Author|Zhang Yu
Editor|Yang Yong
AR "unicorn" Rokid still doesn't seem to be getting rid of the niche label.
IDC data shows that in the first quarter of 2024, China's AR/VR headset shipments will be 107,000 units, a year-on-year decrease of 37.8% from 2023, of which AR (augmented reality) shipments will be 8,000 units, up 119.2% year-on-year; MR (mixed reality) shipments were 34,000 units, down 52.7% year-on-year; VR virtual reality shipments were 22,000 units, a year-on-year decrease of 72.6%.
The AR market is mainly dominated by AR glasses, and despite the obvious growth, the shipments in a quarter are only 8,000 units, which means that the AR glasses industry is still a niche industry that cannot be handled, and Rokid has not yet ushered in an explosive moment.
In January 2024, Rokid completed a C+ round of financing with a financing scale of nearly 500 million yuan, led by the Hefei Municipal Government as a whole, and introduced a number of financial and strategic investment institutions to participate in the largest single financing in the field of domestic AR glasses in recent years.
Source: Tianyancha
Prior to this, Rokid had been receiving frequent financing, such as 100 million yuan in strategic financing from Yujiang District Industrial Investment Group and US$20 million in strategic financing from NetDragon in April and November 2023, respectively. From 2014 to 2022, Rokid has also received a total of 9 rounds of financing, of which in 2022 alone, Rokid has received 4 rounds of financing of about 1.359 billion yuan. Rokid's investor lineup is also luxurious, including MFund Magic Capital, IDG Capital, Yuanjing Capital, Temasek and many other top institutions.
As of now, Rokid has reached a valuation of $1 billion, making it one of the new "unicorn" companies. However, for Rokid, in the context of the large-scale outbreak of the AR clothing mirror market at the end of the year, it is still a big question mark whether it can break through the siege and maintain the existing market share.
AR glasses are hard to become explosives
Founded in July 2014, Rokid is a product platform company focusing on human-computer interaction technology, committed to the research and development of software and hardware products such as AR glasses and the ecological construction of the YodaOS operating system.
At present, Rokid's AR glasses include Glass series, Vision series, Air and Max series. In addition, in October 2022, Rokid released the "new species of the metaverse", Rokid Station; In August 2023, Rokid AR Studio, a consumer-grade OST (Optical See Through) personal space computing platform, was released. In April 2024, the new spatial computing product, Rokid AR Lite, was released.
Zhu Mingming, founder and CEO of Rokid, believes that the AR industry today is like the 2007 year of the smartphone industry, and there are still three years before the release of the cross-era product iPhone 4. Nearly every company is trying to define a new generation of products, but the product that will determine the future has yet to emerge.
It is true that cross-era products in the AR industry have not yet appeared, and even Apple has not been able to make a second "iPhone 4".
In June 2023, Apple released Vision Pro at WWDC23, and Apple CEO Tim · Cook said that "Vision Pro will open the era of spatial computing" and saw it as the second growth curve.
Despite its high price, when the Vision Pro was launched in the United States market, it was a five-minute sold-out Apple server, a 30-minute sell-out, and a two-hour display shipping date extended to three months later. According to IDC, the Vision Pro has sold less than 100,000 units in a quarter since its launch in the United States, and its sales in the United States have fallen by 75% in the current quarter.
Apple eventually decided to pause the development of the Vision Pro and instead focus on making cheaper models. It is reported that Apple has been lowering the priority of product iterations, gradually reducing project staff, and recently notified at least one supplier that it has stopped working on the next generation of Vision Pro.
Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at Tianfeng International Securities, expressed a pessimistic attitude towards Vision Pro, "My observation is that many people (including my own experience) buy Vision Pro and use it a few times before it is useless. If this is a common user situation, it is not something that can be solved by simply making a low-cost version. ”
In fact, Rokid also faces the same dilemma as Apple, that is, the lack of application scenarios.
When releasing Rokid AR Lite, Zhu Mingming said that Rokid benchmarked the lite products on sale as Pad users, hoping to impress business people with the "entertainment + light office" model, and expand the application scenarios from home to business travel, outdoor, office and other scenarios.
But that doesn't make much difference. According to the statistics of the Guanyan Tianxia Data Center, games account for 35% of the consumer applications of AR glasses in China, 32% of film and television live broadcasts, and 33% of travel and social shopping. However, there is no irreplaceability for these three types of application scenarios.
