"The meta-universe is like a coin still flipping in the air."
After the momentum of 2021, the year 2022 of the metasomes will not be quiet. Some investors have questioned whether Meta is in danger because Of Zuckerberg's bet on an uncertain meta-universe; And after Apple came out of the development of MR display news, "fruit chain" listed companies once rose......
As with the Internet's generational shifts, it is a mixture of uncertainty, restlessness, blindness and optimism. The occasional good news can set off a fierce whirlwind that quickly turns the entrepreneur into a unicorn. But once there is trouble, even the giant of a trillion market value will encounter whirlpool.
As "spectators" outside the wave of the meta-universe, the general public may not care about the rise and fall of the stock price or the rise and fall of the so-called giants. There seems to be only one topic they are interested in, that is, what is the "meta-universe" like and what kind of experience can be gained in the "meta-universe"?
The "Three Days Fresh" meta-universe
The metasurverse concept exploded in early 2021, starting out as a theoretical concept, but by the end of the year, there were already tons of metasurverse content.
According to data firm Sensor Tower, between November 2021 and January 2022, about 552 apps added the word "metasomes" to their product descriptions, including 70 apps that call themselves "metasomes" -- an average of one new "metasomes" a day.
Each generational shift is a golden age of entrepreneurship for new and old iterations, and the excitement on the battlefields of the meta-universe vividly interprets the mentality of practitioners. The passion of entrepreneurs should not be ridiculed. When it comes to product experience, the current metaverse is just an increase in number and still in the "grass roots" stage.
Take Gel, a popular product in a short time, for example. It has topped the free list of the APP Store for many times, as popular as many old social products. In terms of product form, gel focuses on soft and cute virtual image. Users can create their own image by "pinching their face", and interact based on location and dynamic sharing. It's just that the current gels are being taken off the shelves and we don't see any further innovations.
Backed by Baidu, Xirang escaped the fate of being removed from the market and even attracted more than a dozen enterprises such as Nvidia, Intel, LYNk and FAW to enter the market. It also features virtual images and provides cartoon, personified and realistic styles. Unfortunately, Xrang has not given much differentiation in gameplay. Currently, it can only run maps, brush landscapes, watch exhibitions, or communicate with friends and passers-by by voice.
The result can say poor satisfactory only, many yuan universe product poured into a large number of users in short time, sufficient the temptation that sees yuan universe concept, but oneness and the gameplay that homogenize changes lets user feel very easily however tired, new period often has 3 days time only. The metasverse is making more and more ripples at the product level, but it is far from being a phenomenal wave.
Many explanations can be found.
For example, ZEGO Technology, Xiangxin Technology and other "water sellers" have successively launched Avatar+ social networking solutions, which to a large extent lowers the technical threshold of the meta-universe. Even entrepreneurial teams lacking core technology research and development can quickly realize some functions of the meta-universe by invoking SDK or API interfaces. In less than a year since the metasurverse concept became popular, the product level has been blossoming. However, many products are still in the testing stage, and some envisioned modules and functions have not been "unlocked" and still need time to be polished.
The current pain point of meta-universe content may be understandable, but the standard to measure a product is by no means "meta-universe". If we can't find a way out in terms of gameplay, business model and innovation, and can't get out of the "3-day fresh period" experience trap, I'm afraid it will be difficult to reach the maturity stage of the market.
02. The exploration period of the great waves
There is a specific explanation for the current state of business in the meta-universe -- the industry is in the period of chaos exploration. In 2010, 2016, and 2018, entrepreneurs have explored business models such as e-commerce group purchase, live streaming, and smart speakers.
After all, the application of any new technology is not smooth sailing, there is a stage of exploration, and it takes trial and error to find the most suitable application scenario, and the metasverse is no exception.
Such rhetoric is not unreasonable, but it is difficult to hide the fact that some enterprises are impatient to get into the game. A direct example is the phenomenon of registering the trademark of the "yuan Universe". Most enterprises may still be in the stage of preparation and planning, and do not even plan to enter the yuan universe, but just follow the trend of trademark registration, which makes the industry bubble of the yuan universe blow bigger and bigger. Some of the companies that launched the products of the meta-universe do not rule out the suspicion of scrambling for heat.
Whether night hit back her gels, super QQ show, dancing party or bytes island, baidu's soil, core gameplay br "pinched face change + virtual social", in addition to the style of the virtual image is different, the private chat, chatting, matching algorithm, interest groups, such as tree holes share are common social play, On the basis of virtual social interaction on the shell of the universe, to take this industry position.
Similar explanations are equally plausible, but not absolute.
For example, Both Vava and Inke Live use ZEGO's structural technology solutions, but the final products have their own characteristics. The former integrates Avatar and chat to realize the following facial expression of virtual Avatar, and users can express anger, sorrow and fear through facial expression when chatting. The latter utilizes the virtual KTV solution to develop the function of panoramic karaoke. Users can place themselves in a virtual karaoke room for physical interaction and facial social karaoke experience.
The differentiation of products in the meta-universe is not complicated, and sometimes a different perspective will have a different answer. For example, virtual concerts may not be a new application, many stars and virtual idols have tried to open virtual concerts, but the entry point of Inke live is the ability to subside, to create a k-song circle for ordinary users, with the difference in content and experience, to create a rigid new demand.
To make an analogy, the current meta-universe is equivalent to the BBS era in the early days of the Internet, which still has great application potential to be explored. The difference is that the concept of "meta-universe" is too grand, abstract and vague, and it may not be able to find a unified evolutionary path in a short time. Especially with the enlightenment of the previous two "creating rich tide", the participants of the meta-universe are much higher than in the past, and the proportion of followers and disrupters is very high, which requires a certain amount of time to filter.
