, Henan province, on April 21, 2021.

A self-driving vehicle livestreams blooming cherry flowers at Donghu Lake Cherry Garden in Wuhan, Hubei province, through 5G technology on March 21, 2020.

A customer uses a mobile phone to scan a QR code and pay her bill at a market in Shanghai's Jiading district on May 18.

A surgeon wears binocular loupes during an operation at China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing on June 15, 2020.

Passengers scan their ID cards to board a train at Chongli Railway Station in Chongli, Hebei province, on Feb 3.

A senior resident experiences VR technology at a public health experience center in Jiashan county, Zhejiang province, on July 13, 2021.

Visitors walk through teamLab's digital art space in Beijing's Chaoyang Joy City shopping center on Feb 1.

Big data, 5G, robots, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence ... our lives are becoming more automated and smarter by the day.

VR headsets allow people to experience alternate realities. Thanks to the speed of 5G, we can watch flowers bloom or observe endangered animals in the wild through high-definition livestreaming. And these days, passengers scan ID cards to enter stations and catch trains.

During Spring Festival, Tokyo art collective teamLab, one of the world's leading multiverse practitioners, opened a 10,000-square-meter digital art space in Beijing's Chaoyang Joy City shopping center. The exhibition drew throngs of visitors to experience its cutting-edge mix of entertainment, technology, design and science.