On April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim uploaded a 19-second video to a website he and his partners had built. The video, called "Me at the zoo," shows Jia De standing next to an elephant in a zoo and telling the camera that the elephant's nose is long and "cool."
Looking back now, the video was silly, but that didn't stop the Los Angeles Times from later describing it as "changing the way people use media." The website created by Jia De, called YouTube, was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion a year after its establishment, and will become the world's largest UGC video site in the future.
However, back in 2005, on the eve of the popularity of smartphones, in order to help users upload videos, the YouTube team had to run to the user's home, take the other party's video tape and run back to the company to upload it in digital format, which was very laborious.
In contrast, Instgram, which was launched in 2010, absolutely stepped on the pulse of the times, and with the outbreak of smartphones, photo uploading and sharing became a new muscle memory, which also made Instgram popular in a very short period of time, absorbing a large number of users, and was quickly acquired by Facebook at a sky-high price.
The popularity of smartphone cameras has made graphic content mainstream on social platforms| Pixabay
The popularity of smartphones and cameras has made it easy for ordinary users to share the content of captured images, which has indirectly contributed to the success of social platforms and photo and video sharing websites.
The current "metaverse" field is facing the same challenge as the previous VR rise - insufficient content, especially the lack of C-end tools and applications, making UGC's 3D content extremely scarce. From the experience of the mobile Internet, there is not enough UGC content to support a large enough platform.
At the content level, the predecessor of the metaversecratic boom, the VR industry, once took a detour, and the 360-degree video content that followed the camera route was popular as a representative of the "reality capture" type of content, but was eventually abandoned; on the other hand, the native 3D content and games produced by professional 3D software became the pillar of VR content. And this trend, at present, seems to extend to the fiery metaverse.
The camera fell on the eve of the metaverse
In Los Angeles, 2015, beautiful girls screamed and ran through the brightly lit river, followed by a strange object. This is not the crime scene of "City of Angels", but the set of Asian director Lin Yibin, who is not making a new sequel to "Fast and Furious", but a VR short film that will be released at google developer conference - "Help!".
The short film about teenage girls and alien monsters was sponsored by Google's Spotlight Stories, a team that grew out of Motorola's ATAP Advanced Technology and Projects to work with artists to produce VR content that was still unfamiliar to the public at the time. Apparently, because of being in California, Spotlight Stories chose the "rich mine" at hand - Hollywood, which is rich in film and television resources.
The shooting scene of Lin Yibin's "Help!" | BackChannel
The camera on the set of "Help!", instead of hollywood's usual Aley camera, is an array of four Red Dragon and fisheye cameras, plus rocker arms and cables, this self-built weird-looking machine was called "Spider" by the crew.
VR video, also known as 360-degree video, the difficulty of shooting, one is the need to capture the up and down left and right pictures into the camera for the later "stitching" into a 360-degree video, and the other is that the director and the camera can not stand behind the camera, so there will be such a machine as a "spider".
"Help!", which invested more than ten million dollars, set a benchmark for VR video, allowing Hollywood to discover the charm of VR as an experience tool, and then evolved into a tool for Hollywood's big companies to promote a few years later, but it also misled the industry, making practitioners think that the traditional content production of capturing real light and shadow with cameras can be seamlessly connected to a new medium such as VR.
Of course, it is not only Google that is wrong, but also competitor Oculus, which has also fallen into the mindset, not only Facebook has opened 360-degree video and picture uploads and displays, but also personally produced two generations of 360 Surround cool camera hardware, and finally the results of OZO launched by Nokia are similar, leaving only a beautiful back for the world.
At the level of content creation, the traditional principle of film and television narrative is facing a fundamental challenge in the VR era - the audience's free observation perspective is no longer dominated by the director. Creators who step into VR film and television production have to face several questions: What is the role of the audience represented by the camera? How can I keep viewers from missing out on stories and actions? Without the lens concept, how to edit?
At the same time, 360 video content does not satisfy users' "fantasies" about VR. For those who are new to VR, turning their heads to find that images can be seen all around, especially when well-made 3D images, does feel different. But with a little familiarity with VR, the stimulation that simple video content can give is limited. The fundamental reason is that 360 video is 3 degrees of freedom content, that is, users can only watch 360 degrees at a certain point in the space, but can not walk in it, and there is no avatar or identity, which is very confusing.
