Let’s put aside the lies and scams and review the Metaverse
Editor | Lin Juemin
In the past six months, you must have seen a lot of content about the metaverse.
Amid the clamor, there are many speculators and even more pessimists, but there are few optimistic voices with constructive thinking.
In the past few months, Leifeng.com has entered the field of Metaverse with an innocent heart. From game engines, UGC communities, to AI, NFT, brain-computer interfaces, through a large number of interviews and research, it has output ten in-depth contents of "Metaverse Ten Days Talk" .
After the conclusion of "The Metaverse: Ten Days of Talk", we would also like to share with you the "insights" we have gained from the industry during this period. Whether you are a practitioner or investor who has been paying attention to this field for a long time, or just a "spectator" who has some interest in this field, I believe that the following content will give you a new insight into the new track of the Metaverse.
Here are six core insights about the Metaverse:
1
What is the Metaverse?
What is the Metaverse? This is a question few people know the answer to.
On the one hand, speculators who hype up concepts are more willing to make the Metaverse a hot spot that everyone can "take advantage of" so as to leave more room for speculation. This has also indirectly led to the current situation of the Metaverse track being of mixed quality.
On the one hand, few Metaverse projects have been implemented, and there are few opinion leaders who can make the final decision on related issues. People from different industries are like "speaking at cross purposes", and their understanding of the Metaverse cannot converge.
Some people believe that the metaverse is where players enjoy games in a virtual world, so companies like LayaBox, Egret Technology, and Roblox have worked hard on games, UGC tools, and communities;
Roblox, the first stock in the Metaverse
Soul believes that the metaverse is the interaction of users in the virtual world using virtual identities, so they are committed to improving users' virtual social experience through virtual identities, AI matching and other methods;
Many people believe that XR is a necessary factor for the Metaverse. The director of a large company's XR laboratory once said that the Metaverse is still close to science fiction. For people working in technology, it is better to discuss XR.
Born out of the concept of industrial Internet, the concept of "industrial metaverse" has also emerged, mainly using remote control, virtual reality and simulated work functions to empower industrial production. Tang Rongxing, co-founder of domestic AR manufacturer Liangfengtai, also mentioned WorkSpace's camera to Leifeng.com, that is, using AR devices to break the boundary between virtual and reality at work and empower production activities;
Ma Jiesi, the founder of Weini Community, believes that the metaverse is an upgrade of human information transmission, from graphic and text information to multimodal information transmission, delivering more value through the metaverse Internet.
There are so many different opinions, who is correct?
We believe that the Metaverse is not a technology, nor is it an advancement in a single field. The Metaverse is an ecosystem in which technologies such as games, social networking, AI, and blockchain will each perform their respective functions and play their own unique roles. None of these technologies can be called the Metaverse alone, but the Metaverse cannot be separated from their empowerment.
We envision that in the ecosystem of the metaverse, the large and comprehensive digital world will fundamentally change the mode of human-computer interaction. Multimodal interaction (such as vision, hearing, touch, etc.) will become a new trend, and the connection between people and the virtual world will become closer.
2
Demand is always the first priority of the Metaverse
For the metaverse, all kinds of concepts are flying around, but not all of them can survive.
We have asked many practitioners and investors: What kind of Metaverse projects are reliable? And their answers are always similar: projects that can accurately identify user needs are good projects.
On the demand side, we have developed a practical model that progresses through three levels to help manufacturers and investors analyze the demand side of a project:
1. Does the user demand targeted by the project really exist? How high is the user's willingness to register/pay for this demand?
2. Can this demand be realized? Can existing technologies and products provide a more efficient/cheaper alternative to this project?
3. How much investment do manufacturers need to make to meet this demand? What is the input-output ratio?
For enterprises and manufacturers, many people want to tell their own stories well, but those who can tell user stories well are often the ones who have the last laugh.
For example, Yan Wenfeng, the cloud digital product manager at Longfor Group, told Leifeng.com: Metaverse social networking cannot and will not replace real-life social networking, because users' demand for face-to-face social networking is rigid and will not be replaced. Jin Pan, AI project manager at Yuntian Lifei, said that because of the more complicated operations and more scattered information transmission, shopping in the Metaverse may be a worse experience than existing electronic shopping operating systems.
