Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618)
Wen | Yang Yeqing
Cover source | Visual China
The hottest concept in 2021 is none other than the metaverse. If you brush off the bubble behind the hype, you'll see where the technology is really advancing.
Recently, Stanford University launched the first VR course in history, and all students who choose this course can wear VR headsets anywhere in the world and appear in the same "classroom". Students can listen to lectures in the classroom, go to the ocean to study biological knowledge, and travel back in time to learn the history of evolution.
Such a "cool" course makes many technology enthusiasts excited: "Meta-universe" is just around the corner.
In fact, just as Musk commented that "metaverse" is more "a marketing term", VR technology has been in the same situation since its birth, and most of the products that look cool are stuck in the concept stage, and there are not many who really achieve large-scale applications.
However, in a simple industry, a VR hardware product that is rarely noticed has taken the lead in achieving large-scale landing applications, bringing "subversive" experience innovation to the industry, and is currently being applied in the cultural and cultural, wine and tourism, home improvement and other industries.
In 2010, the emergence of the iPhone4 opened a new era of human mobility development, Wang Xing once said at the listing of the Us group: "Special thanks to Apple's founder Jobs, if there is no iPhone, there is no mobile Internet, everything we do today is impossible." ”
The development of the VR industry may be the most critical thing to wait for the emergence of the "iPhone 4".
Now, is it coming?
Commercial VR broke the game, starting from the real estate sector
The last VR boom was in 2015, and after 6 years have passed, as of December 14, there have been 145 VR industry financings worldwide in 2021, an increase of 19.8% year-on-year. Among them, there are 55 financing incidents in China's VR industry in 2021.
The VR fever has quietly returned, and in many "watching" areas, of course, the heat of each industry is different.
For example, there are more and more VR movies, as well as VR games, AndteDance's high-priced acquisition of Pico, which also indicates that the industry is on the eve of the outbreak.
But in the final analysis, these seemingly "cool" VR products are still some distance away from the real large-scale commercialization, and VR really brings a subversive innovative experience to an industry and achieves large-scale landing applications in an unexpected field - real estate.
Li Fei, who has long been preparing to buy a house, plans to buy a 2-bedroom and 1-hall house in Beijing, "every Saturday and Sunday to go offline to see two or three houses." I watched more than 10 sets a month and felt too tired. ”
In Li Fei's view, the house type must be seen on the ground. Because I don't want a house with a large pool area, the light of the apartment is better, and sometimes I deliberately go to see the house in the evening. "To buy a house, you have to look at more than thirty sets, less than three or five sets, and an average of 10-15 sets." A senior agent in Beijing Chain said that there are too few cases of two or three sets of offline viewing.
However, this situation is changing since the chain home launched the "VR listing", "I have a customer, recently sold the house, ready to buy a new, online I took him to see 40 sets of VR listings, offline to see a transaction, the transaction cycle is only 3 days." The broker has a deep feeling that VR house viewing has shortened the previous offline house viewing time of one or two months to a few weeks, or even a few days, and the improvement of industry efficiency is very obvious.
For a time, many real estate Internet companies have launched VR house viewing projects, among which shell housing that positions itself as a "technology-driven new residential service provider" takes the lead in layout.
Shell began to explore VR technology in 2015, and established the Rushi Division in 2018 to promote the application of VR technology in the field of house search and house viewing. In the same year, the self-developed VR scanning equipment - Riemann, Riemann based on structured light technology, collected the structural light characteristics of space, through the space multi-point, multi-angle space acquisition, obtained tens of millions of spatial point clouds and spatial fine dimensional data, thereby generating VR materials. In 2020, Shell Rushi upgraded its technology on the basis of Riemann and released the ultra-high-precision VR acquisition device "Galohua" based on laser acquisition technology. Compared with Riemann, Galovar has a longer acquisition radius and higher acquisition accuracy, and can generate a VR space in 20 minutes through 360-degree automatic scanning.
(Shell such as self-developed VR acquisition equipment Garovar)
These two hardware products have directly promoted the large-scale landing of VR in the real estate field.
