December 10, 2021, guided by Guangdong Game Industry Association, Guangdong Virtual Reality Industry Technology Innovation Alliance, Shenzhen Science and Technology Association, Shenzhen Internet Culture Market Association, hosted by Gyro Technology, Shenzhen Science and Technology Development Exchange Center, Hengyue The 2021 Future Business Ecological Link Conference and the 6th Golden Top Award Ceremony ("FBEC2021"), co-organized by Maker Cube and co-sponsored by the industry's leading media game top, VR top, top e-sports, top finance, and top media, was held in Shenzhen The grand opening of the banquet hall on the 6th floor of the Sheraton Grand China Hotel!
At the China Power 2021 5G XR Industry Summit, Guo Peng, head of VR/AR of Qualcomm China, delivered a speech on the theme of "Spaces for the next generation of XR".
The following is the transcript of the speech:
Today is very lively, the annual FBEC has started again, and this year really many people came, which is in line with our expectation.
Just now Cong Qing talked about a lot of long-term and macro metaverse imaginations. Qualcomm, as an upstream company in the industrial chain, as a supplier of chips and a supply chain of underlying software algorithms, started to analyze why XR can develop to today. The reason is that What? Find the reason and see what to do next? What did Qualcomm do again?
Although tens of thousands of years ago, human beings lived in a three-dimensional world, but the way we record information and pass on information has always been two-dimensional. At first, we chiseled words and paintings on rock walls, and later we used paper to write. There are screens, notebooks, and tablets, all of which have one thing in common: two-dimensional and flat. But we live in a three-dimensional world, why can't we transmit information and inherit civilization in a three-dimensional way? From 2D to 3D, from plane to three-dimensional, is a fundamental reason for the transformation from existing consumer electronics products to XR.
Therefore, XR will definitely carry a large part of the responsibility to promote human civilization in the future. In it, we are responsible for the lowest-level technology, so we conclude that the most critical and lowest-level technology for XR to succeed is spatial computing. The calculation of space contains two particularly important levels:
Perception of the human user itself. A set of equipment or a set of systems can clearly know what the user is
What state, what are you doing? looking at what? What do you want to do? What is the state of hands, feet, eyeballs, and lips?
perception of space. The device can know what kind of environment I am in and what characteristics the environment has.
What kind of people do I face.
The perception of users and the perception of space make up spatial computing. With the underlying technology and the support of content/algorithms, Qualcomm firmly believes that XR is the next generation mobile computing platform. In the future, physical screens may disappear, and the world will be replaced by you. screen, this is our vision for XR.
Going back to the actual data or the data forecast in the next few years, according to some consulting companies and our collation, it is predicted that the shipment of XR headset hardware will increase from 7 million units in 2020 to 57 million units in 2024. The average unit price forecast is 500 US dollars, and the sales of hardware can be as high as 31 billion US dollars, and this is only the sales of hardware.
But the metaverse has many layers. The core is the underlying hardware, and there are hardware and the Internet on top. The total industry will be 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than 31 billion US dollars, so this is a very imaginative one. industry.
In terms of specific hardware forms, there are mainly two types that are developing simultaneously. The first is the all-in-one machine, from the AR all-in-one machine to the VR all-in-one machine. Now the all-in-one machine has more and more functions, and the volume and cost are also getting better and better. The more optimized, the all-in-one form will continue to move forward. VR is currently dominated by games, and now there are some application extensions in social networking, e-commerce, short videos and even smart cars. AR is currently used more in industrial and industry applications. This is an extension of AR glasses as a smart accessory for mobile phones, which is equivalent to another screen of the mobile phone, or another interface for displaying input/output. Therefore, we define it as an XR smart head display, which will follow the pace of the mobile phone industry. This development trend will develop from simple to more versatile, from limited to unlimited.
So in the near future, we can see the emergence of smart headsets equipped with mobile phones. It may use the computing power, ecology and industrial chain of mobile phones, but it can give users an experience far beyond mobile phones. This is the future of smart phones. The headset opportunity. In the more distant future, the two may merge. There are still many problems to be solved in the future, such as batteries and optics, which are challenging, but where there are challenges, there are opportunities. The optics and batteries are left to partners in other fields in the industry to solve, and we will solve the problems on the CPU main chip side.