A partner of a consulting firm holds a similar view: "The Metaverse wants to digitize space, but there is no such demand at present; it wants to digitize people, but we may not agree. There are also a series of issues including IP ownership, privacy and security."
3
What will the future metaverse industry look like?
In the metaverse race, small companies have already been competing fiercely, while traditional large companies such as BAT have not yet fully entered the game.
Although ByteDance spent 90 days to acquire XR manufacturer PICO, Tencent reached a strategic cooperation with Roblox, and Ding Lei said that NetEase is fully capable of quickly taking the lead in the Metaverse track, people familiar with the matter said that these are mostly defensive operations, that is, "first occupy the land, then run the horse."
In the previous article "Metaverse: Ten Days Talk", we talked about the story of Mi Chat. When choosing projects, large companies prefer projects that can see actual returns; on the contrary, projects with low probability and high risk are difficult to promote even if the investment is not large.
The picture shows the Metaverse social APP "Xiran" launched by Baidu, which also makes Baidu the first large company to "take the lead"
In addition, by analyzing the reorganization process of Meta (which was called Facebook a few months ago) in the past six months, we also found that promoting new businesses in large companies requires actively breaking down departmental walls and embracing changes in organizational structure.
During this period, Zuckerberg first promoted Andrew Bosworth, who was in charge of XR and Metaverse affairs, to CTO from among the numerous vice presidents, giving him the power to coordinate various departments within the company; then he changed the name to Meta, which on the one hand demonstrated the company's determination to transform, and on the other hand established a head office above each product division, allowing the head office to further mobilize the resources of various departments at a low cost and "concentrate on doing big things."
For large companies, risk appetite, bloated organizations and inertia of thinking can easily make them "difficult to turn around". Being able to use their own flexible organizational structure makes it possible for small companies to overtake others in this race.
Some people say that the Metaverse ecosystem is too big for a single or a few giants to dominate. A VC who pays attention to the Metaverse told Leifeng.com: "In the future, the pattern of the Internet industry should not change dramatically, but as the Metaverse further deepens in the Internet, some new giants may emerge and become stronger and deeper in the sub-sectors."
At the same time, empowered by blockchain, ordinary users may be able to gain a higher status in the metaverse community.
"In the Metaverse, the Internet has two paths to take: the 'big Internet path' and the 'blockchain path'," said Wu Tong, a digital economy and blockchain scholar and Metaverse investor.
The former represents that existing Internet giants will continue to expand their scale by relying on economies of scale and place the metaverse under a centralized system.
The latter represents the metaverse that uses blockchain, which can realize a distributed structure where the rights and interests belong to the users. Borrowing the concept that has been popular recently, it can be called "Web3.0". In such a metaverse, it will be more free and open, and users' "community autonomy" of the Internet will also become possible.
However, compared with the former, the blockchain-dominated Internet form also needs to take into account multiple factors such as data security, national supervision, and the monopoly of existing giants. Most of the blockchain models currently used in China are still more controllable alliance chains, that is, blockchains jointly created by a few institutions and enterprises.
Although the degree of openness is higher than that of private chains, the data of alliance chains is still controlled by a few nodes, and there is also a risk of creating a "trust" (a monopoly organization formed by companies in the same industry) for the industry.
"Fairness", "efficiency" and "security" are considered an "impossible triangle" on this issue , that is, at most two of the three can be obtained, and "all three cannot be achieved". Sun Yulin, a senior researcher at OKLink, told Leifeng.com that there are still many issues in the industry that need to be further explored on this issue.
4. Building a good community is an easier way to the Metaverse, but it is not easy either.
The Metaverse is an ecosystem composed of many different components. Some of these directions still face some technical barriers, such as XR anti-sickness, strong AI, brain-computer interface, etc., while some directions have relatively mature technologies and are relatively easy to implement, such as community UGC.
Li Tao, vice president of Xiaohu Internet Technology, once told Leifeng.com that he had experienced many products that claimed to be "metaverses", but after entering, he often found that the number of active users in them was very small. If a network product does not have a certain number of simultaneous online users, then the user experience will not be guaranteed.
