Looking back at the 2021 | meta-universe has been popular for a year, but it is still too early to talk about "oasis"

Reporter | Yuhao

In March 2021, the voice social boom caused by Clubhouse has not yet passed, and the Metavalse concept mentioned in roblox's listing prospectus on the other side of the ocean has once again aroused heated discussion in China.

The term "metaverse" is derived from the science fiction novel Avalanche, which describes a virtual world built on a computer that is enough to be fake. Everyone can have their own "avatar", shopping, getting married, or even blocking a "life" duel in the metaverse – the experience of death and rebirth can also be virtually constructed.

Similar concepts are not uncommon in science fiction works, but the earnings data of Roblox, a UGC game creation platform, has given people a glimpse of the possibility of building a virtual world. By providing users with game development tools and trading platforms, Roblox attracts a large number of young teenagers between the ages of 9 and 15. These young users use the virtual currency Robux to buy and sell games, and have formed relatively stable social relationships and economic systems on the virtual platform.

On the other hand, under the continuous iteration, the immersion that V/AR products can provide is getting stronger and stronger, and the increasingly mature supply chain has also made the product more affordable; coupled with the promotion of Companies such as Meta, Microsoft, epic, etc., this concept is more widely known.

But Rome wasn't built in a day, and so was the metacosm. Behind a continuous virtual world that simultaneously meets the immersive experiences of multiple people is bound to involve a lot of infrastructure and technical support. It is the industry consensus that meta-universe products will be jointly completed by many partners.

Looking back at domestic and foreign attempts related to the metaverse, V/AR technology and product development, virtual world content production, and social system construction have become the main exploration directions. After the concept became popular for more than half a year, what are the results of the explorers in these aspects?

There are achievements on the metacosm puzzle

In previous virtual world attempts, where the massive amount of content that can attract users to stay comes from is a prominent problem.

AIGC and UGC are two directions of exploration to solve this problem, but the two are not completely independent and parallel, but there is a possibility of cooperation. "The two are not a substitute relationship, but AIGC has a role in reducing the difficulty of UGC." The head of the relevant track of Pleasure Capital once told Interface News.

Roblox is a typical example of the UGC model, and there are also players who explore this aspect in China, and Yahaha Studio, founded in 2020, is one of them.

In this direction, how to balance the difficulty of game development with the quality of the game is a difficult point. Unlike Roblox's pixel style, Yahaha Studio's game interface will be more 3D realistic and the development threshold will be higher. Previously, Patrick, head of strategy and investment and financing at Yahaha, revealed that the second version of the editor tool will be officially launched in the first half of 2022.

On the other hand, AI technology is also being applied in content production. rct studio has independently developed an AI-based Morpheus engine, through the study of a large number of scripts, the engine can understand the internal logic and relationship between the plot and characters, and automatically generate branch stories. This engine has been used in game development.

In November 2021, rct studio partnered with Yumi Interactive Entertainment to participate in the production of the AAA open world MMO game Codename: Odyssey using the Chaos Ball Algorithm and Morpheus Cloud. Depending on the player's choice, the game will generate a dynamic and personalized story, and NPCs will react in real time to achieve the effect of "thousands of faces" of NPCs. At present, the game is still in development and the release date has not yet been determined.

V/AR technology and product development is another direction. In the process of continuous iteration of V/AR products, the lightweighting of To C headset devices and the closeness of the price are obvious trends, but on the other hand, to B's offline VR scenes have also shown new changes.

The price of mainstream VR products such as Oculus Quest 2, Pico Neo 3, and Adventure Dream VR all-in-one released in recent years can reach as low as 2,000 yuan, and the price of consumer AR products such as Nreal Light has also come to less than 3800 yuan. Analyst Guo Mingxi once mentioned in the forecast that Apple Glass, Apple's AR glasses product, is expected to be launched in 2022.

Based on the development of V/AR products, B-side application scenarios such as virtual conferences and virtual performances have begun to emerge.

The virtual conference is not only a new landing scenario of V/AR, but also an exploration of the social system under the concept of metaverse. Meta launched VR conferencing software— Horizon Workrooms, and Microsoft launched Microsoft Mesh, both of which provide users with interactive virtual spaces based on V/AR devices. Domestic AR brand EM3 is also paying attention to this direction, based on its AR terminals and technologies, to create a set of virtual social systems for scenarios such as corporate meetings.