The reason why Shell is determined to take the technical route of VR is that it believes that VR can bring a disruptive and innovative experience to this traditional industry.
All along, the real estate brokerage industry in the presentation of the listing has been widely criticized, from the earliest "fake listing" pictures, to the later "beautified" pictures, and then to the panorama, consumers online has not been able to get comparable to the offline viewing experience, which leads to brokers need to see over and over again, buyers need a suite of offline "demining", low efficiency, poor experience. Vr technology based on the 1:1 fork of the real physical space solves this problem and promotes the migration of the "belt look" link of the real estate brokerage industry to the online.
According to Shell Rushi data, as of June 31, 2021, Rushi has accumulated 13.86+ million vr listings, and according to public information data, after using VR to see houses, the efficiency of offline service brokers has increased by 11.9%, and the efficiency of offline viewing has increased by 13%. Years of technology investment, whether it is the consumer side or the broker side, have been recognized and relied on VR house viewing.
Through VR house viewing, it solves the problem of users looking at houses, finding houses, and choosing houses, which greatly improves the transaction efficiency of the trillion-dollar industry of real estate transactions, which is a typical case of VR landing industry.
What's next for vr disrupted industry?
Since VR has profoundly transformed the real estate field, can it disrupt more industries? It can be said that the industry based on "looking" is being infiltrated by VR.
For example, the 2020 Dubai World Expo, which opened in October this year (due to the impact of the epidemic, the Dubai World Expo, which was originally scheduled to open in October 2020, was postponed to October 2021, and the name of the 2020 Dubai World Expo remained unchanged), the China Pavilion innovatively launched the "China Pavilion on the Cloud", which is the first large-scale venue to be filmed with VR technology in the true sense. It is reported that the overall offline area of this Chinese pavilion is more than 3400 square meters, and the technical service party behind the "China Pavilion on the Cloud" is also Shell Rushi, and it is Shell Rushi's self-developed "Galohua" that undertakes such a large space collection.
It is not easy to do this well. Due to the epidemic situation, rushi's professional photographers cannot go to Dubai to shoot and collect, and can only be performed by a third-party collection team. In order to ensure the collection of shooting results, such as the early stage of the third-party photographer to carry out multiple rounds of point-to-point training, according to the venue drawings, such as the vision team in advance planning, design shooting plan, specific to each exhibition area and exhibition how to select points, and deliver detailed point shooting drawings.
After the acquisition and shooting work is completed, Rushi uses self-developed software and algorithms to intelligently process the huge amount of data transmitted back. In the final month, the offline content will be fully presented online. The light and shadow of the Chinese scenery is unobstructed in the "China Pavilion on the Clouds", and foreigners praise "amazing".
(Galovar went to Dubai to collect the offline space of the Chinese Pavilion)
Not only the World Expo, this year's Winter Olympics also launched a VR smart venue, it is reported that the technical service behind and space collection is also a shell such as vision and its self-developed VR acquisition equipment Galohua.
Since the venue of the Games is different from the ordinary indoor scene, the area of a single venue will be very large, so it is necessary to develop a 100-meter detection distance lidar acquisition equipment for the existing 10-meter and 25-meter detection distance lidar acquisition equipment for the winter Olympic venues and outdoor venues. It is equipped with a 4K HD micro-single-stage color HDR camera independently developed by Rushi, which supports 8K panorama synthesis, realizes high-quality and high-fidelity color acquisition of the Winter Olympic scene, and uses 5G to achieve high-speed data upload.
In addition, Rushi also customizes and optimizes the super scenes of the Winter Olympics, including point cloud fusion and splicing algorithms, which are three-dimensional reconstruction of the space of this super large scene, laying the foundation for the promotion of large-scale sports events.
On a broader scale, the application of VR in the cultural tourism industry has become more and more. Now many consumers like to plant grass consumption, since 2018, Shell Rushi and Tongcheng Travel have carried out close cooperation, landing in nearly 12 key cities in 1,000 hotels; in the field of VR publicity, such as the "Visual International Meeting" cooperated by the Beijing Huairou District Bureau of Commerce, online comprehensive reproduction of Huairou's characteristic exhibition and cultural tourism resources, with only a mobile phone, you can fully and intuitively understand Huairou's exhibition advantages.