On the other hand, the reason why Roblox, the first stock in the Metaverse, has been able to remain evergreen for 15 years after its issuance is because it has a high penetration rate in developed countries. The user community and social relationships brought about by the high penetration rate have "dug" a deep "moat" for Roblox in the corresponding market.
Chen Shuyi, founder of Egret Technology, once shared with Leifeng.com his path to establishing a game UGC community:
The first step is to promote the game box through fun PGC games. Achieving DAU of over 10 million is the prerequisite for everything.
The second step is to attract users and encourage ordinary players to modify their favorite games by opening the editing mode, that is, to create Mods, and transform the original game box model into a game community.
The third step is to make full use of the advantages of mature 3D tools, continue to build the UGC platform ecosystem, and take the initiative of the platform.
Even if there are no technical difficulties, it is not that easy to build a good Metaverse community.
We have analyzed WeChat, the "king" of domestic social networking. Although it has a "terrifying" 1.09 billion daily active users, due to its strong binding with real identities in the physical world, WeChat has gradually become a social tool in real life rather than a "metaverse" community where users can express themselves freely.
Soul, another social platform held by Tencent, has the ambition to move towards the metaverse. Through core functions such as virtual image creation, AI matching social networking, and voice chat rooms, Soul deliberately rejects social networking among acquaintances and strives to open up new social scenarios for users. This is why Soul, as the "social metaverse for young people", can gradually occupy a place in the social product market.
On the other hand, building a community is not just about social interaction. Huang Jieli, a former product manager at Tencent, told Leifeng.com that social interaction actually has to return to content : "As a metaverse social platform, as long as there are enough users and enough content, so that they can spend a lot of time 'playing' on the platform and get enough satisfaction, social interaction will naturally take shape."
This naturally leads to another top priority for the community: user-generated content (UGC).
In the field of population migration, some people have proposed the "push-pull theory" - a theoretical model that discusses the factors that attract and repel population migration separately. In the construction of UGC communities, the push-pull theory can still be applied.
On the one hand, we need to increase the "pull force", that is, strengthen the incentives for users. Mini World has launched a very generous developer support plan: including traffic, funds, funds, 85% of the share ratio, 10,000 yuan startup subsidies, free entry for offline base developers and salary subsidies, etc. This has also brought more than 70 million creators and nearly 200 million creative scene content to Mini World.
Making money for developers is an important factor in UGC construction in the mind of Duan Zhiyun, head of Roblox China. In 2021, Roblox distributed nearly $300 million to developers, and Roblox also made huge profits in the process by taking a 65% commission. The symbiotic relationship with developers is the key to the growth of UGC in metaverse games.
On the other hand, we need to lower the "thrust", that is, lower the threshold for user development. For LayaMe, to become a game UGC - founder Xie Chenghong described this model as "the game version of TikTok" - first of all, we need to optimize the developer tools, specifically providing developers with code-free programming tools, that is, allowing every developer to create in the community, thereby enriching the content in the community.
5
XR still needs time to develop, but the Metaverse doesn’t have to wait
Is XR a necessary condition for the Metaverse?
At least in the minds of many people, the Metaverse must involve XR. A member of the Leifeng.com industry group even said that without XR, the Metaverse would not be worthy of the name of "universe".
But after taking a look at the VR and AR industries, we found that XR still has a long way to go .
First of all, there is the technical hard threshold. Although various XR devices are now known as 4K and 5K, the screen is too close to the human eye, and at least 8-16k resolution is actually required to achieve the retinal effect; the screen refresh rate and delay largely affect whether the user will feel dizzy when using it; most current VR devices are still too heavy, causing long-term use to make people very tired; although they have received great expectations, 5G data transmission and cloud computing power are still in the process of being realized; and the lack of physical feedback at the interactive level casts a heavy shadow on the actual experience of XR.
Secondly, at the user level, the C-end market obviously needs to be cultivated. This is reflected in the fact that users' usage habits are still stuck on mobile phones, PCs, and consoles, and it is difficult to change this habit for a while; it is also reflected in the fact that the price of XR head-mounted display devices is far from being "affordable" and consumers lack a strong desire to consume XR.
