The 31st World University Games is three days away and host city Chengdu has equipped the athletes' village with various cutting-edge technologies to help athletes and delegations around the world enjoy their time during the Universiade.

When athletes travel between the village and venues, they have access to autonomous buses. There are two types of these buses, one with a driver and the other with no driver. These vehicles are remotely driven by a control center that monitors every one of them to make sure that every bus travels safely.

Language can always be a problem for people who travel to a foreign country, but that problem has been taken care of in the athletes' village in Chengdu. A smart translation intercommunication system is ready to help anyone who needs a translation.

The system carries the new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) translation barrier-free communication system and uses neural machine translation, speech recognition, natural-language understanding and speech synthesis technologies. It provides online translation, text transformation and speech synthesis of a total of 83 languages during the Chengdu Universiade.

Drinking coffee has been a necessity for many athletes. In order to meet their needs, a smart coffee-making machine has been installed in the athletes' village, ready to finish all the work, including grinding coffee beans, filtering, brewing and making latte art.

Delegations are not the only ones enjoying all of the convenience brought by technologies during the Universiade. Many of the volunteers have to work in the open air for hours in the hot weather in Chengdu. They can receive cooling vests from the smart cooling station to protect themselves from the high temperatures. These vests are made of a phase-change material, which is often used for aerodynamic cooling in aerospace engineering. They stay at 23 degrees Celsius to keep the volunteers cool.

The Chengdu Universiade will begin on July 28 and end on August 8.

(Cover photo: An autonomous-driving bus in the athletes' village for the 31st World University Games in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province. /CFP)