In the past 2021, with the concept of metaverse hot, more and more manufacturers began to announce their involvement in this field, and even recently there was news that Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple saw great potential from the metaverse, and Apple will link the current VR and AR with the metacosm for further development.
With apple's entry, how will the meta-universe market change in the future? We noticed that the manufacturers involved in the metacosm are more software companies, and this market really does not need hardware support?
Where are the shortcomings of the metaverse market?
When it comes to the metaverse, at present, the most important hardware carrier is AR/VR/MR and other head-mounted display devices, and in this regard, Google and Microsoft actually began to get involved in it many years ago and launched a series of products. But the metacosm really becomes a concept and is accepted by the market, it is in 2021, from this point of view, the metacosm is more like a hardware product born of the shell, rather than a nascent market.
But why has this concept, which has been in existence for many years, not made much progress after years of development? From the current market situation, the application side of the metacosm is mainly reflected in VR/AR and other devices, while the underlying technology is concentrated in computing power, AI, etc. On the surface, there seems to be no short board, but is it really so?
According to survey data from Perkins Coie, XRA and Boost VC, the first two factors consumers consider when choosing a headset such as AR/VR are content and the user experience brought by software and hardware.
Although major manufacturers are constantly launching content, Tencent, Baidu and other manufacturers are also in the software, constantly launching and optimizing content and software functions, but the metacosm is still a concept, in the final analysis, limiting the development of the metacosm or the user experience problems brought by hardware.
JW Insights believes that ar/VR headsets have not only been large and consume power quickly, but also require a lot of space and supporting settings to provide a certain user experience, while heavy devices have not been well improved, which has become the most important factor restricting consumers from purchasing this type of device.
Among them, the most obvious example is that Google released the first generation of AR glasses Google Glass in 2012, but due to many problems such as battery life and functions, Google has not launched this product to the consumer market since then.
Will 3D sensors become the killer of metaversity?
So how do you solve the problems caused by the hardware experience?
In a separate survey conducted by Perkins Coie, XRA and Boost VC, 42% of industry experts believe that the development of small and lightweight devices will be the main trend of AR/VR/MR headsets in the next two years, just like the development of mobile phone technology, towards miniaturization, lightness and integration.
JW Insights believes that in order to continue to develop in the direction of lightweight and integrated, head-mounted display devices will become more integrated in the future, in addition to head-mounted devices, they will not be able to collect the required information when other auxiliary equipment is needed, and at the same time, as head-mounted display devices will continue to strengthen in terms of computing performance.
In addition, in order to be able to achieve integration and ensure the interactive functions required by the metaverse, the headset will have to integrate more sensors, among which sensors to achieve gesture recognition are more important.
Recently, there has been more and more news about Apple's imminent entry into the meta-universe market, among which the most directivity is also Apple's headset device that will appear in the near future.
Judging from the latest news, Guo Mingxi pointed out in the latest forecast that Apple's headset device will integrate 3D sensors to track hand movements, and it is expected that this device will be equipped with four sets of 3D sensors, three more than the current iPhone, and will also be able to achieve more accurate motion capture.
It is worth noting that meta's Quest headset also has this function, but the device's motion capture mainly relies on cameras, rather than 3D sensors, which causes this device to have certain errors in motion capture, which in turn affects the user experience of consumers.
Apple's choice of 3D sensing technology this time is not only because of the market's demand for hardware experience, but also because of the previous performance of 3D sensing in the market. As we all know, in 2017, Apple officially introduced 3D technology in the iPhone X for face recognition, and since then this technology has been widely used in the smartphone market and has developed into the standard of the current mobile phone market.
Jiwei Consulting has previously pointed out that 3D sensing functions are mainly integrated in cameras, and the main applications include ranging, background bokeh, 3D object detection, spatial modeling and AR.
What does the future hold for the 3D sensing market?
It can be said that the market application of 3D sensing is very extensive, from the previously mentioned smart phones, to the current widely used driving assistance functions in cars, or smart factories are applying this technology.
Although the development of 3D sensing technology has been affected to a certain extent in the past two years due to the epidemic, with the maturity of this technology in facial recognition, gesture interaction and detection of behavior or body movements, 3D sensing technology is also further expanding into new areas.
According to the data released by The Insight Partners, the 3D sensing market will show explosive growth in the next few years, and the market size will grow from $4.81 billion in 2018 to $71.91 billion in 2027, more than ten times in a decade, becoming the next important sensor segment.
There has always been a view that the way of human-computer interaction with the evolution of the computing platform gradually changes, but its essence remains unchanged, the improvement of the experience of human-computer interaction can not be separated from the final result of interaction, so we can see that although the computing body evolved from a computer to a smart phone, but the way and demand for interaction is more and more intense, and if the metacosm can really become the next main platform for human-computer interaction, then the platform's demand for human-computer interaction will be more intense than smart phones.
And how to complete better human-computer interaction? The role of sensors in this is self-evident, highly integrated, miniaturized sensors will be an inevitable choice for human-computer interaction, among them, 3D sensing as the best way to experience interaction in smart phones, may usher in a new round of explosion with Apple to introduce it into the metaverse of interactive devices.
Of course, for the entire meta-universe market, hardware as the foundation of user experience, major manufacturers will not only focus on software innovation, and ignore the existence of hardware, after all, excellent ecology can not be separated from the combination of software and hardware, Apple's achievements in the smartphone market is very good evidence.
(Proofreading/Nagging)