Although most of the XR manufacturers that have survived 2017 or 2018 are optimistic about the future, the Metaverse is a visible growth point for them, but it is ultimately "out of reach" at the moment.
As the "ultimate evolution" of XR, brain-computer interface technology is gradually being included in the discussion of the metaverse. If the human brain can be connected to the machine, we will no longer have to perceive the metaverse through any form of screen, and the boundary between virtual and reality may be truly broken.
"Science fiction" is always beautiful, but "science" is still moving forward. Professor He Huiguang, who is engaged in brain-computer interface technology research at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Leifeng.com that an important technical difficulty of brain-computer interface is "how to improve the decoding efficiency of brain-computer interface". At present, the decoding speed of brain signals by the device is only 200 bits/minute, and the users with higher decoding efficiency are the same as the speed of typing on a mobile phone with one hand. This efficiency is far from meeting the requirements for realizing the experience of the metaverse.
In this case, the Metaverse should probably not “wait” any longer for XR.
在今年的GAIR大会元宇宙分论坛上,清华大学新媒体研究中心主任沈阳教授就曾指出,元宇宙的发展分有不同的阶段。我们目前正处于从“准元宇宙”(以屏幕介质为主的传播)向“初级元宇宙”(以XR设备介质为主的传播)迈进的过程中。
Instead of making a 30-point "metaverse", it is better to make a 80-point "quasi-metaverse" down-to-earth. On the one hand, it can accumulate experience and prepare for the next step of technological change, and on the other hand, it can leave enough room for the development of the XR industry.
In fact, virtual social communities, "game version of TikTok", virtual human dressing... a large number of business models have been verified and developed quite maturely.
In this regard, the experience of Oasis VR is very convincing. As we have introduced in our previous article, when Oasis VR was first launched, it also focused on functions related to VR devices, and later gradually adapted the product to PC and mobile phones. In this regard, the founder Yin Sang explained:
"First, we initially expected VR (to acquire users) to be fast. In fact, it was not that fast, and we objectively realized that this judgment was wrong. Second, we previously judged that there was no metaverse on mobile devices, and no experience and possibility of a virtual world. But in 2020, due to the epidemic, we found that a large number of products were on mobile devices. I was very averse to mobile devices before the epidemic. But in 2020, we actually did some reflection on this, so we made a (mobile) demo at the end of 2020, and in less than a month, there were 1 million registrations, and it entered the top 50 in more than 60 countries around the world. We released the official version in June this year, and it has been in operation for more than a month. The current DAU (daily active users) is also 200,000. Users use it for a very long time, about 105 to 110 minutes per person per day, so we think there is still a lot of room for development in this matter."
6
In the future, which areas related to the metaverse are worth paying attention to?
AI technology: creating intelligent “people” and intelligent “environment” for the metaverse
AI has always been a cutting-edge technology field that Leifeng.com has focused on, but recently, the development of the AI industry has reached a bottleneck period.
Jin Pan, who is in charge of AI projects on the front line, told Leifeng.com that the entire AI industry is now trying to find new growth points and wants to do "AI+". The Metaverse is a good story for the AI industry, giving practitioners hope again.
In the metaverse, AI can not only provide virtual and intelligent companionship to metaverse users in terms of virtual human support (such as voice processing, facial expression recognition, etc.) and intelligent body construction, but also use digital twins, MR projection and other technologies to efficiently fill the metaverse world with artificial intelligence created content (AIGC).
Blockchain & NFT: The “economic pillar” of the metaverse that continues to rise
From the popularity in 2017 to today, from the perspective of economic cycles, NFT should have entered its "decline period" long ago. The emergence and rise of the "metaverse" concept is definitely an important factor in its continued rise today.
From the phenomenal pixel art NFT "CrtptoPunk" with a price tag of tens of millions to the "metaverse real estate" that is being hyped up in "Decentraland" today, the scale and popularity of NFTs are growing continuously. However, hype seems to have become the original sin of this emerging concept, casting a shadow on the impression of NFTs and the metaverse in the minds of the public.
A Crypto Punk sold for $5.45 million
Apart from speculation and hype, blockchain and NFT still have great potential in the metaverse.
