In the circle of friends, I have seen too much talk about the metaverse, those beautiful imagination and expectation, those complicated and unfathomable deduction and analysis. However, in my circle of friends, I only saw one person who bought a VR headset.
So, why is this?
The metaverse is not such an inconceivable direction. Stereoscopic glasses date back to the middle of the 19th century. Over a three-month period in 1851, about 250,000 stereoscopic glasses were sold in Paris and New York. In the electronic era, stereoscopes were introduced in the 1950s, and in the 1990s, Sega and Nintendo both launched commercial VR, but the market was lukewarm because there were bottlenecks in all aspects of the technology.
It's not hard to think of VR as social. Too many movies, novels, have described this picture. I remember when HTC's first generation VR glasses were just launched, I went to an exhibition in Shanghai to experience them. The content of the experience is a game, in the street to fight alien robots. Instead of hitting the robot, I walked down the streets of the game to see if I felt like I was walking down the streets of a strange city, being able to open a door and walk into a bar and talk to people. When you experience it, it does feel like this.
Facebook, indeed, is the only company qualified to put this old wine in a new bottle.
On July 26, it was announced that Facebook, which has changed its name to Meta, commissioned a metaverse white paper from the Analysis Group, an international economic consulting firm, which predicts the impact of metaverse technology on the global economy based on the development of mobile devices. The report said that if metaverse technology is adopted from 2022 onwards, it will contribute $3.01 trillion to global GDP by 2031, with one-third ($1.04 trillion) coming from the Asia-Pacific region.
Why Facebook? One way to the metaverse is technology. Wearing a headset is a way to enter another world. AR and MR devices and technologies will be the most efficient tools for setting up metaverse scenes. In 2020, due to the pandemic, global VR headset shipments reached 6.7 million units. The other way is that identity, social identity, is what makes a universe. Facebook has both. At a time when growth is sluggish, it is logical to propose a metaverse, tell a new story to the capital markets, and grow smoothly to explode the capital circle.
However, although the capital is trying to accelerate the metaverse, but the ending of this story is doomed to be small.
There is a well-known product value formula: user value = utility - cost = (utility of new experience - utility of old experience) - cost. From this formula, it is useful to analyze why the progenies of the metaverse failed and why the metaverse was destined for a niche.
3 d history
In fact, the predecessor technologies of the metaverse, 3D and VR, have already failed twice.
The new experience of the metaverse is three-dimensional, immersive, virtual reality.
The product of stereopsis was 3D glasses, the first failure of the metaverse. 3D glasses and 3D TV were also popular for a while. At that time, the two technological routes were 3D TV and 4K TV. Blu-ray disc, HDMI cable, due to lack of bandwidth, can not provide 3D and 4K at the same time, when the two routes can not coexist, the market chose the 4K route. Now, when people buy TVS, they don't buy 3D anymore, and the other line of technology, it's gone from 4K to 8K. 3D failed.
That's true in consumer electronics, and it hasn't been rolled out in a big way in the business world, in the professional world. During the boom of 3D TV, nVidia provided CAD and 3dMAX designers with a set of industrial 3D glasses, which enabled them to see the three-dimensional graphics displayed on the screen. With this device, designers can sense the Z-axis information, which is depth information, which is better for design. However, the designers did not choose this product.
The new experience with 3D glasses is that they are three-dimensional, they have depth information, they are more realistic, they are more informative. The old experience, as opposed to 3D glasses, was a 2D screen that relied on perspective to get Z-axis information and a sense of physical strength. The reason 3D fails, in my opinion, is precisely because humans are pretty good at getting Z-axis information, that is, 3D sense, from 2D perspective. No one can watch a 2D movie and get confused about perspective, two cars chasing, one in front of the other, no one can get confused. That being the case, people don't want to go through the hassle of wearing 3D glasses. Designers can perform 3D design tasks on a 2D screen just by using perspective principles. People can see before and after a 2D movie.
