Author 丨 Ye Hao
Editor 丨 Kang Xiao
Produced | Shenzhen Network Tencent News Xiaoman Studio
VR outlets and entrepreneurs who have had a lot of ups and downs in a short period of time and were snubbed by capital five years ago and fell into a trough five years ago, because the outlet of the meta-universe is once again sought after.
"Byte laid out VR in June this year, when Oculus Quest2 was a big seller, decided to invest in ALL IN, and the merger was settled in August. The logic of byte is that this market has changed tenfold in a year, and if it changes hundreds of times, it can eat this wave of dividends, but this is the acquisition logic of the Internet. One investor told The Deep Web.
The Oculus Quest series has become the most benchmark product in the global VR headset market. In August 2021, Byte acquired Pico, the largest acquisition in the domestic VR industry, with a rumored amount of 9.059 billion yuan. It is understood that Pico is a research and development and sales enterprise focusing on VR all-in-one machines, and the previous holding company was Goertek.
In mid-November, Jianfeng K2VC organized a meta-universe salon in Beijing, investment institutions, shells to find a house, 58 with the city, byte, and other large factories to come to the relevant business employees, VR and AR entrepreneurs, because there are too many people, the original small meeting seems cramped. This salon is a realistic reflection of the current meta-universe fever, investment institutions are moving, big factories have entered the game, vr and AR entrepreneurs are once again sought after by capital.
Data show that according to incomplete statistics, since 2021, there have been 58 AR/VR-related financing events worldwide, and the total scale of fundraising has reached about 14.4 billion yuan. In the same period of 2020, there were 49 related investment and financing incidents, but the total scale of fundraising was only one-third of the current one-third, about 4.9 billion yuan. This round of investment fever originated on the other side of the ocean. On October 29, Facebook announced that it had officially changed its name to Meta, with the goal of covering 1 billion people in the metaverse within 10 years. Zuckerberg believes that the metacosm (virtual reality VR + augmented reality AR) is a new chapter in the Internet and the next chapter for Facebook.
Yuan Wenda, founder and managing partner of Red Dot Venture Capital China, believes that the rise of the meta-universe concept stems from changes in technology and demand. From PCs to the Internet to smartphones, every new era in the past 20 years has been behind the changes in the way humans and machines interact.
However, the short-term mania brought by capital cannot change the relatively long application cycle of the VR/AR industry.
Save the forgotten track
"This round of leading investment institutions just signed the B+ round of TS (letter of intent), the tripartite due diligence stationed for a few weeks, it is estimated that the end of the month can be done, and now the investment plan has not yet been decided, there are several investment institutions to invest, and it has not yet been determined who to follow." Zhang Daoning really felt the enthusiasm of capital.
Daoning Zhang is the founder and CEO of NOLO VR. Master of Computer Science from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications; 9 years of experience in Internet and embedded system research and development, served as the leader of Google's innovation project; participated in the development of the next generation of Internet of Things middleware BlueLink at IBM China Research Institute. At present, NOLO has accumulated 100,000 users from 70 countries around the world.
In 2015, Zhang Daoning founded NOVEL VR. That year, the O2O entrepreneurial tide was in full swing, and science fiction fan Zhang Daoning did not choose the entrepreneurship of Internet model innovation, but chose hard-core technology entrepreneurship. "At that time, I did it too early, I made a VR controller, at that time my controller did a good job, but there was no good VR headset in the world, and the most capable of carrying us at that time was Feng Xin's Storm Magic Mirror."
In Zhang Daoning's view, "the wave of VR is 2015 and 2016, by 2017 the entire industry has become cold, 2018 is considered flat, and in 2019, with the release of quest1, the entire industry has slowly risen." ”
The VR field has experienced its first boom, which originated in Oculus.
As early as March 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus, a VR hardware equipment company, thus entering the VR hardware market. At that time, Oculus launched a consumer-grade product called the Rift, which was introduced to the market as an interactive peripheral for desktop computers. However, in that period, due to the imperfection of display technology, users also had a bad experience such as vertigo and fatigue, so vr was short-lived, only appeared for one year, and finally fell into a trough.
In Zhang Daoning's view, the development of VR product forms can be divided into three stages: the PCVR represented by HTC is similar to home theater; the VR all-in-one machine represented by Oculus Quest2 is similar to headset beats, but the size is too large to be a hard injury; the third stage: magic mirror + ring, similar to airpods. AND SOLO focuses on the research and development of magic mirror + ring.
In August 2021, Byte acquired Pico, the largest acquisition in the domestic VR industry, this acquisition added fuel to the domestic meta-universe, and Zheng Yu, founder & CEO of Beijing Lingxi Micro light Technology Co., Ltd., also felt the temperature of capital.