At Rokid Open Day 2024, although Rokid announced that it has established cooperation with 200+ museums and scenic spots in China, implemented AR teaching solutions in more than 40 primary and secondary schools in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Wenzhou, Jinhua, etc., and launched new spatial interactive entertainment activities in many cities across the country. However, it should not be ignored that AR glasses are still only suitable for micro-interaction, even if AR glasses are integrated and applied in a certain application scenario, it will only bring a short-term fresh experience, and it does not have subversive significance, which means that AR glasses are difficult to become explosive products.
There are still many difficulties
According to the "2024 China AR Industry Development Insight Research" released by Yiou Think Tank, the cumulative number of customers served by Rokid has exceeded 1 million, and in 2023, it will account for 27.9% of the market shipments, ranking first in domestic consumer-grade AR glasses. Despite this, Rokid still faces difficulties that need to be overcome.
First of all, the content ecology of AR glasses is not rich enough, far from being comparable to the content ecology of smartphones, and there have never been explosive products on the application side. The most important thing is that the content ecosystem cannot be developed by Rokid alone, but must be built by partners from all walks of life, which cannot be quickly solved in the short term.
Even in terms of entertainment, Rokid's AR glasses are still subject to many limitations, such as supporting only some "tasteless" chicken rib games, which cannot be adapted to mainstream games such as "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite".
iResearch believes that in an ideal state, hardware, software, and content are in a spiral promotion mode, which are closely linked and complement each other. At present, the domestic AR consumer-level application ecology basically transplants mobile phone 2D applications, and there is no application that really has AR functions, gives full play to the value of AR virtual and real combination, and interactive capabilities.
For developers, the user's frequency of use is too low to match the interest, which makes it difficult for Rokid to establish an effective business model, and eventually forms a vicious circle that restricts positive development.
Secondly, the technical maturity of AR glasses is low. According to iResearch's findings on the development of AR core technology, the overall technology is still immature, and the improvement of a single link is difficult to drive the rise of the whole industry. Although the technologies that can be commercialized in the short term (3-5 years) have made a big leap, the economic benefits are still very low compared with the existing mature solutions for the main landing scenarios. In the long run (5 years later), although the development path of each key technology is relatively clear, the time node of technology maturity is far away and the stage monetization ability is weak.
Finally, Rokid also faces strong competitors. Mark ·Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Mate, revealed in a recent interview that Meta is developing the next generation of AR smart glasses, whose performance will far exceed that of Ray-Ban products, and is expected to completely subvert the concept of traditional glasses.
In the future, once Meta launches AR glasses, the overseas market share of AR glasses manufacturers such as Rokid may be greatly affected, and even affect the domestic market share. In addition, smartphone manufacturers such as OPPO, Huawei, and Xiaomi have also entered the field of AR glasses, in contrast, Rokid is inferior to its competitors in terms of brand influence and content ecological construction. It can be seen that Rokid's road ahead is not a smooth road.
There is still a long way to go in the implementation of spatial computing
After Apple proposed the concept of spatial computing, Rokid became the first AR glasses manufacturer in China to enter spatial computing.
With the support of XR, 3D, computer graphics, machine vision, Internet of Things, sensing, somatosensory, AIGC and other fusion technologies, users can use terminals such as MR headsets and spatial operating systems to interact with digital content and the space environment in an immersive way.
"After the release of Vision Pro, pure VR will no longer exist in the future, and there will only be two different technical routes for AR products: VST (video perspective) represented by Vision Pro and OST (optical perspective) technology route adopted by Rokid and others. Apple's Vision Pro will not have a direct impact on Rokid at the moment, as two different technical routes, heavyweight and lightweight products will also exist in the future. Zhu Mingming said.
However, with the collapse of the Vision Pro, it seems to have cast a shadow on the development of spatial computing.
For Rokid, who is also betting on spatial computing, there are still many difficulties in implementing spatial computing, such as the need for high-precision calculations in three-dimensional space, including image processing, sound localization, motion capture, etc., which puts forward extremely high requirements for computing power. At the same time, the resolution, refresh rate, field of view and other parameters of AR glasses also need to be continuously optimized, and the portability and battery life of AR glasses should also be considered to improve the user's immersion and comfort. In addition, spatial computing requires the fusion of data from multiple platforms, including sensors, PCs, clouds, etc., and ensuring data accuracy and consistency is also a challenge.
It can be seen that the premise of spatial computing lies in the close connection and collaboration of ecology, hardware configuration, network, chip and algorithm, and the current level of virtual and real integration between the real world and the digital world is in the initial stage, and there is still a certain distance from the complete landing. At the same time, each capability of spatial computing is the crystallization of technology polishing and supply chain cultivation, and each capability has extremely high barriers, and the barriers after combination are even higher.
Whether Rokid can stay at the "spatial computing" table in the end depends on whether he has real hard power, but with the collapse of Vision Pro, there is not much time left for Rokid.