Per reporter: Ding Zhouyang Wen Menghua Per intern reporter: Li Jianning Zhu Peng Per reporter Per reporter: Dong Xingsheng, Song Hong
The hot word of the year 2021, "metaverse" must have a name.
With the popularity of the movie "Ready Player One" and the renaming of Facebook, the old word "metaverse", which once slumbered in science fiction in the 1990s, came alive.
On October 29, Facebook founder Zuckerberg announced that the company would be renamed "Meta" (meaning meta of the metacosm) and that the company's stock exchange code would be "MVRS". The thumb background panel in front of the company's headquarters was also torn off and replaced with an "infinite" symbol. "From now on, we will put the metacosm first, not Facebook first." Zuckerberg said in an open letter.
The capital market is very "on top" of the metacosm, and in March this year, Roblox, an American game company with the concept of metacosm, went public, creating the most exciting story in the capital market. When the traffic dividend is exhausted, the metacosm allows mobile Internet companies, including Facebook, to see the next chapter where the story can continue.
When the metaverse becomes a basket that can be loaded into anything, 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other technologies that are really evolving have become subtle. Some AI researchers even avoid being involved in the metacosm. But when will the metaverse truly become a human second space parallel to the real world, the key to the answer lies in the above technology, and the solid promotion of each link can make the virtual world no longer only stay on the PPT.
On December 23, at the 2021 Artificial Intelligence Future Application Scenario Forum hosted by the Daily Economic News, Shen Xiangyang, a top expert in the field of artificial intelligence, a foreign academician of the National Academy of Engineering, a foreign academician of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a double-appointment professor of the Institute for Advanced Study of Tsinghua University, Chai Jinxiang, founder and CEO of Mofa Technology, Xiao Hong, CEO of Perfect World, ZhonghuaHuatong, chief strategy official Hui of Century Huatong, Liang Zhensheng, vice president of Guangzhou Jiu Technology Co., Ltd., Sun Feng, COO of iQIYI Intelligence, Wen Hao, deputy director of Tianfeng Securities Research Institute, and many other industry leaders jointly discussed the future application scenarios of artificial intelligence and passed on the future artificial intelligence ecological construction rules.
Games are the best touchstone for artificial intelligence
AI empowerment in other industries is gradually unfolding
"You want to talk to someone, you don't have to call them, their avatar can teleport over." In Zuckerberg's words, "This [metaverse] is an internet where you are, not just something you can watch and use." ”
Whether virtual content is valuable may remain to be tested, but it is indeed being widely practiced. Domestic and foreign technology and Internet companies have invested billions of dollars in virtual content.
A few days ago, Meta opened the virtual world platform Horizon Worlds, after users enter Horizon Worlds, they need to create a 3D avatar to open online social entertainment, but the image only has the upper body, no legs, causing many players to complain. This reflects that the current level of industrial production of virtual scenes and characters is still in its early stages.
Horizon Worlds screen Image source: Meta official website
"AI has begun to penetrate all walks of life like electricity, and we also believe that ai has a huge room for future development, but today's AI penetration rate is only 4%." Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Innovation Factory, said in a speech last year. That is to say, today's stage of development of AI is equivalent to the era when the Internet industry has not yet appeared search engines, which is equivalent to the era of electric applications but no power grid.
Image source: Innovation Factory
In the view of Xiao Hong, CEO of Perfect World, the game field is undoubtedly the best touchstone for the development of artificial intelligence technology.
Released in August, the movie "Runaway Player" tells the story of a bank clerk who discovers himself as a game's NPC (non-player character) in the boring life of day after day, and thus embarks on an adventure to escape the programming. In the existing categories of games, stupid NPCs always assume a more fixed, single function, how to make this code-composed avatar can also have more diverse and freer behavioral choices like players? This is inseparable from the blessing of artificial intelligence technology.
The mobile game "Fantasy New Immortal" released by Perfect World this year has introduced artificial intelligence technology, using AI to collect and analyze server data, so as to make the interaction between NPC characters and players more real and natural.
