Image source @ Visual China
Text | Effervescent VCer, author | Meow Sweet, Edit | Janet
Investors in the front line, peeling back the cocoon and revealing the venture capital circle. Outside of reason, look for sensibility, and the receipt of goods in the view is calm.
Never been in Clubhouse, not a Roblox gamer, and have never experienced ARVR, but you must be familiar with the term "metaverse".
This year's rapid popularity and selection of the 2021 top ten internet terms of the "meta-universe", originated from the 1992 science fiction novel "Avalanche", until the listing of Roblox in 2021, Facebook renamed Meta was pushed to the peak, and in just a few months almost occupied the headlines of major media.
When the huge impact of the epidemic and the lackluster technology industry collide with each other, the countless reasons behind it are enough to push the metacosm to the peak, and also find a new outlet for giant companies, secondary markets, media, and brands, making the "metacosm" a topic that everyone can't do without.
Is the "metacosm" with its own heat an integration of the current cutting-edge technological concepts, or is it the concept of the future digital world? Can the real economic interests behind this be sustainable? Is there any experience that can be learned from production and life?
In this issue, we invited content industry observer Minghao Zhuang to discuss the perceptual journey of the cognitive metacosm. Let's take a look:
Effervescent: From live gaming to esports, from Matrix Partners to content industry observers, what is the secret to your enduring popularity?
Zhuang Minghao: Social networking is an important ability for VC practitioners, but not everyone likes to socialize. For introverted or rational practitioners, my advice to many people is to try to write. VC work will force practitioners to enter a lot, and in the face of many emerging industries and models, we will always have our own cognition and ideas.
Many times we see and think of some things, we will feel that they have some signs at this time node, and then continue to communicate and communicate with entrepreneurs or practitioners, gradually producing a clearer logical analysis framework and organizing them into their own cognition. At the moment (I) may not expect any feedback from this, but the process of collating the content is enough in itself, and I'm honest.
I have been insisting on this matter since I worked, and may have formed a positive cycle after holding on to it for a long time, so it is seen and recognized by more and more people. Many times you will find that you may not be the earliest (that one), or you may not be the most deeply understood (that one), but you are willing to express and continue to precipitate.
Jobs said that "all the fragments of life will be connected in some way at some future day", and I believed in this. You don't know where these "points" will be connected in the future, but when you look back ten or twenty years later, you will find that the "points" that seemed to have no connection before have been connected to this line and become who you are today.
Effervescent: What made you turn to the metaverse? Were you one of the first people in China to pay attention to this field?
Zhuang Minghao: "As a classical Internet investor, what should I look at?" "This is a very real problem that I have faced after returning to Jingwei from Panda in 19 years. From a pessimistic and rational point of view, everyone actually started laying out the next step very early. Part of it goes to see consumption, some of it goes to the new world of blockchain, and part of it goes to big factories to make industrial investment. When I was still doing VC in 20 years, although I also invested in some projects, I did not have a systematic system and a clear context.
Be sure to find the core "theme" of the words, at that time I talked about two, the immediate and is the voice, and the poetry and the distance based on the iteration and development of the technical level, the technology of superposition on each other may create something new. It was about Q3 of 20 years, and the concept of metaverse and Metavalse hadn't been brought up by so many people, and my feeling was similar to the scene in Sword Art Online wearing a game device and entering the SAO world. Including the report on virtual idols that I wrote back today, I found that a lot of the logic at that time was the same as the metacosm that everyone is discussing today, and the core logic is the business model change caused by technological change.
The opportunity for further attention may be the hot discussion of Clubhouse during the Spring Festival. It was a gathering of people who were focused on cutting-edge areas, especially blockchain and gaming practitioners, and the talk of things became Metavalse, and I realized that I wasn't the only one who thought so.
In the process, Roblox went public. The attention of a number of technology companies in the United States (on this concept) and the investment made by domestic head VCs before the emergence of the concept, whether right or wrong, have basically formed a consensus of all head Internet VCs. Then we found that the companies we had invested in in the past 1-2 years actually belonged to the Metavalse concept, and suddenly this realization became a consensus.
This cycle is very short, only about 3-4 months, and it has instantly become the consensus of the media, analysts, secondary markets, and the top technology giants in China and the United States. At first, I didn't realize that such a large range of consensus could be formed, perhaps because the impact of the epidemic and the lackluster technology industry, and the agglomeration of various reasons has reached such a hot point.
How do we understand the metacosm?
Metaverse, this may be a world of a thousand people and a thousand faces.
Luo Yonghao Weibo retweeted the Twitter of American tech blogger Shaan Puri, who believes that the metaverse is not a place or platform ( Place ) , but a moment , as people's attention shifts from real life to the Internet , it also means that we are getting closer and closer to the metaverse. In the eyes of NFT practitioners, the metacosm is a matter of asset confirmation. Xu Tong, founder of Maoyan Film and investment partner of Zhen Fund, believes that the metacosm is a concept rather than an opportunity, and the essence is a series of changes brought by a new generation of computing equipment to everyone's work and life.
Effervescent: Which view do you agree with, and if you were to introduce the metaverse in a sentence or analogy, how would you describe the current situation?
Zhuang Minghao: At first, I thought the word was all-encompassing. Metaverse's relatively narrow understanding may be a 3D virtual online community, and the broad understanding may be the next generation of the Internet. Everyone's perception of this matter is different, whether it is a spatial dimension or a time dimension, it may not matter at this point in time today.
We don't need to explain to anyone what the metacosm is, or standardize and unify the definition. We can look at what has happened in the last 20 years, what we have experienced in ourselves, especially with technology and the Internet. So look 20 years from today and imagine what it will look like. I think most people deduce their own perception of the metacosm.