For a Chinese, the biggest and most complex consumption is decoration, often hundreds of thousands of millions, but in the decoration company to provide renderings, VR still has not become a standard. Although renderings can now be easily transformed into VR perspectives, consumers rarely experience this feeling on VR devices. Because just looking at the floor plan can already have a good sense of the final effect.
So, the new experience of stereo is not as big or even higher than the trouble of wearing 3D glasses. So, 3D glasses are out of the living room altogether and in the cinema, when there is a bigger screen, independent scene, people will be willing to change their behavior pattern, wear glasses. In fact, polarizers are increasingly replacing electronic ones in theaters for 3-D movies, and one reason may be that polarizers are lighter, because people don't think it's worth the burden of a heavier pair of glasses.
So, when the new experience isn't good enough, people aren't even willing to afford a pair of glasses, and the 3D fails and doesn't go into the home.
VR were dusty
Another new experience in the metaverse is immersion, virtual reality. This is VR. And the second failure of the metaverse.
I bought VR goggles early on, but used them very infrequently.
Search Xianyu with Eat Grey +VR and you'll find plenty of people using the term when selling their VR glasses. It's normal to have second-hand sales, but the reason so many sellers are selling is that not many are "eating dust".
The most important part of VR immersion is vision. Regardless of the cost, the current technology, there is no problem in achieving this part. But smell, touch, inner ear balance, and the position of the joint fluid in the joint cavity are all essential elements of authenticity and immersion. Even the weight of VR glasses felt on the head reminds the user that it is fake. Therefore, the false mountains and seas, the universe and stars, although dazzling and exciting, but people will always be tired of. In a certain group, some people imagined that the female stars were virtual, they could approach, another person who bought a helmet said, what's the fun? You can predict all her reactions, and you always know they're fake.
In terms of (utility of new experience - utility of old experience), the metaverse doesn't offer much compared to a 2D screen, getting a 3D feel out of 2D. However, the immersion, the virtual feeling, is really a big improvement. The problem with VR isn't that the experience isn't effective enough, it's that it's expensive.
The best immersive devices, including VR headsets that don't see the lattice and high-performance computers, cost around 30,000 yuan. The equipment is very expensive, but it is a small matter. With the progress of technology, the price of the equipment will surely come down. What won't come down is another cost. When we talk about immersion, virtual sensation, the other side of the coin is: completely cut off from reality, only cut off from reality, can you enter another virtual reality. That's a very, very high and logically insurmountable cost.
A disconnect from reality means a need for comprehensive security. The first is physical safety. The designer wears a helmet, she designs a car, she needs to move around, she needs safety, she needs soft bag walls, closed rooms, an uninterrupted environment. The workplace provided by the company is no longer a cubicle, but 15 square meters per person. That's a high cost.
The second is social safety. Imagine male and female colleagues in a virtual meeting in the same room. The male colleague quietly removes his helmet and uses his phone to film the female colleague. So, a lot of people around a table, wearing glasses, meeting with distant colleagues, is a high-cost behavior.
In addition, the metaverse requires a complete period of undisturbed time. In the famous metaverse movie, a shipping container was arranged to provide this space. But for most people, such a space and time is a luxury.
So, the unsolvable high cost of the metaverse is: highly secure environment, physically safe, socially safe, non-fragmented long time. So the question comes, why graphic video, audio, shared desktop can solve the problem, to do so much cost to solve. Why use 15 squares when a computer can do a design? Just to show off?
Because of this high cost. VR didn't break the circle, and VR games didn't break the circle. Those who talk about the metaverse, even if they experience it, even if tens of thousands of yuan is nothing to them, they will not buy a VR headset, and even if they do, they will eat dust. This new experience will only drive them to talk, but it won't drive them to buy a VR headset.
Of course, it is also possible to imagine that the metaverse will gradually become popular in the future. But I'm not so sure that's going to happen anytime soon. Because technical obstacles are easy to overcome, what cannot be overcome is human nature.
The biggest cost of playing HIFI (hi-fi) is the house, because listening requires acoustic decoration, and the popularity of VR, the biggest cost is "security of various properties". In any case, completely obscuring the outside world is a costly act for human nature.