At home, you can visit the five major ruins in Egypt or the Terracotta Warriors in China. Of course, you can visit famous scenic spots around the world, which is no different from the real experience.
In an interoperable collaborative space, architects, engineers and designers work together on space design in a virtual world, freely entering and exiting the virtual and real worlds.
Similarly, at home or anywhere, students can receive education in a more immersive and social way, making the educational experience more interesting. Likewise, the gaming industry has become increasingly immersive, allowing gamers to forget reality and enter a virtual world.
What can bring such application scenarios and experience is the metaverse that is popular all over the world. The Metaverse has drawn a big pie for us, which is very tempting. Zhao Guodong, secretary-general of the Zhongguancun Big Data Industry Alliance, said that 2021 is the first year of Yuan Universe, which is comparable to the great migration in the age of great voyages.
Cao Kaibin, director of the Haibi Research Institute, believes that the concept of the metaverse has just been released, and it is estimated that it will take about 10 years to gradually take shape.
However, the blueprint of the metaverse has not been drawn yet, and the first strokes have just been made. It is still too early to develop where it will develop and how to change our way of life. Now is not the time to take stock of heroes, everyone has a chance, now is the time to think and plan, and the time to stop with silence.
01
Metaverse, the "digital clone" of the human world?
The core meaning of the Metaverse is to create a parallel space for human society.
In my opinion, the current concept of Metaverse is very mysterious and suspenseful. The main reason is that the metaverse has not really been recognized by everyone.
The term metaverse first appeared in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, referring to the fusion of physical reality, AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) in a shared online space.
Looking at it now, the Metaverse does not specifically refer to a certain application or product, it is a parallel universe parallel to human society carried in a digital form.
Wikipedia’s description of the metaverse is the most representative, “Through virtual augmented physical reality, a 3D virtual space based on the future Internet that presents the characteristics of convergence and physical persistence, with link perception and sharing characteristics”, its essence is parallel universe.
The key features and values of the Metaverse are becoming clearer.
Regarding the key features of the metaverse , venture capitalist Matthew Ball believes in an article published in January 2020 that it mainly includes: it must span the physical world and the virtual world; contain a fully mature economy; provide "unprecedented interoperability", i.e. users must be able to take their avatars and merchandise from one place in VR to another, no matter who is running that particular part.
Based on the idea that the metaverse is an enhanced virtual world parallel to the real world, the value it brings to us has gradually surfaced. As players, we use our daily life as a label, and we can do anything we can do in real life in Metaverse, including playing games, going to concerts, watching movies, shopping, and even creating.
Cao Kaibin, director of Haibi Research Institute, believes that the metaverse is not yet the ultimate form of digital society. The ultimate form of digital society is that it can be separated from the real world and realize the self-reproduction and self-growth of digital life.
Alexis Rollan, director of Ubisoft China's AI & Data Lab, gave six basic elements of the metaverse: social attributes, persistence, user-generated content (UCG) creation, media integration, self-owned economic system, and scalability.
Roblox believes that a real metaverse product should have eight elements: identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, anywhere, economic system, and civilization.
The Metaverse isn't just a game.
Seeing the concept of the Metaverse, many people immediately think that the Metaverse is just a game, a trick for game companies to make money in different ways.
Indeed, the Metaverse serves the development of the game industry and upgrades online games. Now just talking about providing an immersive experience seems to be unable to fully summarize the promotion and harm of the Metaverse to the game industry.
So entertainment games will obviously be a big part of the Metaverse, Zuckerberg said, but the Metaverse doesn't just cover games.
"It's a persistent, synchronous environment where we can be together, maybe some hybrid of the social platforms we see today, but also an environment where you can immerse yourself in it."
The Metaverse isn't just AR and VR.
When the metaverse is mentioned, people only think of virtual reality VR or augmented reality AR, although VR/AR will indeed be an important part of the metaverse.
Zhao Guodong believes that Metaverse and VR/AR are more like the relationship between the whole and the part. VR/AR is an important organizing part of the metaverse, but it is far from the whole of the metaverse.
Many companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, and Ali, have invested a lot in VR/AR, and have launched some products and solutions. But the Metaverse isn’t just about VR/AR. Many experts predict that it will be available on all different computing platforms, including PCs, mobile devices, game consoles, and more.
02
Opportunities created by the metaverse are constantly revised
The Metaverse is a "great idea," but that's about it so far.
But this year, Boblox, a company that makes video games for mostly kids and teens, went public as a "metaverse" company after years of losses, closing its first trading day with a dizzying $38 billion market cap.
One would naturally think that the concept of the Metaverse made Boblox. The game industry, as a major part of the metaverse, has become more and more immersive, bringing new experiences to the game industry, but regardless of the harm Boblox games have caused to teenagers.
The explorers in the market then listed a series of possible application scenarios in the Metaverse.
In the future metaverse, several friends can visit a certain scenic spot together through a telepresence virtual world. Matterport has been able to use VR technology to enable users to experience the five major ruins in Egypt.