"Our B round of financing is also close, much smoother than our early financing," Zheng Yu said, "angel round financing is the most difficult, one is that no one can understand this matter, and the other is that no one believes that we can make it." Until I met an investor who had just returned from Silicon Valley with Jun Capital, after chatting for an hour, I decided to invest in us. He told his partners that the project had to be invested, and the longer it went on, the more valuable it became."
Zheng Yu, graduated from the Institute of Quantum Electronics of Peking University, founded Lingxi Micro light in 2014, and led the team to become the first in China to develop optical waveguide technology to solve the core bottleneck of AR (augmented reality) display, officially known as the top three AR hardware companies in China.
Zheng Yu likes the Star Wars series very much and is a very senior Star Wars fan, "I bought a set of Quest2 that can play VR lightsaber. Liu Cixin has a famous saying: the future of mankind is either outward, going to the sea of stars, or inward, into virtual reality. VR is pure virtual, and AR can fuse reality to make more people feel the shock of the universe, which is exactly what I want to do. ”
Battle of the routes
Today's Apple, Microsoft, Snapchat and other big manufacturers are sparing no effort to lay out the AR terminal market.
At this stage, the AR glasses on the market are mainly divided into two categories.
One type is the main light, thin, portable AR glasses, the function is relatively single, the appearance of the form is close to ordinary glasses, such as North focal and so on.
The second category is represented by Microsoft's Hololens, with built-in master chips, SLAM algorithms, multiple depth cameras, etc., with functions such as gesture interaction and environmental tracking, but it is large and bulky, mainly in the form of headbands, hoods and helmets.
The AR end market has been slow to launch a disruptive product. In this regard, a senior person in the field of AR said: "The reason for this phenomenon is that the big manufacturers are still struggling with the emergence of an optical waveguide component that meets the 'standard'. Before the optical waveguide module standard was determined, there was a lot of debate about diffraction and array waveguides. ”
Zheng Yu introduced: "Optical waveguides now have three technical routes, geometric array optical waveguides, embossed grating waveguides, and body holographic optical waveguides, and the comparison of these three routes has produced a lot of controversy. ”
At present, Microsoft, Magic Leap and other large manufacturers have successively invested in the ranks of diffraction waveguides, which makes more start-up companies determined to follow the pace of large manufacturers.
The question of whether to the left or the right did not cause much trouble to Zheng Yu, because the three technical lines of Lingxi Shimmer were all involved.
"From 2019 onwards, self-built production lines, from technology research and development to integrated upgrading of production and research, an important breakthrough has been made in two-dimensional pupil expansion and expansion of eyeBox, and there has been a huge increase in the production capacity and yield rate of geometric array waveguides, and the next stage is expected to further compress the price of a single optical module from thousands of yuan to within 100 yuan." Zheng Yu elaborated.
The current AR glasses can be described as ideal and plump, and the reality is very bone. Zheng Yu introduced, "Microsoft's Hololens and Magicleap combined have annual sales of 100,000, only one percent of Oculus Quest2, and the current AR is equivalent to VR in 2015." ”
According to foreign media Upload VR, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in a live broadcast on Investor Day in November: "Oculus Quest 2 sales have reached 10 million units."
Chen Cang, vice president of investment at Zhilin Capital, said: "The growth curve of Oculus Quest has many similarities with the early iPhone, and Facebook's shipment expectations have exceeded the market performance of the iPhone 3G. He believes that the form of this product has truly reached the critical point of the outbreak of consumer-grade products.
When Apple Jobs was alive, he took the lead in launching the iPhone smartphone, bringing the world into the era of mobile Internet. Whether Zuckerberg and Facebook can make an entry-level hardware device that has widely become a metacosm is still controversial in the industry. But the big sellout of Quest2 responded to that controversy in some way.
"They have tacitly accepted that the two products of Quest and Pico neo3 are the iPhone 1, and the future of a VR is like this, the interaction paradigm is like this, the product form is like this, and there is almost no difference from the iPhone to the iPhone 13," Zhang Daoning elaborated.
"Headlines acquisition of Pico is this logic, Byte internal online education is gone, the medical cycle is very long, Byte needs to find new business, successfully copy the model of vibrato, VR this track is." Quest1 sold 600,000 units and Quest2 sold tens of millions," said one person familiar with the acquisition.
For the giants have identified the path, Zhang Daoning does not feel that Quest is the iPhone, nor does he think that the Quest series is the endgame.
"Zuckerberg shot the product form other than the all-in-one machine, the PC-related cut was finished, the Oculus Go was gone, the Oculus Rift was gone, and the Oculus Gear was directly stopped. He felt that none of this made sense, leaving only the form of an all-in-one machine. To use positive words, this is called concentration, but it is actually a kind of choice and disregard, is there really no value outside the non-all-in-one machine? ”
Zhang Daoning shared a point of view that he particularly agrees with: there may be two paths for an industry in the world, and this path depends on what the most powerful person in the industry thinks, so Zuckerberg defines how to go this way in the VR industry, and the path he defines will become mainstream and there will be a group of followers.