According to EM3 COO Yuan Ye, the focus of EM3 in 2021 is to complete the components required for the virtual social system one by one, and the overall product demo is expected to take shape by the end of 2021.

The virtual performance is another B-end landing scene of the V/AR equipment, and The huaxi jingxin, a subsidiary of the venue asset operator Bloomage Culture and Sports, is the provider of the overall virtual performance program. It is understood that Bloomage Jingxin adopts the Pico Neo 3 customized model, provided by Tatame digital human solutions, and equipped with VR special venue seats. In 2022, according to the relevant personnel of Huaxi Jingxin, there will be more virtual performances launched to the market.

It's still too early to talk about "oasis."

Meta CEO Zuckerberg once described the metaverse as the "physical Internet", in which you are no longer browsing content but in content. Yu Jianning, rotating chairman of the Blockchain Special Committee of the China Communications Industry Association and president of Huoda Education, believes that the metacosm is essentially the third generation of Internet Web 3.0. The fusion of virtual and real in the metaverse will be a new digital world in which everyone will participate.

Although under the Concept of Web 3.0, ownership of Internet content is owned by the user, not just a monopoly company. But the vision of the next generation of "the Internet with a human body" still attracts large companies to become the infrastructure for information in the new era.

At the end of 2020, Tencent summarized the next wave of mobile Internet upgrades into the true Internet, and also called this transformation another big reshuffle, "just like the transformation of mobile Internet, people who can't get on the ship will gradually fall behind." In this context, Tencent and Roblox jointly built a game development team and invested in Epic Games are widely interpreted as the power metacosm.

In addition to Tencent, ByteDance has also invested in related companies such as Code Qiankun, Bird Look, and Yomi Interactive Entertainment. Echoing investment events, companies such as Tencent, NetEase, ByteDance, Baidu and other companies have registered trademarks related to "Meta-Universe".

Putting aside the concept of returning to the business level, It is a fact that Tencent, Ant, Baidu, JD.com, and Bilibili have made efforts to develop blockchain and NFT-related technologies. Benefiting from the characteristics of blockchain technology, NFTs can give digital goods, digital assets, and digital artworks a unique and immutable credential, and also make it possible to identify, circulate, monetize and authenticate virtual identities in the metaverse. This technology is of great significance in building a virtual world economic system and realizing the interaction between virtual and reality.

Due to the large number of technical capabilities involved in the metaverse concept, each company has flaunted the technical capabilities accumulated in the past and moved forward on this basis.

Thanks to the game business, NetEase has accumulated in virtual scene construction, virtual character construction, game AI, etc., and based on this, it has launched meta-universe concept related products such as Yaotai immersive activity system, AI virtual person anchor, and planet blockchain; Bilibili has begun to test the "high-energy chain" function, providing users with identity proof and asset accounts based on the existing user ecology, hoping to create a "digital world".

JD.com entered the digital human scene at the same time as launching its NFT platform, which won the best presentation award of ACM Multimedia in the multimedia field; Baidu recently released the immersive virtual social app "Xi'an", and Baidu vice president Ma Jie said in an interview that he hopes to integrate more AI capabilities into it.

Although the concept of the metaverse has attracted much attention and large companies have entered the game, the time point of its real landing is still vague.

In November, Tsinghua University released the "2020-2021 Meta-universe Development Research Report" pointed out that from the perspective of industrial development reality, the current meta-universe industry is still in the foundation stage of social + game scene application, and it is far from realizing the ideal state of industry coverage and ecological openness, economic self-consistency, virtual and real interoperability, and there has not yet been a consumer-grade product concept that combines AI, VR, AR, 5G, big data, digital twins, cloud computing, blockchain and other technologies.

At the same time, the economic risks that may occur in the linkage between virtual currency and real money, the extremely high requirements for computing algorithms in the open world of large multiplayer online, the addiction problem caused by high immersion, and the more essential problem - the contradiction between the centralization of the regulatory level and the complete decentralization pursued by the metaverse itself are all problems that need to be faced in the future to build a metacosm. From this perspective, it may be too early to talk about "Main Street" in Avalanche or "Oasis" in Ready Player One.