The Metaverse promises to empower talented educators from around the world to better leverage immersive experience tools to make the educational experience more fun.
These traditional business models will undergo tremendous changes under the influence of Metaverse immersive commerce: highly immersive, you can try out products, and you can also accept introductions from merchants.
In the future, applications such as physical secret rooms, theaters, and concerts in the Metaverse will have an unparalleled enhanced experience.
NVIDIA's Omniverse is creating an interoperable collaborative space where architects, engineers, and designers can design spaces together. The platform can even integrate AI models of fluid dynamics and other physics libraries that simulate the real world.
The Metaverse is a vision that spans many companies and even the entire tech industry, so there is opportunity for everyone.
Zuckerberg said the Metaverse will bring enormous opportunities to individual creators and artists, to individuals who want to work and own homes far from today's urban centers, and to those who live with more limited educational or recreational opportunities. Where people bring great opportunity.
The business model of the metaverse is still a long way from maturity.
The realization of the Metaverse requires the complementarity of various technologies such as 5G, VR/AR, and cloud computing, but the core technology AR/VR has not yet formed a clear business model.
Hardware and terminal equipment sales are the most important source of income in the current early AR/VR market, but content, as the core element of the Metaverse, will be the main profit point in the future.
On the basis of rich content experience, the future business model may further expand to advertising, subscription services and other aspects. This is also the source of income that Zuckerberg expects.
03
The metaverse is a training ground for various "technologies"
The Metaverse is the beginning of life-giving technology. It is certain that the metaverse is the result of the comprehensive application of various technologies. If the metaverse comes true, a large wave of new technologies will gain a larger market.
The observation of China Software Network found that the technologies developed by Metaverse mainly involve four types of technologies from application to bottom layer:
Application experience layer. The metaverse is not a castle in the air, it must have attractive applications, and the technologies and services that build these applications are directly oriented to consumers. Among them, the game is currently the closest "entrance" to the metaverse, and the experience will continue to evolve from the game. At the same time, the application covers various daily life scenarios of human beings, providing users with more entertainment, social interaction, consumption, learning and business work content, and providing huge development opportunities for UCG.
Spatial computing layer. Seamlessly mix the digital world and the real world, so that the two worlds can perceive, understand and interact with each other, including 3D engine, VR/AR/XR, voice and gesture recognition, spatial mapping, digital twin technology, etc.
XR will be the next generation mobile computing platform. XR has penetrated into all walks of life. In addition to consumer-oriented entertainment, voice, and audio-visual, XR can be found in various industries such as education, training, industry, engineering, collaboration, manufacturing, and medical care. If Metaverse is a world, then XR equipment manufacturers are manufacturers that produce cars, airplanes, and even spacecraft for this "world".
Human-computer interaction layer. With the realization of miniaturized sensors, embedded AI technology, and low-latency edge computing systems, it is expected that future human-computer interaction devices will carry more and more applications and experiences in the Metaverse. VR/AR head-mounted displays are generally considered to be the main terminal for entering the metaverse space, and also include wearable devices, brain-computer interfaces and other devices that further enhance immersion.
Among them, brain science is known as the "ultimate frontier" for understanding nature and human beings. In the scientific community, the "Brain Project" has been considered a greater project than the Human Genome Project. The black technology "brain-computer interface" born on this basis is the main entrance for the new generation of game interaction.
Through multi-modal interactive devices, high-precision sensor devices, multi-type terminal computing, high-quality interactive transmission, advanced intelligent interactive algorithms and intelligent perception algorithms, BCI (brain-computer interface) technology will provide Metaverse from different aspects such as scenarios, devices, and requirements. Pave the way for development.
infrastructure layer. The explosion of the metaverse concept is an inevitable product of marginal improvements in infrastructure technology. With the maturity of 5G, cloud computing, blockchain and other technologies, the real-time computing capabilities in the virtual environment can support large-scale users to be online at the same time, and achieve a more immersive experience.
Cao Kaibin, director of Haibi Research Institute, believes that new communication and social methods will be born in the "parallel world" of Metaverse, and the current model with mobile phones as the core will change. In the future, there will be new tools that are different from WeChat and WhatsApp. A new digital empire will be born.
04
Ready to move business company
The Metaverse is a vision spanning many companies and even the entire tech industry, and is seen as the successor to the mobile internet. Of course, this is not something any one company can do on its own.
Cao Kaibin, director of Haibi Research Institute, believes that the ideal of Metaverse is a parallel universe of human society, which brings more development space for digital giants and more possibilities for establishing a "corporate country in a digital society".
Domestic and foreign giants such as Facebook, Netflix, and Tencent have begun to deploy related products. At present, companies participating in the exploration of the Metaverse can be divided into the following categories:
The first category is game companies.
Roblox, which first wrote the concept of "Metaverse" into its prospectus, once had a market value of more than 40 billion US dollars, had 32.6 million daily active users, and developed more than 18 million game experiences. Its active developer ecology, user ecology and business model are The market shows the future development potential of the Metaverse.
