In the field of education, the metacosm also has countless imaginations.
Written by | Zhang Ziyue
Facebook changed its name, adding a fire to the metaverse.
Meta-universe concept stocks sit on rockets, and institutions get together to investigate. Luo Yonghao, the "industry lamp", announced that the next entrepreneurial project was the "meta-universe" company, which was once jokingly called "meta-universe" to become "complete the universe".
Another "Luo Fat" Luo Zhenyu's "Meta-Universe 6 Lecture" sold millions in one hour.
The "virtual fire" of the metaverse is burning from the game, and education seems to be one of the first areas to spread.
According to the rhythm of one "first year" every year, 2021 is undoubtedly the "first year of the meta-universe".
At the beginning of the year, Roblox first wrote the concept of metacosmonics into the prospectus, and on November 9, Roblox's market value reached more than $62 billion, more than $52 billion, becoming the number one game company in the United States by market capitalization.
Third-quarter financial results show that Roblox's daily active users averaged 47.3 million, up 31% year-over-year. It is reported that half of the children under the age of 16 in the United States are playing Roblox.
Although Roblox has become the number one game company in the United States by market capitalization, it has never actually wanted to make games, but instead wanted to do education.
In recent years, Roblox has invested a lot in education and training, not only holding summer programming summer camps, providing free online programming courses for teachers, purchasing offline programming training classes, but also reaching a strategic cooperation with Tencent in 2019 to introduce "Robles" to China. Tencent brings it to schools as a STEAM education curriculum, teaching programming on the Roblox platform. During the pandemic, Roblox has also developed an educational tool that allows children to listen to teachers in a virtual classroom, learn about history and humanities while learning programming, developing games, and designing 3D models.
In addition, Roblox tries to achieve gaming and programming education to feed each other back. For example, the player Alex started out playing games only on Roblox, and gradually tried to create games using the tools provided by Roblox, and then his MeepCity exploded. With the game, Alex, who had never studied computer programming professionally, earned nearly a million dollars.
If you look back at past developments, whether it is mobile Internet, VR, AR, education has not always been the first industry to "eat crabs". But now, from Roblox, we may be the first to see the possibility of the "metacosm" extending to the education industry.
Create a scene with metaverse technology, create a sense of immersion, and give users the tools to complete their learning and transformation. Users learn to program while playing games and develop new games to complete updates to the virtual world content. The games produced by the developers will directly get feedback from the player market, earn virtual funds, and the entire economic closed loop will be completed in the virtual world, and eventually feed back into the real world.
Not just programming, founder Baszucki envisioned more educational scenarios. He spoke many times about the vision of the Metacosm, "When you studied the Civil War, a long time ago, you would have studied the encyclopedia. Now, people go to videos or books. In the future, imagine that you can participate in the civil war, experience it yourself, and understand it. In the future, Roblox users will not only be able to read books about ancient Rome on the platform, but even visit and hang out in the historic city that was rebuilt in the 'metacosm'. ”
It is pointed out that if the meta-universe technology is implemented in the classroom, the entire educational method will be subverted. Imagine the appearance of the entire cosmic galaxy in the astronomy class, which can be arbitrarily reduced or enlarged, the history class can truly travel back to ancient Rome 2,000 years ago, witness the volcanic ash buried in Pompeii, and the language class is no longer only cold words, but can stand on the Yangtze River, hear the apes on both sides of the strait, and feel the pride of Li Bai... In the vision of the meta-universe, every major, every class, and every knowledge point can become an enhanced version of virtual reality, and the offline scene will be perfectly online, and the students' learning scenarios, learning methods, and learning effect evaluation standards will change accordingly.
Judging from Facebook's statement, the application of education does not seem to be far away. According to public information, after changing the name of Meta, it said that an important area of development is education, and the company will set up a $150 million VR content creation fund to reshape the way of education in the next three years to enhance the quality of VR teaching content.
Meta reportedly wants to build a robust metaversymic education ecosystem that isn't just limited to immersive educational experiences, with some of the money going to be used to train VR/AR content creators. Meta is working with Unity on VR education tools and Quest 2 skills training, and with several educational institutions and non-profit organizations to create immersive educational content.
"VR isn't all about entertainment and gaming, it can be a powerful teaching tool, and now is the perfect time for us to build a new VR education for the future." Meta's Mark Rabkin says so.
Compared to these visions of Facebook and Roblox, capital can't wait to set off a carnival.
According to data from the Prospective Industry Research Institute, in the first half of 2021, the number of financings in the AR/VR industry was 20, including a number of large financings of hundreds of millions of yuan, with a total financing of 2.833 billion yuan, which has exceeded the 2.826 billion yuan for the whole of last year.