It is not difficult to predict that VR is also useful in home improvement, engineering surveying, fire protection and other industries. For example, the millions of data accumulated by VR and the provision of suitable spatial digital solutions for each industry are the new infrastructure for VR to stimulate each industry.
Blossoming industries, vr "iPhone 4" how far away?
Looking back, VR has long been not only a small game experience, but deep into various industries to generate value.
In the VR consumer route, product progress is very obvious. Among them, Oculus, an app owned by Facebook's parent company Meta, rose to the top of the list on Christmas Day in 2021, and Meta VR headset became the most popular gift for Christmas. At the same time, Apple's head-mounted AR/VR is expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022.
The "iPhone 4" in the VR consumer field is about to come out, and the core is to solve the computer graphics computing, stereoscopic display and other technologies. VR games, VR movies and other experiences have been fundamentally improved, and with the heat of the meta-universe, the public has rekindled interest in VR interaction.
In the VR industry route, although the attention of capital and users is not as high as in the consumer field, the actual value generated by the actual application as the development idea is greater. The most difficult point of this route is that to make VR from early adopter to common use, the cross-generational progress of technology is indispensable.
In terms of the evolution of the VR house viewing industry, the VR source material of many platforms in the early days is spliced with pictures, this kind of VR listing using panorama stitching technology, graphic distortion, no depth of field, proportion imbalance and other issues can not be eradicated, the user after reading the perception and reality have a large error, so the actual application effect is not good.
Shell's first mass-produced VR acquisition device, Riemann, uses structured light technology that is much better than panoramas. The camera is a precision scanning device with depth perception, which can complete the all-round acquisition of spatial information and image information. However, this equipment weighs 10 kilograms, and structured light technology has strict requirements for the offline collection environment.
However, this kind of VR-generated online "listing" has been accepted by consumers. With the emergence of "lidar" LiDAR technology on Apple's 2020 iPad Pro, the industry began to focus on breaking through laser VR acquisition equipment, and Shell Rushi also launched a laser VR acquisition device in 2020, the name is "Galohua".
"Galohua" can be regarded as a representative of the cross-generation of industrial VR technology. Because compared with relying on the camera to take pictures and then AI synthesis, the laser can calculate the data of different objects in the "photo", such as the height of people, the length and width of furniture, and the three-dimensional spatial data, the VR scenario it models is the real reaction, and the 3D restoration of the real world is truly realized.
It is reported that the depth acquisition accuracy of Galohua reaches an absolute error of 20mm, and the measurement area error can be controlled to less than 0.4%, which is at the world's leading level, which is a qualitative change brought about by laser VR compared with structured light technology.
In addition, from the portability, the performance has also been greatly improved, and the overall equipment has been reduced from the original shoulder-to-shoulder horizontal weight to 3KG. With a space of 100 square meters, the collection time can be reduced to 20 minutes. Replicating a house in the cloud so quickly is a result that was previously unimaginable.
On top of self-developed hardware such as Garohua, based on the accumulation of massive VR data, Shell Rushi has realized spatial modeling, house interpretation, item recognition, intelligent placement, real-time rendering, etc. on the algorithm, so far, the real estate brokerage industry has truly entered the digital era of AI+VR.
Rushi not only drives the application of VR in the real estate transaction industry, but more importantly, the accumulated set of AI algorithms and the accumulated spatial data processing capabilities can be reused to other industries and provide adaptable solutions according to various industries.
Behind all this is the continuous technological progress in the field of commercial VR, driving the continuous iteration of VR products. Behind the landing of real estate, cultural tourism, entertainment and other industries, the "iPhone 4, 4S, 6, X" products of the VR session are needed to continue to land.
The era of VR is not far away, and VR hardware products represented by Galohua will profoundly improve the development efficiency of the industry and bring consumers a better experience.
Join the exchange group & content reprinting & cooperation related