Preamble:
Entrepreneurship in the Metaverse field is not smooth, and it seems to have become an industry consensus.
Even today, equipment expenditures and hands-on learning costs in the VR/AR field remain high, and the overall global user base is still at an early stage compared with the mobile Internet.
Against this background, how Metaverse Company can sustainably and rapidly obtain user growth has become a difficult problem for managers to think about.
Among them, XRSPACE, which is at the forefront of the industry, handed over a unique answer: choose the most familiar and easy-to-use scene to cut in, continue to invest in 2D mobile and tablet terminals, and complete the unified identity linkage with 3D VR terminal , and eventually rapidly expanded to the global market and accumulated a large number of active users.
Metaverse world created by XRSPACE
This time, we had an in-depth conversation with Liu Guanting, the general manager of XRSPACE, and will reveal the story of XRSPACE's new path. The audio version will also be released on the Authing brand podcast "Hackers and Painters" later.
Q1: XRSPACE has become the leading company in the metaverse industry. It entered the market early in 2017 before the "metaverse" became popular. What kind of opportunity was it at that time and what was the forecast for the industry?
Our vision of establishing XRSPACE is to build a 3D virtual world, and we firmly believed in this vision six years ago.
Our founder Mr. Zhou Yongming (Peter) is the former CEO of HTC, and I also met him at HTC. In 2014, Peter launched the first real VR helmet HTC Vive, and then left HTC and founded XRSPACE in 2017.
We are all people who have experienced the smart phone revolution. When the iPhone first came out in 2007, there was a lot of criticism. It was not until the iPhone 3GS that it gradually became stronger and later became a phenomenal product.
We wonder, what will the post-smartphone era be like? So we went to see 5G, AI, blockchain, VR, AR and other technologies, and then we deeply realized that the post-mobile phone era will jump from 2D experience to 3D experience. For example, you just woke up in your bedroom, go to the office to work, maybe go to the gym after get off work, and come home in your living room. These are all 3D spaces, which contain 3D characters and real-time interactions.
From 2D to 3D is not just VR and AR, which is why we joined hands with Authing to export products to iOS and Android Google play a year and a half ago. You can also experience this 3D world on your phone or tablet—if you have VR and AR, it’s immersive; if it’s just a phone or tablet, it’s 2D, but all you experience is a 3D world .
Q2: GOXR and PartyOn, the leading products of XRSPACE, respectively focus on exhibitions and social karaoke, are rapidly expanding to the global market and have accumulated a large number of active users. When mainstream manufacturers are making games, what kind of strategic considerations are based on choosing such an industry?
We have done a lot of exploration, such as office or productivity scenarios, we have actually done verification.
Last year's Meta's Zuckerberg also emphasized that he even worked with Microsoft to embed Office 360 into Oculus. However, it is like saying that meetings are about efficiency, and users are required to wear troublesome helmets, and it takes time to set them up. That is not actually helping them. How much time can you wear a helmet in 8 hours?
When a company emphasizes efficiency, you must have a simpler tool to help it, instead of emphasizing experience. So we are talking about the transition from 2D to 3D, which can be more social and entertainment. These directions do not emphasize efficiency, but focus on experience.
GOXR's 3D Exhibition and PartyOn's Singing Event
The interaction of people in the virtual world is very interesting. When we decide to focus more on this, we must also measure that the 3D experience is too new. People don't know what to do when they step into this 3D world.
In the 2D world, everyone is used to swiping their phones, and the 3D user habits need to be educated. So we started with art and culture. For example, the Palace Museum can make it 3D, and some ancestral temples can be put in the 3D world for users to visit.
We must let everyone enter the metaverse in a way that is closer to daily life and easier to understand.
The second product, PartyOn, is the same, especially in the Asian market. Karaoke is actually something that everyone understands without communicating.
At present, the way of singing on mobile phones such as national K songs lacks the joy of gathering and singing with friends, which cannot be done on mobile phones. Therefore, we are also quite successful on major platforms, such as Pico’s App store. App store. Different from games, it is easier for users to sing. We have some blueprints in the future, such as the ability and performance of virtual people.
Q3: What is the core competitiveness of XRSPACE?
We are actually one of the few software companies in the industry who understand hardware, and we even made VR helmets at that time. Because when it was established in 2017, the 3D experience was still too new. At that time, Oculus had not yet appeared, but it had already been bought by Meta. So we felt at that time that there must be an appropriate hardware product to allow users to experience the 3D world. In 2019, we cooperated with Deutsche Telekom and held a developer conference. At that time, we made gesture tracking and removed the handle, which was also the Oculus handtracking that Meta later promoted; Meta was criticized last time that Avatar is half-length, and we can do full-body.