In addition to releasing a variety of chips, Qualcomm has also greatly reduced the design cycle and development difficulty for users in terms of software algorithms, spatial computing, user perception, spatial perception, and reference designs for different parts and ecosystems. The Spaces released by AWE this year is an AR developer platform specially built for AR/MR, all of which are what we have done in the ecosystem. You may think that Qualcomm is a company that provides chips, but we not only provide chips, we have also done a lot of ecological things. In addition to chips, Qualcomm also provides a lot of underlying software, algorithms, and complete designs.
We also have many ecological partners, including customers, ODM manufacturers and OEM manufacturers, many excellent solutions and partners of many parts, to create the whole solution together. In the face of global suppliers, Qualcomm will create XR+5G integration in the future. At present, more than 50 products have been released or sold on the market. The main chip platforms are XR1 and XR2. XR2 is still the mainstream choice of many of our manufacturers. It is equipped with 5G functions, powerful multimedia processing capabilities and optical capabilities, so at the current time node, if customers want to cooperate with us, XR2 is a good choice.
At the AWE in the United States in November this year, Qualcomm grandly released the Spaces platform-Snapdragon Spaces. This is a
A developer platform for MR/AR that helps developers create head-mounted experiences that integrate with the physical world. It includes three levels of things:
First of all, it is technology and innovation, many of which are developed by us;
Second, it is an open and cross-terminal ecosystem. Open and cross-terminal not only refers to the upper layer, the same layer, but also to the lower layer, so its compatibility is very good;
Third, it is a developer-first platform, designed to allow developers to transfer what they currently have from other scenarios/other platforms, such as mobile phones and platforms, without increasing additional development investment. Migrated to the Snapdragon Spaces platform quickly.
Next, let's take a look at a video to see what exactly Spaces provides for the AR scene?
Please ignore the line on the glasses in the video. This is just our internal prototype. With the iteration of technology, we believe that our products will not only be wireless, but will also become smaller and smaller. There are so many scenes mentioned in the video just now, including gesture recognition, graphic recognition, spatial positioning and anchor point persistence, object detection and tracking, spatial occlusion relationship, plane detection, head positioning, scene recognition and The construction of spatial maps, all these functions can extend the functions of current equipment to a three-dimensional space.
Qualcomm also announced the acquisition of two companies not long ago. One is Wikitude, which is a company mainly engaged in object recognition and tracking. At present, there are more than 150,000 developers developing applications on mobile phones. Developer stuff is migrated from phones and platforms. Another is Clay (the company that makes gestures). We also announced our partners on AWE, including not only the developer platform and developer engine, but also mobile phone manufacturers and domestic and foreign operators, so this will be an open and cross-ecological AR system.
The Spaces platform can directly project the existing APP into the space, and its size, distance and position can be manipulated in the space, and developers do not need to do extra work. If the APP itself has 3D content, such as AR shopping, then you can change its size and position in the actual space by dialing and rotating on the mobile phone to achieve a complete match with the space. For example, when buying a sofa, the original mobile phone is through the camera Look at it, but the virtual sofa that the Spaces platform allows you to see is completely in line with the physical world.
How can we be so friendly?
First, provide SDK support for leading 3D engines Epic Games Unreal Engine 4 and Unity;
Second, let developers use familiar 3D tools for creation, such as Unity editor, Unity AR basic kit and Unity MAR, which are all based on plug-ins and run on Spaces;
Third, a robust library of resources, including documentation, sample code, tutorials, knowledge bases, and tools, will be open to developers and vendors.
At the same time, we provide high-quality developers with good qualification package support, including applications, development kits, joint promotion and technical support. These are some things we do to enrich the ecology. Spaces includes the innovation of the underlying technology, it is a friendly cross-terminal platform, and it is also very friendly to the migration workload developed by developers. This platform has now been released, and it will be available to the market as early as next spring. Qualcomm looks forward to working with developers to build the entire ecosystem.
That’s all for my sharing today, thank you everyone!