Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society

Qinhong Zhou; Hongxin Zhang; Xiangye Lin; Zheyuan Zhang; Yutian Chen; Wenjun Liu; Zunzhe Zhang; Sunli Chen; Lixing Fang; Qiushi Lyu; Xinyu Sun; Jincheng Yang; Zeyuan Wang; Bao Chi Dang; Zhehuan Chen; Daksha Ladia; Quang Vinh Dang; Jiageng Liu; Chuang Gan

arXiv · 2508.14893

Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society

Qinhong Zhou·Hongxin Zhang·Xiangye Lin·Zheyuan Zhang·Yutian Chen·Wenjun Liu·Zunzhe Zhang·Sunli Chen·Lixing Fang·Qiushi Lyu·Xinyu Sun·Jincheng Yang·Zeyuan Wang·Bao Chi Dang·Zhehuan Chen·Daksha Ladia·Quang Vinh Dang·Jiageng Liu·Chuang Gan

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Abstract

The rapid progress in AI and Robotics may lead to a profound societal transformation, as humans and robots begin to coexist within shared communities, introducing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual Community-an open-world platform for humans, robots, and society-built on a universal physics engine and grounded in real-world 3D scenes. With Virtual Community, we aim to enable the study of embodied social intelligence at scale. To support these, Virtual Community features: 1) An open-source multi-agent physics simulator that supports robots, humans, and their interactions within a society; 2) A large-scale, real-world aligned community generation pipeline, including vast outdoor space, diverse indoor scenes, and a community of grounded agents with rich characters and appearances. Leveraging Virtual Community, we propose two novel challenges. The Community Planning Challenge evaluates multi-agent reasoning and planning ability in open-world settings, such as cooperating to help agents with daily activities and efficiently connecting other agents. The Community Robot Challenge requires multiple heterogeneous robots to collaborate in solving complex open-world tasks. We evaluate various baselines on these tasks and demonstrate the challenges in both high-level open-world task planning and low-level cooperation controls. We hope that Virtual Community will unlock further study of human-robot coexistence within open-world environments.

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Qinhong Zhou, Hongxin Zhang, Xiangye Lin, Zheyuan Zhang, Yutian Chen, Wenjun Liu, Zunzhe Zhang, Sunli Chen, Lixing Fang, Qiushi Lyu, Xinyu Sun, Jincheng Yang, Zeyuan Wang, Bao Chi Dang, Zhehuan Chen, Daksha Ladia, Quang Vinh Dang, Jiageng Liu, Chuang Gan. 2026-02-08. Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14893

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