by sportswriters Yue Wenwan and Gao Meng<\/p>\n
MILAN, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) — After lunch, French ice hockey player Anae Simon placed a pin from her national team into an orange capsule and waited for a robotic arm to drop it into a transparent ball pit in the Milano Olympic and Paralympic Village.<\/p>\n
Then she leaned toward a touch screen and spoke a simple instruction in her native language: “Help me grab a blue one.”<\/p>\n
Seconds later, the robotic arm, guided by artificial intelligence, reached into the pit, selected a blue plastic capsule and placed it gently on the counter.<\/p>\n
Inside was a pizza-shaped pin inscribed with “pizza club” and “eat more.” “This is a new one, I’ve never seen it. It’s so adorable,” Simon said with a smile. “With this technology, exchanging pins here is like opening a mystery box.”<\/p>\n
The moment captures why a small booth tucked inside the athlete village has become an unexpected attraction.<\/p>\n
Powered by Chinese technology from Alibaba Cloud, the smart pin exchange station is turning a decades-old Olympic tradition into a playful, tech-driven experience, drawing athletes from around the world.<\/p>\n
Pin trading has long been part of Olympic culture, a way for competitors and staff to connect across sports and borders. At the Milano-Cortina Games, that ritual comes with a digital twist. Participants place one of their own pins into a capsule, then let an AI-driven robotic arm randomly select another.<\/p>\n
The station is driven by Alibaba Cloud’s large language model, known as Qwen, which allows users to give voice instructions in Chinese, English, French and Italian.<\/p>\n
For many athletes, the novelty lies not just in the technology, but in how it blends into the social rhythm of the village.<\/p>\n
Italian medical staff member Daniela Artesani said she visits the booth nearly every day.<\/p>\n
“Everyone is curious about it,” she said. “Each capsule feels like a small gift from someone you don’t know. And it doesn’t replace the traditional face-to-face exchange. It just makes it more playful.”<\/p>\n
The athlete village in Milan officially opened on Jan. 30, with around 1,500 people living inside. The Olympic atmosphere is already thick; flags line the buildings, fluttering in the winter air.<\/p>\n
Around the intelligent pin exchange station, collectors have deposited pins with their own histories: emblems from the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, mascots from the 2008 Beijing Olympics and badges from the Paris 2024 Games. Each capsule tells a different story, even before it is opened.<\/p>\n
According to Tai Le, an on-site Alibaba Cloud staff member, more than 1,300 people have tried the station in its first five days of operation.<\/p>\n
Yet even as technology draws crowds, the original spirit of pin trading remains visible throughout the village.<\/p>\n
In the dining hall, Chinese speed skater Yang Binyu unclipped a Chinese team pin featuring a panda and the Milano-Cortina mascot Tina to exchange with others.<\/p>\n
“Besides the races, this is what I’m most excited about \u2014 trading pins and making friends at the Winter Olympics,” she said. \u25a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/strong> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" … smile. "With this technology<\/span>, exchanging pins here is … attraction. Powered by Chinese technology<\/span> from Alibaba Cloud, the … tradition into a playful, tech<\/span>-driven experience, drawing athletes … operation. Yet even as technology<\/span> draws crowds, the original …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}