Recently, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and China Communications Standards Association jointly held the 2023 Extended Reality Industry Summit Forum and CCSA TC625 Annual Partner Conference in Xiamen, aiming to promote the healthy and high-quality development of the extended reality industry.
Cocos was invited to attend this summit to help the innovative development of the XR industry and related applications, and jointly promote the rapid and healthy development of the industry.
During the conference, Wang Qingli, the person in charge of Cocos XR, shared the theme.
Good afternoon, everyone. I am Wang Qingli from Cocos. I am mainly responsible for the related business and R&D work of the XR department. Today I will introduce to you how to use Cocos XR to provide assistance to the industry content ecology and promote better and faster development.
On the whole, Cocos will continue to provide developers with better development tools and service platforms in the direction of XR, and improve cross-device, cross-platform and low-threshold service capabilities. At the same time, the current XR industry is in the stage of development where the accumulation of core technologies has been completed, and hardware solutions are becoming more and more clear, and content scenarios are being explored and implemented. Based on a mature and complete tool chain, Cocos will provide an integrated service solution for efficient development, lightweight resource consumption, and low-power operation, lowering the development threshold for developers, reducing development cycles and costs, and exploring a lightweight rendering integration for equipment manufacturers , Data security is independent and controllable, XRUI is flexible and customizable, and the content platform quickly gathers abundant feasible paths.
Specifically, compared with other engines, lightweight, high performance, and cross-platform are the core advantages of Cocos. Cocos is also the first game engine to support HarmonyOS, and can support various mainstream graphics APIs. Based on an open source protocol, Cocos is customizable, embeddable, and extensible. It can not only provide developers with stable and general editor functions, but also allow flexible and free extension development.
Cocos CreatorXR inherits the lightweight, high performance, and low power consumption of Cocos, and adds an XR development tool chain to fill the gap in the localization of metaverse industrial engines and tools. Currently, 4 versions have been released, covering VR /AR glasses, handheld and Web various device terminals and platforms, the recently released version 1.2.0 focuses on providing WebXR development functions.
Cocos CreatorXR can ensure that the development workflow and component logic of all platforms are consistent. Developers can use the same development methods and habits to create an XR project, which can be packaged and adapted to various devices and platforms, greatly reducing the development cycle and cost. .
The editor part provides templates and functional components for VR content development, including multiple supports and presentation methods for binocular rendering of devices, custom pupil distance and other modules, minimizing the development cost of XR content.
At present, the fragmentation of the XR industry is still very serious, resulting in too high development costs, and it is difficult to accumulate rich high-quality content, which is not conducive to cultivating user stickiness, nor can it promote equipment sales. This has also contributed to the formulation of several industry standards. At present, several mainstream standards such as GSXR / OpenXR / WebXR, Cocos CocosXR have realized the support of main functions, solved problems such as hardware platform coupling and standard differentiation, and ensured that developers' content You can freely switch to the corresponding platform type without modifying the project.
Cocos CocosXR encapsulates general functions, such as device mapping, interaction and virtual movement, and several modules of XR UI, providing typical logic components and common UI, etc. It can be used not only for VR development, but also for AR development on the glasses side. In the future, we will focus on realizing low-code development and construction capabilities in subdivided fields, and gradually improve and increase VR/AR functional modules.
The picture above is a common XR development component provided by Cocos CreatorXR, which adopts the same development workflow and is compatible with various XR devices. Unify the signals of different peripheral interactive devices of various devices, package them into typical interactive components, support 3Dof/6Dof and signal processing of gamepads and mobile phone touch screens, and also provide commonly used prefabricated content, Cocos Creator Users can directly use it to develop XR scenes and game systems. In terms of extension mechanism, users are also allowed to extend custom plug-ins.
针对手持 AR 的开发能力，我们提供了 ARModule 来实现对 ARKit，ARCore 和 AREngine 三种 AR API 的支持，目前已经实现了追踪定位、虚实融合、平面检测、射线碰撞、图像跟踪、物体识别跟踪、光照估计、Mesh 重建等等核心 AR 能力，可以通过Cocos Creator 界面可视化地启用。最新的版本对于 WebXR 的内容开发也提供了相同的组件支持，不需要开发者关注平台差异，保持相同的开发习惯。
Cocos 提供通用的开发组件，通过这些组件，一个 AR 项目可以分别打包到手持原生、Runtime 小游戏、AR 眼镜端以及 WebXR 的各类设备和平台正常运行。
总的来说，Cocos CreatorXR 是一款从 XR 开发者痛点出发，缓解 XR 设备及 SDK 碎片化，提高开发者投入产出比，进而助力 XR 内容生态繁荣的创作工具。同时针对 XR 设备内容匮乏的现状，Cocos XR 还可为主流 VR/AR SDK 的设备，提供可视化的开发工具和轻量化的 XR 运行环境。
Cocos CreatorXR 已经完成了对国内外主流 XR 设备的兼容适配，支持 Oculus，Pico，华为，Rokid，联想 A3和基于 Monado SDK 的设备，目前还有其他 XR 设备厂商正在适配中。此外，Cocos 也会联合 XR 服务平台提供更多云端 XR 能力和内容变现方式。
Cocos CreatorXR 也对兼容 WebXR 的浏览器进行了适配，已经具备了基本的 WebXR 流程，平面检测以及触屏交互等等功能，通过 Cocos CreatorXR 开发打包成 Web 项目之后，可以在浏览器进行访问，性能以及稳定性还有光照的显示效果都和原生端的没有明显的差异。
开发者通过 Cocos CreatorXR 开发一款游戏，可以同时构建发布在不同的设备，不同的平台，以不同的形式进行安装部署等等，就是说，对于开发者来说，一次开发可以去实现多渠道的发布变现。
目前 XR 的行业生态还处于初期的发展阶段，作为开发工具的提供方，Cocos 是这个生态链中不可或缺的一环，做好开发者和内容平台，设备厂商之间的桥梁，不断改进引擎和编辑器，让开发者的创意更快落地，提高内容丰富度，促进设备销量提升，让整个生态快速形成良性循环。
Cocos 将持续为开发者提供更完善，快捷的跨平台的开发工具，对性能和效果进行长期优化。交互能力同样是 XR 领域重要的一方面，后续将增加自然交互的开发功能。提供更完善的调试预览工具。
AR 方面持续集成 SDK 的更多特性，做好兼容性和一致性优化，让开发者的一个项目可以运行在各种 AR 设备上，智能选择设备所支持的 SDK。
Cocos 还将继续推进和设备厂商、内容平台的深度合作和战略互助，比如在开发工具的构建层面，继续增加更多的设备接入和兼容。从 XR 的系统层面提供安全的，轻量化，低功耗的渲染框架，内容平台层面，以 Runtime 内置形式来提供轻应用的运行环境。
Cocos Runtime 已经成为诸多快游戏小游戏平台以及超级 App 内置的技术底座。我们在此基础上也提供了 XR 的开发能力。一方面，可以内置在内容平台作为即点即用运行环境，提高转化率和变现效率，有助于提升内容丰富度。
另一方面，在设备系统方面提供轻量级渲染器或者 Launcher，以低功耗的运行状态来快速实现 3D 对象的渲染，有利于设备的用户体验和生态积累。
Cocos 经过十几年的发展，一直和海内外的头部企业有着广泛深入的合作，相信在 XR 这个新兴的技术领域，会有更多创新性的新需求涌现 ，Cocos 会继续在 XR 领域为合作伙伴开拓新的市场空间，提供的 XR 增值功能和服务，谢谢大家。
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