Roblox hosted a virtual concert featuring Lil Nas X, the hugely successful Metaverse app. And Roblox's real long-term goal is to build a metaverse where millions (or billions!) can come together to play games, meet, collaborate, and even create Roblox's own virtual economy, with a currency called Robux.
Overseas, the game platform Rec Room completed a new round of financing at the end of March this year, with a total amount of US$100 million. The company started with VR social games and has more than 15 million users. In mid-April, another company, Epic Games, raised US$1 billion for business development related to the Metaverse, setting a record for the highest financing in the Metaverse track.
Domestically, on March 11, MetaApp, a mobile sandbox platform developer, announced the completion of a US$100 million Series C round of financing, which has become the largest single financing in the domestic metaverse track; on May 28, cloud game technology service provider Haima Cloud completed A new round of financing of RMB 280 million.
The second category, technology giants that expand their fields
Facebook's Zuckerberg hopes that in the future, people will see Facebook not as a social network company, but as a metaverse company.
Facebook announced it would spend billions on Zuckerberg's new target of becoming a "Metaverse company," as he and a host of other tech titans scramble to take part in the next evolution of the internet and social interaction borrowed from science fiction. . The latest products of Facebook Oculus - AR glasses and other human-computer interaction projects have detonated the market, and the high cost performance and good user experience have been well received by consumers.
Zuckerberg predicted that in the next five years, Facebook will transform from a social media-based company to a Metaverse company.
Outside of Facebook, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is also bullish on Metaverse. As the digital and physical worlds converge, he says, Microsoft is leading a new layer of infrastructure: the enterprise metaverse. Microsoft bought Mojang, the developer of the Minecraft game, for $2.5 billion in 2014.
Microsoft has its own AR headset, called HoloLens, which is now mostly used for business applications. Moreover, at a price of more than $3,000, it is unaffordable for the average person.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said that he is building Omniverse, a platform for virtual collaboration and virtual worlds, allowing tens of millions of artists and designers to create together in their own universe.
As early as 2010, Qualcomm has been deeply involved in the technical fields of AR and VR, including human body tracking technology for XR, environmental perception technology, user interaction technology, etc. solution.
So far, more than 40 XR devices powered by the Snapdragon platform have been released, including VR and AR devices, as well as some smart glasses connected to mobile phones.
In China, Tencent began to track Roblox’s game projects as early as 2017. In May 2019, Tencent and Roblox established a strategic partnership. The two parties announced the establishment of a joint venture company to cultivate the next generation of programming, technology talents and content creators by creating a "game + education" form.
The business of Huawei's game side is mainly in the B-end market, mainly in the public cloud service game company, cloud game technology, game engine, AI technology, etc. to empower game companies. As a platform, Huawei mainly provides platform technical services for game companies.
In terms of specific products, Huawei built the AR/VR Engine 3.0 version to help developers build an AR/VR ecosystem ; released the Cyberverse map technology, and "Huawei River Map" is Huawei's first AR map based on this technology.
In April of this year, ByteDance invested nearly 100 million yuan in Code Qiankun, the developer of the "Metaverse" game. Code Universe's flagship product "Restart World" is quite similar to Roblox. It can be said to be one of the few UGC production platforms for teenagers in the domestic game industry.
The third category, innovative companies
The halo of the mobile Internet is quietly dimming, and it will be replaced by a multi-interface, full-sensory human-computer natural interaction method. The brain-computer interface will help human beings skip the physical hardware carrier, get rid of the bondage of the body, and enter the era of man-machine symbiosis.
Founded in 2018, a Chinese company, Brainlu Technology, is a brain-computer interface software and hardware platform technology company based on AI technology . Applied non-invasive brain-computer interface company".
Tetavi, the world's leading provider of volumetric video solutions, completed the latest round of financing of 20 million US dollars this year. The company mainly provides volumetric video software solutions for creating personalized immersive content in Metaverse. By establishing a new platform, it brings high-end immersive content to to consumers around the world.
Using 3D technology to virtualize the event scene, AllSeated mainly provides visualization tools for event planners, including 2D & 3D-CAD drawing, timetable and design desktop, etc. Based on the AllSeated platform, users can design and view the 3D images of the event site before the event, and invite various suppliers and guests to the platform for unified arrangement and management. The AllSeated platform currently covers the US, UK, and German markets.
Many domestic VR companies have recently obtained a large amount of financing. For example, the cases of virtual reality space mostly exist in the field of VR house inspections. Intermediary agencies such as Keike have launched VR house inspection functions; It has received financing; iQiyi VR has completed hundreds of millions of yuan in round B financing; Huanchuang Technology has completed 80 million yuan in round B financing; Wanmei Mobile has completed C round financing of 50 million US dollars, etc.
In terms of products, BOE has developed a VR panel with a response time of less than 5ms, which has been successfully applied to Huawei VR.
Although the Metaverse is still developing, the development speed of new technologies and new applications must not be underestimated, let alone its impact. Sometimes, choice may be more successful than hard work.
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