Samsung, Nikon, Ricoh and other companies launched 360 cameras | YouTube
Although camera manufacturers such as GoPro, Ricoh, and Nikon successively launched consumer-grade 360 cameras that year, the crappy sharing method and the less affordable price did not allow users who already had smartphones to go out and bring a 360 camera - the Pisces Eye lens still lost to the traditional lens of the mobile phone.
Of course, more importantly, because it does not need "kryptonite" like VR games, and the number of VR users and cannot support advertising, 360 video content cannot make money through the platform like ordinary videos, and the general team can only support the progress through one project after another. Eventually, as the VR industry gradually entered a trough in 2017, the 360 video industry also fell apart and became lifeless.
The failure of 360 video, although there are problems in the VR industry, but under the existing technology, the content produced by the camera captures reality is not compatible with the new medium of VR. In contrast, native 3D content, represented by VR games, has begun to become the "top pillar" of VR.
3D content "top stream" is still missing tools
When traditional lens capture reality is frustrated in VR, native 3D content represented by games has become the mainstream content of VR platforms, and if nothing else, it may also become the main content form of the future metaverse.
Unlike Lin Yibin's "Help!", which also pays attention to the beginning and end of traditional film and television techniques, in the early stage of the VR explosion in 2015, the keyword of VR games and experiences was excitement. The "pendulum" and roller coaster are the most popular features in the Oculus Rift DK two-generation developer suite. These early experiences do not pay attention to graphics and design, and pursue a violent attack on the "vestibular" system of the user's brain in order to impress or psychologically shadow.
Yang Dong, technical director of unity's greater China platform, clearly remembers that the first experience of playing Oculus DK2 brought back from the United States was a skiing game, I don't know whether the optimization is not good or the frame rate is not enough, it is also possible to have both, the result is "halo no".
Yang Dong did not expect that after Oculus launched the consumer product Rift CV1 a few years later, he took this set of equipment to his children's kindergarten and gave the children a taste of VR charm, but he did not expect that the most exciting "roller coaster" experience for these children was the most exciting.
The hottest content in early VR was roller coaster | YouTube
Early VR users, much like those children, have a natural affinity for VR games, because in a sense, most of the early users themselves are fans of deep games, and VR content creators are game developers. That's why two major game engines like Unity and Unreal are developer conferences, as well as VR developer conventions. Yang Dong still remembers taking hundreds of paper box VR glasses with his team to experience VR scenes for game developers.
As opposed to 360 video, VR games and experiences allow users to move around the game scene and simply interact with in-game objects or characters. Even having a 3D avatar has doubled the user's sense of immersion. That's why 3D native content like games became mainstream on VR platforms and helped a handful of studios get millions of dollars in sales, while the number of VR users at the time was pitifully small.
Zhou Xudong, co-founder of Sandman Studios, who once focused on vr content production and distribution, believes that just like traditional movies and VR film and television content, there are two needs for reality capture and 3D native content, and because the latter is more conducive to secondary development in the production process, 3D native content may be larger.
The Sandman Studios team is currently developing a product called "Vast", which has built virtual shows and display venues for exhibitors and professional teams in VR, and the team has also tried to design exclusive VR tools for professionals such as DJs and stage controls, so that they can control stage effects in the virtual world, similar operations, but the imagination of the effects that can appear in the virtual world is several orders of magnitude higher than that of the real world.
The virtual stage effect in Sandman's tool "Daqian" | Sandman Studios
However, it's too early for the average user to use specialized software and engines like 3D MAX, MAYA, and Unity to produce 3D content. Yang Dong believes that in the short term, it is unlikely that there will be tools like mobile phone cameras that can allow ordinary users to create 3D content with one click. However, in some verticals, teams can put the functionality of professional tools in the cloud, and the application side can be simplified to the average user.
From this point of view, the current popularity of many virtual idols and two-dimensional social applications just confirms this truth. Yang Dong believes that instead of creating virtual objects, the first thing people want to virtualize is actually people themselves. "Everyone can be their own virtual anchor, they can go and bring goods or do whatever they want."
For the meta-universe, Yang Dong believes that it is not a reality at once, but "a little bit into people's lives", just like furniture and electrical appliance manufacturers such as IKEA now, which allows users to view the effect of 3D models of furniture and electrical appliances in physical space on the mobile phone. The concept of a metaverse may allow real-time rendering of 3D content to quickly become popular at the mass level.
"Just like the Internet back then, when it first came out, everyone was sending emails and playing QQ, and now the Internet is really helpful to people's lives and has real value." Yang Dong said.