The metacosm is working on the "meeting" again

Produced | Tiger Sniff Technology Group

The author | Zhang Xue

The cover | the official Website of Meta

No one can deny that the recent heat of the metaverse has reached a new level.

Under the crazy heat, some strange things are also happening, such as some people who earn more than one million yuan by selling "meta-universe" classes for ten days, such as even Honey Snow Ice City and Nai Xue's tea are also competing for layout. No wonder some netizens joked: "The meta-universe is a basket, and anything can be loaded into it." ”

Of course, under the hustle and bustle is not all gimmicks, and now, remote meetings are being targeted by metaverstem practitioners, and some analysts believe that this is a scene that can achieve the fastest landing.

Why remote meetings

Although the spread of the new crown epidemic around the world has led to a big outbreak in the remote meeting market, it has also given birth to technology upstarts like Zoom.

But even now, there is still a gap between the effect of remote meetings and on-site meetings, the most obvious of which is that remote meetings are missing a lot of presence and immersion. As a result, the attendee experience is greatly reduced, which affects the overall performance of the meeting and even business innovation.

In this regard, some practitioners pointed out that there are still many problems in the current remote meeting method, for example, in the remote conference, people prefer to listen, rarely take the initiative to speak, less interaction, and the efficiency of communication is not high.

In addition, Nicole Herskowitz, general manager of Microsoft Microsoft Teams, also said in an interview with the foreign media The Verge: "We often feel tired in remote meetings. "After a maximum of 30 or 40 minutes in a meeting, it's hard to stay engaged and focused."

This reality also sends a signal that after the market outbreak after the epidemic in remote meetings, it has come from the stage of large-scale popularization to the next stop that needs to improve the sense of experience.

In the context of the rise of the metaverse, virtual reality and remote conferencing have a natural combination point. For example, using one of their own "avatars" (that is, the more popular digital people now) to participate in the speech, but also with body language and micro-expressions to convey information.

Similarly, in a report published by the Meta Institute, it is pointed out that virtual meetings using avatars are closer to human communication in natural situations.

He Lizhong and Han Yang, electronic industry analysts at Capital Securities, believe that although the player group under the meta-universe game is huge, from the perspective of macro development, improving the game experience is not a top priority, and the video conference to improve productivity is the scene that most needs the meta-universe at present.

We can imagine that when we attend remote meetings, everyone meets and interacts with a virtual role that matches their own image, sitting around a table in a virtual conference room. Compared to Zoom's standard web conferencing model, which places participants in a video grid, the "metaverse" is obviously more creative and communicative.

To be more advanced, by wearing devices such as AR/VR, you can interact with colleagues, communicate with customers and build business in a more immersive way, so that people can feel more truly in a real physical room.

It is reported that the current technology has allowed the user's avatar to reflect the user's expression and action in real time.

It is not difficult to find that as the timeline of "temporary remote" under the epidemic is lengthened, the situation is quietly changing, and more and more ideas and technologies are pouring into this emerging track.

The "meta-cosmological" video conference began to land

If even those of us who have seen the trend of remote conferencing being "metaverse", then those keen practitioners have long been prepared for the landing of this scene.

In fact, as early as the V2EC Developer Conference held by HTC in 2020, it took a different form of activity. The HTC V2EC Developer Conference was held on the VR collaboration platform Engage, with more than 1,000 people using the HTC Vive Virtual Reality Headset.

It's just that at that time, the concept of "metaverse" was not so popular.

Time to now, we see that various vendors have made a layout in the meta-universe + remote conference. The latest example, Baidu announced on Friday (December 10) that it will release the meta-universe product "Xi'an", and the Baidu AI Developer Conference will be held in the Xi'an APP in the same period. This is the first conference held in The Metaverse in China, which can accommodate 100,000 people to interact with the same screen at the same time.

For example, Meta recently released the telecommuting software Horizon Workrooms, which allows users to hold meetings in a VR environment, through Meta's Oculus Quest headset experience, Workrooms uses spatial audio and hand tracking and other functions to make people feel more truly in a real physical room.

Meanwhile, in a recent year-end letter, Microsoft co-founder billionaire Bill Gates not only looked back on "the most unusual and difficult 2021," but was also optimistic about 2022 and beyond — including a "more digital future." He predicts that the rise of the metacosm will dramatically change future work.

Gates noted that the Covid-19 pandemic has "revolutionized" the workplace, with more companies than ever before offering flexibility to employees looking to telecommute. "These changes are only going to intensify in the coming years," Gates wrote, adding that telecommuting will only pull more people into the metaverse.

And that's just last month, Microsoft announced at the Ignite conference that it will launch a new Mesh for Microsoft Teams software, that is, microsoft's mixed reality platform Mesh into the video conferencing tool Teams, allowing people in different geographical locations to join the collaboration and share holographic experience, to achieve virtual meetings, send chats, collaborate on shared documents and more functions, is expected to be launched by 2022.

Gates noted, though, that users must wear virtual reality headsets or glasses to do just that. He also acknowledged that in order to "accurately capture expressions, body language and sound quality," people need expensive tech equipment, such as VR headsets and even motion-capture gloves.

It is worth mentioning that although the participation of virtual people is still in its infancy, I had the opportunity to experience such a meeting not long ago.

Unlike imagining that we would create a virtual person ourselves, the image of the participant was customized by the AI face pincher based on the photos provided in advance. Also, we didn't use VR equipment either.

What is more novel is that when entering the meeting, the whole is an immersive screen, which can be like the "eat chicken" game, arbitrarily pull the screen to switch different perspectives, and can also communicate with people through voice, action and micro-expressions in the virtual conference room. And this conference has also been customized to allow people to put trademarks, posters, etc. in the virtual meeting.

It can be speculated that with the further promotion and popularization of technology, remote conferencing combined with virtual reality will soon become a reality.