After the launch of various products, our app has been settled on various platforms, and of course the helmet has not been put down. We went to exhibitions before, and users often asked: "You can do this on your mobile phone, have you ever made a helmet? The experience with a helmet is 100 times better!" Then we do have it, and it can bring an even more amazing experience. We are far superior to other software vendors in terms of technology accumulation.
However, VR helmets are relatively expensive for users to get started, and there is no way to use them every day, so we extend it to a mobile phone for each person— I use Pico in China, you hold a mobile phone in Germany, and he holds a tablet in the United States. Entering a 3D space together, feeling like we are all in this together. Of course, the multi-terminal identity linkage here is also realized with the help of Authing .
XRSPACE-GOXR Mobile User Authentication Journey
XRSPACE-PartyOn Mobile User Authentication Journey
A common question is whether to worry about competition from various latecomers. Here, I dare not say that our products are the most advanced, but they must be among the top in the world. Because of the real-time interaction of virtual people in the 3D environment and the voice transmission during social chorus, the delay needs to be made particularly low, so that users will feel together and like the real world. Such underlying technical advantages are still relatively difficult to approach.
Q4: Which Authing products and services does XRSPACE mainly use ? How can it help us?
The virtual person in the 3D metaverse is essentially an identity, and its underlying layer must be supported by a strong identity infrastructure.
When we found Authing, we thought of the need to make identities multi-terminal and cross-platform, open up users' existing daily habits and future development trends, and help users migrate from 2D to 3D. To put it bluntly, we need iOS and Android development, which can be integrated with VR identities such as Oculus and Pico, and allow users to easily log in with one click.
Only by unifying identities, follow-up user operations, experience collection, tracking and management of user behavior records at each end, and other extremely important means of growth can have a basis for realization.
We can definitely invest in R&D manpower to do this part ourselves, but we pay more attention to the development of the core metaverse and leave the professional work to professional companies, so as to build a harmonious ecology. And for a start-up company, the speed of product development and launch will also be accelerated, and we can put resources in places that need more focus.
The cooperation experience with Authing is also very good. In the early stage, we found that the integration of Authing's third-party login authentication is extremely rich, which can meet our long-term and global expansion needs.
Authing supports dozens of login methods at home and abroad, and can facilitate login integration
In the use stage, we often have some technical development demands. The interaction between our employees and Authing technicians is still very efficient. The upgrade and optimization of product capabilities are always very timely, and the degree of cooperation impresses me very much.
Secondly, Authing is also very good in the internal management of the enterprise, and can control the system permissions of employees, especially our C-side will have a lot of data, which involves personal privacy and so on. Internal personnel must go through prudent security measures and controls to obtain these data, and all access and operation records must also be retained. This part of Authing can also meet our demands.
Therefore, Authing actually plays the role of a middle office. Whether it is user identity capabilities to support our growth, or internal control to ensure our data security, we have cooperated very well.
Q5: I heard that XRSPACE also works closely with AWS. How does the underlying cloud facility support our development?
That's right, our initial positioning was to take the global route, so there is no doubt that we chose AWS services. We mainly use its overall infrastructure (IaaS), because AWS has a large number of elastic machine pools in global deployments, which can be called at any time, which is very convenient for us.
As mentioned earlier, one of the technical advantages of our cloud is low latency. AWS has a complete solution. For example, we now need global acceleration to ensure user experience, such as instant interaction and synchronization of live broadcasts, and products such as AWS CDN. Like Authing, it supports the rapid development of our business.
In the future, we also look forward to continuing to work closely with Authing and AWS!
Q6: In the end, everyone is also very interested. Will the rise of AI tools give you new industry thinking?
The recent new AI technology also gives us more ideas, for example, many AI maps and videos are still in 2D, and whether the virtual world can also be based on prompts, such as directly creating the buildings or small buildings you want Home? Is it possible to directly simulate the earth?
The second point is that instant interaction is our differentiated advantage, but users cannot always be online, so when you are not online, can you use AI to define a virtual you, as an assistant, and do a basic interaction when friends come? . In fact, many AIs are still only used by professionals. To jump out of the circle, it must be more visual and intuitive. Even through training, people can't tell whether this virtual person is AI, and I believe that technology will advance to such a level.