Produced by Radar Finance and | Li Yihui, ed. | Deep Sea
The meta-universe is hot, and Baidu is in full swing. Since the recent announcement of the meta-universe App Xi'an internal beta, Baidu has frequently "spoilers" to increase its popularity.
Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu, said that there are some technical bottlenecks in the current metaverse, and vision, hearing and interaction are the three mountains in front of them. He sees Hiram as a "negative 6.0 version" metacosmonic product, that is, it will not be completed until 6 years later.
In the eyes of many experiencers, Xi'an is indeed more like a hastily listed semi-finished product, and the first feeling of many experiencers is that app production and image rendering are rough, interactive communication is unstable, and some scenes even appear to wear molds. Not surprisingly, the product scored only 2 points in the Huawei App Store and 2.6 points on the App Store. It is worth mentioning that Radar Finance searched through the App Store on December 24, and failed to search for Greem, which is suspected of having been removed.
Even if the degree of completion is very low, Baidu still released a meta-universe marketing plan based on this, hoping to sell ads in the scenes built in Greem. It's just that these experiences are not good, missing the user's sticky products, will there be customers to pay?
In the past two days, Baidu also broke out large-scale layoffs, involving more than 300 people in the game business. Judging from the experience of Hundred Years in social networking, games, etc., whether Green can build an attractive metaversal ecology makes the outside world doubtful.
Hiram was spat on badly
"In a vast world, several transparent glass columns rise from the ground to the sky, and underneath them are buildings of all sizes with only outlines and no details, a group of people with hairstyles and clothes looking into the distance, and occasionally paddling futuristic spaceships in the air..." The above scene comes from The Baidu Meta-universe product Xi'an.
On December 21, Baidu announced the official opening of the metaverse App Xiyuan directional internal testing. According to the official website, The World of Hiram is composed of wirelessly connected virtual spaces, each virtual space is a unique digital city, and merchants or partners can create an exclusive brand world with the help of the Xi'an App.
Multiple users have found that creating virtual characters, multi-scene movement, real-time dialogue, and other activities such as socializing, which are mentioned in the metaverse, are all in Greece. But overall, the current version presents a very rudimentary picture.
Some users shared their own experience: after logging in, because they did not know what to do in this space, they could only wander aimlessly, and at the same time, they would breed a sense of boredom caused by lack of purpose.
In fact, as a social metaverse, Baidu is also "crossing the river by feeling the stones", which is responsible for building the infrastructure of the virtual world and handing over the remaining upper-level construction rights to third-party developers and partners. At present, Xi'an has opened scenes such as the Trisolaran Museum, Sanxingdui, Shaolin Temple, Feng Tang Art Center, Baidu World Congress, etc., except for the CCTV live broadcast screen displayed on one of the large screens that can produce a little sense of virtual and reality integration, the other scenes do not provide any form of interaction.
The lack of interactivity and the blankness of third-party development applications can easily make the experiencer feel that "nothing is useless".
As early as a month ago, Xi'an was launched on major app stores, and now it has been removed from the Apple Store, and the ratings on other download channels that can be found are generally below 3 points. A low-rated user complained, "Rough modeling, perfunctory content, a lot of bugs, do it like a 4399." ”
Another user who took only 5 minutes from installation to uninstall concluded that Greem is at best a lab demo, and now any online game can kill it in seconds. The user further said that as a product of a large manufacturer, the Hiram model is rough, the animation is rigid, the content is simple, and the performance is low (Caton) makes people speechless, "this is making people fools.".
Baidu did not respond positively to the alleged excessive bugs and single scenes. Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu, only said, "After more than a year of development and testing, The version number of Green is still a negative number, there are still many imperfections, and it still has huge room for growth from the goals we envision." ”
He believes that under the current network technology conditions, vision, hearing and interaction are the three mountains that hinder the development of the metaverse, and the challenges brought by technical difficulties are very large.
It is understood that the identity system, social system and anytime, anywhere demand in the metacosm requires Thathyam must place users under the same server as much as possible and ensure a low latency and high immersion user experience. Ma Jie also repeatedly emphasized the 100,000 people in Greece's same screen technology, pointing out that the support behind it is the construction of large-capacity high-concurrency servers.
However, in the actual experience, although users can speak anytime, anywhere, they cannot establish effective communication with each other. This is due to the difficulty of sound simulation in VR environments, Meta's Horizon World can only support real-time chat for 14 people, and it is not easy for Greece to achieve multi-person voice communication in a space of 100,000 people.
And subject to the rendering capabilities of mobile phones, a server carrying 100,000 people cannot render distant user images under the condition of satisfying immersion and low latency, resulting in character movements and expressions looking dull.
Some observers believe that Xi'an is more like a semi-finished product that is eager to go online, and some links are still slightly rough, and user feedback is enough to prove this. In the future, Baidu will need to spend more effort polishing products.
Commercialization points to the B-side
Following the opening of the internal beta of Xi'an, Baidu announced the marketing plan of the meta-universe.
At the 2021 Baidu Marketing Summit held on December 23, Baidu Marketing proposed to lay out future scenarios such as the meta-universe and reconstruct the marketing "human goods yard" marketing scenario. Through the Baidu Meta-Universe, based on Baidu Xi'an, the Baidu VR industrialization platform has been fully upgraded, and the brand can connect to future scenarios.