"The controller will never go away, but it will be smaller, lighter, and more convenient. Gesture recognition is an effective complement, and future VR will have a fairly diverse range of interaction methods, possibly in the form of accessories to be plugged into huge systems. Zhang Daoning thought.
At present, NOLO has made interactive devices as small as rings. Zhang Daoning firmly believes that the area that the giants do not focus on is the opportunity for startups, "strategically, we are not afraid of Oculus quest, but we are in awe of it, it is indeed very large in investment." 」 ”
With two flowers blooming and one branch each, who can represent the future may still need time to verify. But one thing is certain, what changes this wave of cosmic outlet has brought.
What does the vent bring?
"In the last round of the boom, the industry did not realize that the technology at that time could not meet the imagination of VR." Yu Xiaoyi, investment manager of Matrix Partners China, once told the media that a large number of underlying modules and consumer product manufacturers had financing difficulties at that time, which hit the expectations of investors.
"At present, these problems are gradually being solved, and compared with the boom in 2015 and 2016, 3D modeling, spatial perception and cutting-edge display technology have been greatly improved, so the experience of VR devices has entered an acceptable range." Yu Xiaoyi thinks.
Facebook is a big manufacturer with an early layout in the VR field. Since Facebook acquired Oculus VR in 2014, it has been looking at virtual reality as the company's key research and development direction.
Earlier in the release of the third quarter earnings, Zuckerberg revealed at the earnings conference that the VR research and development department alone may lead to a reduction of $10 billion in the company's annual operating profit, and the company will recruit 10,000 engineers in Europe next year. With heavy investment, the Oculus Quest series vr-mounted VR all-in-one machine solved the problems of VR equipment in the early years such as computing power and display effects, and at the same time, it was also the first time that the threshold for VR entry equipment was lowered to less than 300 US dollars (about 1917 yuan). The decrease in price has also become one of the reasons for the big buy of quest2.
In China, NOLO's 6DoF tracking technology makes NOLO's product prices between 1,000 and 2,000 yuan. Zhang Daoning said, "If Byte did not acquire Pico, our shipments next year will definitely exceed Pico." In April 2020, Pico CEO Zhou Hongwei mentioned in an interview with 36Kr that due to the impact of the epidemic, it is expected that Pico neo 2 will sell 50,000 units in 2020.
"The real infrastructure of the metacosmonic era is essentially immersive, if the immersion is not enough, the ease of use is not enough, the price is not low enough, the other is a castle in the air, there is no way to really do the best", and it is true, quest2 has taken a big step, but it is still not optimal, but it has taken technological innovation a step forward.
"This boom is better than the boom in 2015 and 2016, and relatively speaking, this time it is more landed." On the curve of technological development, the previous wave may be conceptual, and this wave is biased to the ground. Zheng Yu thought.
All the imaginations people have about AR glasses can be seen in Spider-Man: Hero Expedition. The AR glasses that the male protagonist Parker received from Iron Man have slender temples and fully transparent ultra-thin lenses, and their shape is extremely close to ordinary glasses. However, it can unfold a strongly immersive holographic image in front of the eyes, and combine gesture tracking, voiceprint recognition and other technologies for physical interaction.
But existing optical techniques do not enable the experience in the film. "Hardware from the bottom to do a lot of work, AR glasses should be like ordinary glasses and sunglasses, to be beautiful and cool, in order to wear in daily life, it is possible to replace mobile phones." There is still a conservative estimate of at least a decade to go before this dream is reached. Zheng Yu judged.
As early as last year and the year before, Lingxi Micro light had received orders for light waveguide lenses from two global manufacturers with a weather vane. On December 10, Lingxi Micro light released its first thin and light AR glasses reference model Aladdin Zero, based on the mature AW70s array optical waveguide module developed by Lingxi Micro light, which controls the weight of the optical machine at 10g, making the appearance of the whole machine closer to "ordinary glasses" compared with the same type of products on the market.
Regarding the challenges of the future, Zheng Yu believes that using existing technology to make an AR glasses that everyone can accept and has a reasonable use scenario is a problem facing all AR developers, and it is still difficult to open at the consumer level. However, if you accurately cut into an application scenario at the B or C end, you may get the first wave of dividends for AR glasses.
"Whether the metaverse can really explode depends on whether users can get new experiences and whether needs can be truly met." Yuan Wenda has said publicly. In this way, Whether it is AR products or VR products, if you want to achieve the immersive sense of interaction that the metaverse says, there is still a long way to go in the future.
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