The layout of the domestic Internet giant on the meta-universe has already begun, and in April this year, Byte spent 100 million yuan to invest in the domestic mobile game developer code Qiankun, and the meta-universe game "Restart the World" developed by the company was launched in August. In the same month, Byte won the bid with Tencent to acquire meta-universe concept company "PICO" for 9 billion yuan, which is the largest acquisition of the domestic VR track this year. Moreover, it is reported that Byte is internally or developing a meta-universe social product "Pixsoul", which is committed to creating an immersive virtual social platform.
Facebook's name change has added a fire. On October 28, Facebook announced that it would change the company name to "Meta", the prefix for Metaverse, while changing the company icon. Zuckerberg even made a high-profile claim that the metaverse would be the next frontier, hoping that within the next decade, the metaverse would cover 1 billion people and carry hundreds of billions of dollars in digital business.
An Amazon butterfly flapping its wings occasionally threatens to trigger a major storm across the Pacific Ocean. Technology giant Facebook changed its name to Meta to turn to the metacosm, which naturally set off a double shock in the technology field and the capital market.
From October 29 to November 10, the overall growth rate of the meta-universe plate was nearly 30%, of which yishang display, Zhongqingbao, Tianxiaxiu and other individual stocks rose by more than 80%, of which Yishang showed a strong trend of 6 days and 5 boards.
The ideal is very full, but the current judgment of many institutions on the metacosm is that it is not yet mature.
Metaverses are recognized as the first to be from the science fiction novel Avalanche by writer Neal Stephenson. In the novel, humans live in a virtual three-dimensional space through digital avatars, and this artificial space is called the "metacosm".
The metacosm is defined as "a collective virtual shared space created by the fusion of virtually augmented physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet."
Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who has long studied metacosms, has proposed several key characteristics that determine the metacosm: the metacosm must span both physical and virtual worlds; form a fully fledged economy; provide "unprecedented interactivity"; and the metacosm will be operated in a decentralized manner by many different players, rather than belonging to a single company.
In summary, the metacosm is an open source platform with a high degree of virtual and reality interconnection and constructed by a closed-loop economy.
At present, even if it is the entertainment and socialization that was first applied, the metaverse as a whole is still in its early stages, and there is no large-scale application and achievement in education. In the future, educational institutions in transition will be even more powerless to do so. Moreover, the meta-universe industry as a whole also faces risks in three aspects:
The first is that the development of the underlying technology is not as expected, which is reflected in the insufficient development of VR/AR technology as a technical support. At present, VR/AR is still considered to be the most likely entrance to the metaverse, but the vertigo that the industry needs to solve the most has not yet been broken, and this will still be an industry-wide problem for a while. In addition, the resolution of VR on the market currently supports 4K at the highest, and to achieve the most natural clarity of the human eye, the resolution needs to meet 16K, and the refresh rate must reach 180HZ, while most of them are currently only concentrated in 70-120HZ, which is difficult to simulate the real sensory experience. Moreover, the slow development of the virtual content ecology makes the concept of metaversity only stay at the imaginary level.
Second, policy risks cannot be ignored. The underlying trading system of the metacosmum introduces new blockchain finance such as NFTs, but it is obvious that the supervision of blockchain in various countries is becoming increasingly stringent, and the same is true for transactions involving virtual currencies. Under dual regulation, if the policy changes, there is a risk of subverting the economic system of the metacosm at any time. Recently, a number of meta-universe concept stocks have risen by more than 60% or even 80%, causing the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to issue a letter of concern and constantly prompt investment risks, from which it seems to be able to glimpse the trend of tightening supervision. The new digital world is bound to be equipped with corresponding regulatory policies and standardized operations, and there are still many unknowns ahead.
Finally, how to protect the rights and interests of users will be another important challenge. The metaverse is parallel to the real world, and users must leave countless digital traces in their survival. On November 1, the Personal Information Protection Law came into effect, and the protection of users' personal privacy was further strengthened. In this context, how platform developers of metaversity should legally collect, store, and manage user data in metaverse needs to be further refined in the discussion. With the increase of virtual transactions in the metaverse, how to increase financial risk resistance and protect the safety of users' personal property in the real world is also a major problem.
"When will the metaverse really arrive?" Some people say that it is now the eve of the outbreak of the metacosm, and some people say that the metacosm is a scam used by capital to harvest. The digitization of the real world has been underway, and the simulation construction of online education scenes is also constantly improving. Is the metacosm just a new bottle of old wine for VR/AR, or can it really fission the "next Internet decade"? To what extent can metaverseal education evolve? How many possibilities are there for the combination of the two? Everything in the future is curious.