At the same time, Baidu Marketing launched three major initiatives: one is to release the "Starlight Plan" of Duxingxuan to help enterprise content marketing through 10 billion+ billion traffic and creator training camps; the second is to upgrade the "Jimuyu" intelligent business operation platform, and the third is to upgrade the marketing management platform.
Ding Zhigang, general manager of Baidu Virtual Reality, said at the meeting, "Through Xi'an, we can move the stage from traffic acquisition to user conversion to content co-construction to the meta-universe. ”
Obviously, the immature Xi'an is shouldering the heavy responsibility of helping Baidu sell advertisements. The official website of Xilang lists some specific application scenarios, including VR education, VR marketing, VR cloud exhibition, VR training, and VR industrial park, and the focus of landing is on B-end business.
According to the official description of the concept of brand space, Greem can provide virtual space customization functions, in which brands can hold large-scale events with multiple people online at the same time without space restrictions, and can also provide one-on-one customer service. In addition, for brands, once the scene is built, its capacity ceiling will far exceed the offline stores of the same level of experience, and can be used for a long time and continuously updated and optimized.
According to reports, the Baidu AI Developer Conference will be held in Greece on December 27, which will be the first large-scale conference undertaken by Greem, when Greem will be open to all users.
Industry insiders believe that Baidu, which is mainly based on advertising revenue, under the background of the rise of algorithm platforms and the slowdown in the growth of Internet advertising revenue, urgently needs new advertising space and carriers to stimulate user interest, thereby expanding Baidu's advertising position to increase revenue.
However, as a review in the App Store said, the experience provided by Greem is not much different from the VR viewing of Shell and the VR of The Car Home.
This may make it difficult for Greece to meet the needs of the B-side. In addition, in view of the poor experience and weak product strength currently shown by Greece, if the follow-up is still unable to strengthen the ecology to attract C-end users, the lack of basic traffic or its commercial imagination will be greatly reduced.
According to Ma jie, The ultimate goal of Green is to create a platform for partners and developers, a platform where imagination can take root. At the same time, he frankly said that Baidu's meta-universe road is still very long, and at this stage, the positioning of Xi'an is still a content creation and sharing platform, especially the construction of content ecology and the huge market foundation are one of the current technical bottlenecks hindering the development of meta-universe.
From this point of view, although Baidu covets the attractive dividends of the meta-universe, there is still a longer way to go to eat it into the mouth.
Will the exposure of the big layoffs affect the meta-universe?
Throughout Baidu's development in recent years, it has invested in fields including social networking, e-commerce, games, and local life, but the end of each time is to get up early and catch up late.
Statistics show that since last year, Baidu has successively launched five social products such as anonymous social App "Earpiece", video social App "Let's Go Together", voice social App "Sound", interest social "Youpu" and Boom Social App "One Round - Cruise Ship Werewolf Killing".
But these products didn't make much of a splash. At present, there is no trace of "earpiece" in the App Store, the "sound" iOS version has been removed from the shelves only 4 months after it was launched, and the interest learning community product "Youpu" is currently only available for Android download.
Ai Media Consulting 2021 China Mobile Social Industry Application APP Atlas data shows that in the first echelon, WeChat, QQ, and Weibo maintain a leading edge in the scale of monthly active users; in the second echelon, Momo and Tantan are leading in the field of fun dating (that is, love), and Baidu Social has no products in the first and second echelons.
On December 24, a number of media exposed Baidu's layoffs, and the game became a hard-hit area. A number of mobile ecological business groups (MEGs) said on the 24th that the core goal of this layoff is to save labor costs and shrink budgets in businesses with weak commercialization capabilities. More than 300 or all of the game departments were laid off, and there were also layoffs in financial live broadcasting, education and other businesses.
In addition, Cao Xiaodong, vice president of Baidu and head of the mobile ecosystem user growth department, may also leave Baidu.
According to the data, Baidu MEG's business covers mobile Phone Baidu App, Baijia Number, Mini Programs and other services, Baidu live broadcast, short video, games and education and other services.
Some users who are certified as Baidu employees said that Baidu's acquisition of YY's domestic business in the first half of the year suffered serious losses, coupled with the fact that the investment kuaishou in the second half of the year also suffered losses, resulting in the direct reduction of the budget of the game department.
In July this year, Baidu Games reorganized its business team, announced the establishment of a new brand, registered trademarks such as "Baidu Games", and announced 23 leisure and heavy game products.
Industry insiders also believe that financial pressure or the main reason for Baidu's layoffs. For Baidu, it just suffered a net loss of 16.559 billion yuan in the third quarter, compared with a profit of 13.678 billion yuan in the same period last year. Therefore, cutting out games that require long-term development is expected.
In the field of AI that has been laid out for many years, Baidu can hardly say that it has absolute advantages. After the domestic smart speaker sales fell by 8.6% last year, the first half of this year only increased by 2.2% year-on-year, and the market performance was sluggish; another key focus on the autonomous driving business, it is difficult to open the situation in the short term, the official revealed that the Jidu car that can deeply experience Baidu's automatic driving technology will be mass-produced and listed in 2024 at the latest.
This time, when the meta-universe outlet came, Baidu took the lead in taking out the Xi'an App and took the lead among peers. But judging from the past competitive strategies of China's Internet giants, they will not stop the flag, and rushing to run cannot guarantee that Baidu is the final winner.
And under the current circumstances, Baidu has been exposed to large-scale layoffs, whether it will loosen the determination to invest in the metaverse, it remains to be seen.
Note: This article is the original of Radar Finance (ID: leidacj). Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.