In an exclusive interview with each reporter, Xiao Hong elaborated more specifically on the application exploration of AI technology in NPCs: "We are trying to define this process based on the player's game data when the player enters a copy and fights the NPC. This means that even if a player goes into the same quest, they will face different situations, and we don't know what the player will experience, and even NPCs will create some new characters to participate. ”
Extending to the field of e-sports, the role under the control of artificial intelligence can also become the "strongest sparring partner" in the training of e-sports players, and in terms of winning rate prediction, artificial intelligence can provide ordinary players with professional players' playing strategy and winning rate analysis based on big data, so that users can better understand the game.
Although some of the above attempts have not yet been fully realized, it is conceivable that whether it is confrontation or companionship, more "smart" NPCs can bring players a more realistic and natural, richer and more diverse, and more immersive game experience.
In addition to improving the user experience in game content, the rise of artificial intelligence has also enriched the solutions for game development. For example, Xiao Hong said that the use of artificial intelligence for scene modeling and texture rendering not only effectively improves the overall screen performance of the game, but also improves the development efficiency and intelligence of the game. "What if artificial intelligence is used in game design?" Xiao Hong believes that "players can not only have more personalized experiences in the battle with NPCs, but at the game design level, AI can also provide tasks or maps that are not designed in advance in real time according to the characteristics of players, which makes the product more flexible." ”
The barriers to AI tools themselves are not high
Data and scenarios are the key to victory
There are also refined virtual content, but more AI still needs to be done manually. In the current virtual content industry, upstream software companies develop various types of software to meet the needs of different links, such as Autodesk has developed many digital content production tools such as Maya, 3Ds MAX and so on. Chai Jinxiang, founder and CEO of Mofa Technology, believes that a single point tool cannot form a vertically integrated industrial production line, so the current industry's intelligence and industrialization are very low.
"We don't talk about the endgame of the metaverse, just mirroring the entire content industry that exists today into the virtual world will generate a market size of several trillion." Chai Jinxiang said in an exclusive interview with every reporter.
Mofa Technology founder and CEO Chai Jinxiang
Image source: Photo by zhu Peng, an intern journalist
According to iResearch data, the game industry is currently the industry with the highest penetration rate of virtual content in the domestic market, reaching 90%. In other industries such as long and short videos, live broadcasting, advertising, and enterprise services, the penetration rate of virtual content is within 30%, of which enterprise services are only 5%.
"The company's external publicity, recruitment, web pages, websites, including the company's internal staff training, etc. can all be artificially ARTIFICIAL. If our overall penetration rate can reach 30%, this is a very large market. Chai Jinxiang said.
Chai Jinxiang explains: "People from all walks of life have different understandings or definitions of the metacosm, because they will be defined according to their own company's products. Although it is very hot now, there are good and bad, and there are also leek cutting behaviors, but I don't think the metacosm is empty, because at least there is a bit of consensus, that is, it is the next generation of Internet forms. So it's bound to happen, it's just a matter of time nodes. ”
Chai Jinxiang also said that in the early investigation of entrepreneurship, the team found that most AI companies are only making tools, and do not have relevant data and scenarios. "We want to have data and scenarios, because as a technology company, if you want to build barriers, you still have to look at where you are in the industry chain." We feel that the barriers to the tool itself are not high, so we want to be the supply side. ”
IS AI the "strongest brain" in the metaverse?
The virtual content industry urgently needs supply-side reforms
"From the PC era to the mobile Internet era to the meta-universe era, in fact, they are all solving the same problem, that is, how to move various traditional formats or business models offline to online." Chai Jinxiang said.
"Now the production of virtual content is basically done by the supplier, that is, outsourcing. For example, the previous very popular movie "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", its animation was completed by many suppliers, thousands of artists and animators. Chai Jinxiang said, "Now the industrial chain of virtual content has two characteristics, the first is that the chain is very long. Taking animation as an example, there are more than a dozen links such as storyboarding, original painting, model, special effects, lighting, and rendering. Secondly, each link is mainly manual production, which is labor-intensive. So this industry is not industrialized, it is a handicraft workshop. However, this is not only the current situation of the domestic industry, but also a worldwide problem. ”
Looking back at successful commercialization cases in the past, scale is an inevitable process, and without industrialization, scale is a castle in the air. For how to achieve industrialization, Chai Jinxiang believes that the garment industry can be referred to. "Previous clothing was tailor-made because everyone was different in stature and clothes were typical non-standardized products. But now we can determine different size standards for a dress, so each size can achieve assembly line production. ”
Therefore, the division of labor is equally important, and the premise for the clothing industry to be able to standardize is to separate design and production. Chai Jinxiang said: "The content industry also needs to separate planning and production, taking games as an example, once the preliminary planning is determined, the subsequent process can be industrialized." Of course, the intelligent tools in this process are very important, if there is no tool, the final production will be manual, and it will not be realized. ”
Chai Jinxiang believes that "high quality" that does not have scale is actually worthless. "A few good games and a few good movies are not very strong for the creation of the meta-universe, and only if many companies can make high-quality and large-scale content, the value of the meta-universe is large enough."