As an important support for users' virtual property, NFT allows users' virtual property to exist independently from Internet service providers in economic logic; at the same time, virtual property is no longer a code that can be "infinitely copied", but becomes the only unique content. Each piece of equipment and skin of the user is no longer just a service provided by the platform, but can be traded independently from the platform and has independent value.
As an important certificate of user UGC, NFT can confirm the ownership of the content produced by users, and also allow every step of the content flow to be traced, allowing users to continue to profit in the "copyright income" model, so that users can invest in UGC creation without any worries.
In the application of blockchain and NFT in the metaverse, supervision is naturally indispensable. Under the condition of embracing supervision and cooperating in the implementation of relevant national laws and policies, blockchain and NFT may become a very important part of the metaverse.
Carbon neutrality: Another possible contribution of the metaverse to humanity
There is no need to say much about the significant impact that climate change, environmental pollution and waste of resources have on the development of human civilization.
According to statistics, global carbon emissions totaled 21 billion tons in 2020, and the earth's surface temperature rose by 1.96 degrees. IMF Managing Director Georgieva said at the United Nations Climate Conference that global carbon emissions need to be reduced by 55% from baseline levels by 2030, which is extremely urgent.
The sudden spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in recent years has been found by scientists to have played a positive role in reducing emissions and protecting the environment. According to data from foreign research institutions, due to travel blockades and reduced outings caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels fell by 7% month-on-month in 2020, a drop that even far exceeded the emission reduction during the global financial crisis in 2008.
Ma Jiesi, former head of Xiaomi VR and founder of Weini Community, told Leifeng.com that the emergence and popularity of the metaverse is likely to play a "similar" role in carbon neutrality.
Ma Jiesi believes that the metaverse is the only path to carbon neutrality. Consumption and satisfaction of needs in the physical world are bound to be accompanied by a large amount of carbon emissions and resource consumption. As the meaning and value of human life gradually migrate to the virtual society, human demand for physical consumption will also decrease sharply.
Although the degree of digitalization is deepening, Ma Jiesi believes that this process is still mainly based on the dissemination of text, audio and video content, and the content is mainly based on the physical world. "For example, the content of eating broadcasts, selling goods and show-offs that are spread on some frequent platforms is still full of waste."
On the stage of carbon neutrality, "the metaverse must be the protagonist," Ma Jiesi told Leifeng.com.
7
What is our attitude towards the metaverse?
The "Ten Days of Metaverse" has come to an end, but the development of the Metaverse industry is still in full swing. As an observer of the Metaverse and even the entire Internet industry, what is Leifeng.com's attitude towards the Metaverse?
We are generally optimistic about the Metaverse. Although today’s Metaverse also has the same risks as the Internet bubble in 2000, we also believe that after the tide recedes, there will always be high-quality companies left on the beach, leading the future market trend.
Perhaps by then, the name "Metaverse" will be replaced. Regardless of what the future "Metaverse" is called, the further integration of humans and the virtual world will become the general trend of Internet development.
Our attitude towards the Metaverse is long-termism. The completion of the Metaverse is not a one-day job, and there are still many "hard" barriers such as cloud rendering, VR anti-sickness, and real-time interaction.
Before discussing the Metaverse, we must first discuss the "infrastructure" of the Metaverse, which includes cloud computing, AI, XR, and a series of "basic skills" that support the operation of the Metaverse.
Sun Yulin, a senior researcher at OKLink, divides the construction of the Metaverse into three levels: "underlying science - software and hardware support - product entry". Discussing the Metaverse without "infrastructure" is actually no different from "castles in the air".
The metaverse race will face a protracted battle, and in this process, long-termism can even be called a "virtue."
Our attitude towards the Metaverse is constructive. Ten thousand years is too long, we must seize the day. From the perspective of optimism and long-termism, we are more concerned about the specific implementable plans for the implementation of the Metaverse, the people and groups who have made substantial contributions to the Metaverse in the process of the Internet plan, and the key events that have a significant impact on the actual construction of the Metaverse.
The Metaverse may have a significant impact on the world's Internet landscape in the next 10-20 years. In this process, Leifeng.com will be a witness and report on this major historical trend.
In the future, we will continue to produce more exciting, informative, and knowledge-enhancing content related to the Metaverse. Please stay tuned.
END
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