It may be too early to say how long the metasomes will last, but the accumulated failures and successes point in the right direction.
03, immersion from the sense of participation
As Jiang Zhaosheng, a senior researcher at THE Oueske Cloud Link Research Institute, said: "Although the market has high expectations for metacosmic social interaction, it is still more gimmicks than substance at this stage. The premise of meta-cosmic social interaction is that there is a meta-universe, but now people probably don't understand what the meta-universe is. "The current social products in the metasurverse feel too detached from reality."
Such a sound is actually not uncommon. In the context that the metasurverse has not reached a conceptual consensus, the outside world's understanding of the metasurverse is generally based on VR, AR and other hardware. The biggest feature is the unprecedented sense of immersion, but immersion is a sensory experience in essence.
If we temporarily turn our attention away from the meta-universe and move to the offline social networking of young people, drama killing and secret room escape can be said to be the most lucrative industry. Among them, "playbook killing" related enterprises registered 5957 new companies in 2021, up to 85% year-on-year growth, market size has also exceeded 20 billion yuan.
According to the research report of IMedia Consulting, 73.7% of the respondents said they were interested in reasoning logic, 63.3% wanted to experience different characters, and 57.9% of the players chose scripted killing as a new way for friends to have a casual party... Behind the "drama killing", the young people's pursuit of immersion, and this immersion is the source of the immersive sense of participation.
The same logic applies to the metadverse. Virtual images satisfy users' instinctive social needs to some extent, and are adopted by more and more virtual social products. However, in order to further transform users' curiosity into user engagement, users' sense of participation needs to be actively mobilized.
Mentioned virtual KTV solution, is to avatar, follow-up, spatial audio, audio and video real-time ability of fusion, the user can fit in a virtual room the true karaoke experience, with the first person, the third person, personal features, such as the perspective of different dimensions, greatly reducing the user experience in the KTV. With the increase of the user's sensory dimension, there will be more resonant moments and it will be easier for the user to fully participate in the experience, which is commonly referred to as immersive.
Shaan Puri, an American technology critic, makes a revelatory observation: "Most people are wrong about the meta-universe, which is not a virtual place, but a moment." When we spend seven or eight hours a day on our phones, habits and behaviors are already migrating silently, and more and more demands are shifting from the physical world to the digital one. The emergence of the metasemes is not the result of VR stimulation, but the inevitable reallocation of users' time.
In other words, with VR, MR, AR and other hardware products on the rise, the gold miners of the meta-universe, if they want to seize the opportunity, are bound to continue to create differentiated experiences in content, and awaken the desire of young people to actively participate in the situation, rather than Shouting slogans, drawing a pie, and fidgeting with concepts.
04. Two pairs of hands pushing the wheels
There is a management concept called the "flywheel effect," in which it is hard to spin a wheel at first, but at a certain "critical point," the gravity and momentum of the flywheel become part of the thrust, and the flywheel spins faster and faster even if it doesn't exert much force.
Yuan the universe as a huge systematic project, which involves artificial intelligence, cloud computing, communications, chain blocks, such as technology, which promote the flywheel rotating factor basically has two, one is the interaction of the hardware, one is the content of ecological, and formed a positive correlation relationship: the ascension of VR hardware such as shipments, heralding the developers are expected to gain more benefits; And the more quality content there is, the more consumers are incentivized to buy hardware.
One of the worst outcomes is that because hardware isn't shipped enough to make money from it, there's no incentive to keep spending. At the same time, the scarcity of high-quality content directly affects the user experience of the terminal, which will not only hinder the entry of new users, but also accelerate the loss of old users.
That is precisely the challenge. According to KPMG China's insight, in order to achieve immersive virtual experience, VR all-in-one and other perceptual interactive hardware needs to solve the problems of "window screen effect" and vertigo on the hardware, as well as the accuracy and real-time challenges of full-body motion capture in three-dimensional space. However, the current VR headsets are still in the early stage of popularization, and are in urgent need of "killer" products.
Compared with the uncertainty of hardware, the innovation of content ecology can be said to be the biggest force driving the flywheel, and the endless meta-universe content is the trickle of this force. While most metaverse content is still connected to users on mobile phones and tablets, there is no shortage of value in the educational market. But the status quo of homogeneity and simplicity of products in the meta-universe is also inseparable from a technical proposition.
For example, in order to build realistic, real-time and interactive 3D virtual worlds, applications of game development engines, including Unreal Engine, Unity and so on, are indispensable, and corresponding professionals are scarce. It is said that Tencent, which has a large pool of game talent, has opened up nearly 100 positions to develop the super QQ Show, specifically requiring technical candidates to be familiar with Unreal Engine, Unity and other engines.
There are also some solutions to support scene customization in the market. For example, some cloud service providers integrate Avatar, RTC, Unity and other technologies, and developers can realize the metacosmic world by simply calling a few lines of code without UE and Unity development experience.
Back to the discussion of the content of the meta-universe, technology is the lowest structure of the meta-universe, and the current technological progress limits the imaginative space of products to a certain extent, but it is not the prevarication of "three days of freshness". At least with existing technology, there is no shortage of possibilities for developers to focus on the business itself and let users "play" within it.
Write at the end
Some VR industry practitioners are already sensing that the past crazy metasurverse capital boom is slowing down as we move into the second quarter of 2022. It is not ruled out that optimism will gradually erode and pessimism will continue to ferment, bringing the whole industry into a trough.
In fact, the pressure is left to all kinds of meta-universe content entrepreneurs, who need not only the prosperity of a hundred flowers blooming, but also the product experience that users are willing to pay for. Through the fresh scenes, they can find the moment of product Epiphany as soon as possible, push the flywheel of the meta-universe to keep rotating, and get out of the "black barrier area" before landing.