Founded in 2018 by a team led by Chai Jinxiang, Mofa Technology is a technology company engaged in the production of virtual people and virtual content. One of the driving forces behind the establishment of the company is Chai Jinxiang's belief that the supply side of the virtual content industry urgently needs an "industrial revolution". "Once we enter the metaverse era, the demand for virtual content, virtual people, and virtual scenes will increase dramatically. However, there is a problem of imbalance between supply and demand in the current industry, especially in the supply side, which lacks high-quality, high-efficiency and large-scale content production capacity. ”
From hardware to content, there are still many pain points in the metaverse
Investor: Let the bullets fly a little longer
"2021 is indeed the first year of the meta-universe." Wen Hao, deputy director of the Tianfeng Securities Research Institute, said. For the judgment of the "first year", of course, related to Facebook's name change, in addition, a series of things happening in the entire Internet industry have been connected by the "metacosm", including Microsoft to create an "enterprise metacosm"; ByteDance's acquisition of VR software and hardware manufacturer Pico; Tencent Music announced a strategic cooperation with VR performance service provider Wave and so on.
"So we can see that at a time when the mobile Internet user dividend is nearing the end, everyone is very much looking forward to the next wave of technology to make the entire industry have a new development direction." Wen Hao said, "Reflected in the capital market, overseas feedback is stronger." At present, although the domestic head companies have done some layouts, they are relatively low-key, more in doing and less to say. ”
"The key feature of the metacosm is immersion, and VR is the key to achieving a metacosmic immersion system." Recalling the technical charm of experiencing VR for the first time, Sun Feng, COO of iQIYI Intelligence, said, "When I enter a game with a VR device, in a closed 3D space, a virtual character really stands in front of me, and the shock brought by this immersion is completely different from two-dimensional." In addition, VR hardware can do a lot of interactive things, through the tracking technology of VR all-in-one machine, the human vision, hearing, and touch in reality are naturally transplanted into the virtual world. ”
The hardware of the metacosm includes not only VR equipment, but also upstream technology such as computational analysis capabilities. Century Huatong Chief Strategy Official Hui said that Century Huatong invested in the construction of the largest operation center in East China in Shanghai. "It will serve as an important data storage and server computing center in the future metaverse, and it will also be an upstream for us to lay out the future of the metaverse."
For Liang Zhensheng, vice president of science and technology of Guangzhou Jiu, who focuses on the application and research and development of virtual reality technology, the metacosm is definitely not just an entertainment scene, and the metacosm can land in learning scenes, historical and cultural scenes, medical scenes, etc. Correspondingly, the technical entrance to the metaverse is far from enough. "Now only tens of millions of people in the world have VR devices, far less than more than half of the world's people have smartphones."
The scene space in which the metaverse can land in the future is undoubtedly huge. Some studies predict that the market size of the metacosm will reach $800 billion by 2024. However, with the explosion of the metaverse, chaos and controversy have also followed.
Wen Hao frankly said that at present, for the investment of meta-universe, most of the more professional and cautious investors are still waiting. Because the development of this industry still needs time, everyone is embracing the Internet in different ways, but the secondary market is limited by the optionality of the target, and in the current main investment, there are more concept investments.
"Investors from the industrial side to the primary market pay more attention to substance than concept." Wen Hao said. Although opportunities and challenges coexist, the meta-universe is the trend of the times, but from the perspective of global VR and AR shipments, the industry is still in its infancy.
Reporters: Ding Zhouyang, Wen Menghua, Li Jianning (intern) Zhu Peng (intern)
Editors: Dong Xingsheng Song Hong
Vision: Zou Li
Typesetting: Dong Xingsheng Ma Yuan
Daily economic news