"Zuckerberg spent years trying to make the Metaverse a reality, but now it has been replaced by AI and is headed toward the grave of technological creativity." An article expressing "Metaverse is dead" recently sparked a buzz on Twitter The discussion, and the counterattack of Tim Sweeney, CEO of the game production company Epic Games, made this topic even more heated.
"Have an online wake and let the 600 million monthly active users of Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, Sandbox, and VR Chat mourn it in real-time 3D." Sweeney told the outside world in this sarcastic statement. In fact it has been growing.
When most people's attention is shifted to the hottest artificial intelligence at the moment, the threshold for the construction of metaverse is quietly lowering.
Currently, Epic allows users to generate a 1:1 simulated virtual image in a few minutes with only an iPhone; while the game production platform Roblox provides a tool for generating 3D models with one click. The tools for making games and creating metaverse "people/things/fields" are becoming more and more "fools", which is also an important reason why platforms such as Roblox continue to influx users.
“Metaverse has 600 million monthly active users”
On May 8th, the business technology media Insider published the article "RIP Metaverse" ("Rest in Peace Metaverse"). The author is Ed Zitron, CEO of a technology and business public relations company. He believes that Meta has not achieved its metaverse goals. Decentraland and Yuga Labs' Otherside also failed to live up to the hype. The Metaverse has died and been abandoned by the corporate world, and investors have long since turned to the hot topic of artificial intelligence.
Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney hit back at Ed Zitron's claim with a figure of "600 million monthly users" who are active in metaverse virtual worlds such as Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, The Sandbox and VR Chat. Obviously, he doesn't agree with the statement that "the metaverse is dead".
Tim Sweeney hits back at 'Metaverse is dead'
If you are a veteran gamer, you must be familiar with Epic Games, the video game developer who once became famous for making "Fortnite". In April 2020, well-known American rapper Travis Scott also held a virtual concert in "Fortnite", attracting more than 12.3 million online players to watch, setting a record high. In recent years, the company has also become an important construction force in the Metaverse.
Although Sweeney did not give the data source of "600 million monthly active users" in detail, the number of users on each platform with the "signboard" of the metaverse after entering 2023, especially when AI becomes a new outlet, does not seem to have a large number of users decline.
Epic marketing director Dana Cowley disclosed at the 2023 GDC (Game Developers Conference) that the game development engine Unreal Engine (Unreal Engine) developed by it currently has 750,000 active users, and an increasing number of creators are using Unreal Engine to create realistic games. Metaverse scene.
In addition, Roblox, the "first stock in the metaverse", disclosed in its latest financial report for the first quarter of 2023 that its daily active users once again broke new highs, with a year-on-year increase of 22% to 66 million. In the fourth quarter and full-year financial report of 2022, the daily active volume of the platform is 56 million. Roblox is an online gaming platform that allows users to create virtual worlds.
Epic and Roblox not only provide games, but also provide tools for making games. Users on these two platforms are both players and creators. On The SandBox, another Web3 metaverse game platform, the enthusiasm of players remains. According to a report released by the on-chain data platform DappRader, on The SandBox, the third-season event called Alpha alone brought 220,000 visitors to the platform, and more than 10,800 independent wallets (UAW) interacted with smart contracts. This is an increase of 23% compared to the end of August last year.
The number of users of Metaverse representative platforms such as Epic, Roblox, and The SandBox has not decreased but increased. The number of active users shows that Metaverse is not really dying, and it is artificial intelligence that activates it. AIGC is letting those who give Metaverse The tools for "creating people" and building scenes in the game are becoming more and more convenient, and AI has made the threshold for metaverse construction lower and lower.
How low? A virtual human can be generated with an iPhone, and a 3D scene can be produced by giving a simple prompt.
The threshold for metaverse construction is lowered due to AI
At the 2023 Game Developers Conference, Epic released a big move and launched MetaHuman Animator (a facial animation tool). In the demonstration Demo, the demonstrator speaks to the front camera of the iPhone for 10 seconds. After only 2 minutes, MetaHuman Animator can accurately reproduce the spoken content on the modeled human face. Highly restored, including the synchronization of lip movements, facial muscles and words, even eyes and light and shadow.
MetaHuman Animator highly restores realistic human faces
MetaHuman Animator uses artificial intelligence to solve the work that consumes a lot of energy of 3D modelers. Usually, the modeling of characters involves a huge workload, requiring 3D animation artists to build the basic model little by little, and then continuously add details, such as skin pores, wrinkles and hair, etc. Even for the most professional game studios, using motion capture technology, it will take weeks or even months at the shortest to produce a detailed human face.
Now, MetaHuman Animator plans to let you use an iPhone to complete these workloads: stand in front of the phone camera, spend a few minutes recording a video of a character's face, and a high-fidelity face modeling will come out. With this tool, it is not difficult for users to generate a highly restored virtual image of themselves in the Metaverse with one click, and everyone can pinch an identical self in the virtual world.
Sweeney said that a series of tools developed by Epic are currently aimed at 3A game developers and independent developers. In the future, in addition to the commercial and technical fields, hundreds of millions of people can use similar tools in the metaverse to build their own metaverse Space, "People can buy paintings or other cool sculptures to decorate their space."
In the matter of lowering the threshold for creators, Roblox also uses AI. The company does not regard artificial intelligence and metaverse as "either-or" options. Instead, it combines the two. In February of this year, the company integrated the AIGC creation tool into Roblox Studio, which can generate images, 3D models and even related game codes just through text prompts.
Epic and Roblox have pointed out a clear path for activating the metaverse—use generative AI to produce real-time or fixed scene environments for the metaverse, and then combine virtual engines to complete high-fidelity rendering, restore the real world or create new scenes, so that Everyone can become the creator of the Metaverse with a low threshold.
Even OpenAI is advancing AIGC to generate 3D content. Recently, the company released and open-sourced Shap-E, a generative model for creating 3D assets based on text prompts. The AI unicorn says complex and diverse 3D models can be generated in seconds after being trained using large 3D and text-based datasets.
The AIization of metaverse construction tools directly lowers the threshold for users. Whether it is people, spaces, or scenes in the virtual world, the tools to create them are becoming more and more "fools". Compared with hanging out and playing games in the metaverse virtual world built by others, creation is becoming an attraction for users to enter the metaverse, which is also an important reason for the growth of Roblox users.