Just like Ding Lei of NetEase has always said, they have made a lot of technical preparations. There is no metaverse, and a lot of technical and product functional stuff is in progress. The keyword "metaverse" only describes what is going on and makes everyone more acceptable.
This concept is "needed" by all. Investors need it, entrepreneurs need it, listed companies need it, and giants need it. It is in line with the foundation of the underlying consensus, so it can achieve widespread acceptance.
Effervescent: How long do you think we're still away from entering the real metaverse, the world of the number one player, the runaway player?
Zhuang Minghao: If we define the need for visualization as it is in a movie, maybe 10 years or so will be enough. Of course, there will be many paradoxes in it, and before many technical solutions are solved, they may not be able to achieve that ideal state, and the real qualitative change has not yet arrived.
When Venezuelans enter the metacosm – how far are the real world and the virtual economy?
Venezuelans earn money on maintaining family expenses through the gold-fighting game RuneScape, and the NFT game Axie Infinity has a "human-to-human" phenomenon in a poor community in the Philippines, which has gradually become a source of income for many people... Social factors such as monetary instability, the inability of the real economy to make money, and high unemployment have prompted people to enter the metacosm.
Effervescent: Would such a gold-digging farmer be the beneficiary of the metaverse? Or will it become cannon fodder or leeks?
Zhuang Minghao: The existence of chain games is reasonable from a certain point of view, and the commercialization of many emerging technologies often starts from games. Few people have really entered the new world of chain travel, whether abroad or at home, gold diggers have become more industrialized, through scripts and computers into a technical confrontation. In the enchanting and abnormal new world of chain travel, the impact and reshaping are always there. This wave of pure manpower will not be long gone, just like when our reform and opening up just began, Adi and Nike will put the foundry in China, and today they will transfer the foundry to Places with lower labor costs like Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
The distinction between the old and new worlds is becoming increasingly blurred, and there is no way to define right and wrong. In June, El Salvador announced itself as the first country in the world to consider Bitcoin as legal tender, bringing about a short-term surge in Bitcoin. This wave of Bitcoin's surge may be related to turkey's recent surge in house prices, and it is not clear whether the fluctuation affects the real economy to win or lose.
When factors such as fiat currency collapse, inflation, currency over-issuance, and the impact of the epidemic are superimposed, do people have to find a sense of existence in the real world? Even if there is no chain tour on the spiritual and economic level, something may appear to make this demand come true.
Effervescent: Will there be a day when the metacosm and the real economy will compete? Will the labor costs of the virtual world still be based on time, knowledge, and skills per se? Will the value of human beings become more and more monolithic?
Zhuang Minghao: This is a philosophical question. In extreme evolution, it is very likely that this will happen, but it will take a long time. Just like mining, considering that the cost is more about machines, computing power, architecture, CPU, if you add AI, it may really be the same as in the movie "Westworld", whether it is human or not may not matter. Under extreme conditions, people become dry batteries, as long as they contribute the brain's computing power. Just as Venezuelans are doing, give their brainpower, time, and mouse clicks to earn a little income and support their families.
Effervescent: Many brands try to circle users with the concept of metacosm, what do you think are the deviations/errors in these brands' understanding of metacosmities?
Zhuang Minghao: There is no mistake, each takes what is needed. Cut the leek, rub it.
In 2016, Wang Xing mentioned that the elements of the competition in the second half of china's Internet have changed from the number of users to time, the secondary level has become money, and the number of users * user time * user money = platform value. China has exceeded 1 billion intelligent terminals for many years, and this number has not risen much. According to QuestMobile statistics, the number of users online reached 7.2 hours last year when the epidemic was over, and now it has fallen back for about 6 hours, and this data is still slowly growing.
We can understand the epidemic as an extreme test at this stage, but it is only 24 hours a day, and most of the rest of the time a person spends except sleep. From the perspective of time, the first thing to grab is to play games, watch live broadcasts, virtual world time and spiritual consumption. When the time is running out and virtual consumption is also affected by the epidemic, everyone begins to grab the money to eat and drink Lazar. So in the past 2 years, live e-commerce has developed wildly, and these are all connected.
Effervescent: From the perspective of social development, what will be the impact of the metacosm on different industrial chains? For example, in the production of content, is the threshold for practitioners gradually raised, and what will it look like in the metaverse era?
Zhuang Minghao: I thought the same thing before, but when I think about it, it actually decreases. Quality content is a scarce commodity, and the core idea becomes important.
The reason for the rapid rise of short videos is that the threshold for video production has become lower, and many people in China today cannot write 1,000-word small essays, but if you shoot a 15-second small video, there is a high probability that you can shoot it. So to some extent, future evolution may not need to be filmed, and what the eye sees or thinks will become something achievable.
We've been looking at changes in the sound space lately, and there's been a voice to music, where AI can turn a few simple notes into a piece of beautiful music. Including what NVIDIA is doing now, just draw two brush mountains or stones can be directly rendered into an artistic masterpiece with AI. This may be the way to achieve this in the future, and even as long as the imaginary picture in the mind is simply entered, the system can immediately generate visual things in the form of AI.
Effervescent: Why is ar/VR now similar to what it looked like in 15 or 16 years, and is this a sign of not going back and forth?
Zhuang Minghao: With glasses as a carrier, the stage technology may have reached the physical limit. However, through AR/VR devices, it will take some time to cross the gap between the user's "realism" experience level and the technical supply realization level.
In the past, we learned about mobile phones + cartons, but this is not the same thing as today's Ouclus Quest 2, although the Ouclus Quest 2 is still some distance and difficulty to achieve the ideal state of high realism. As hardware, the development of VR glasses itself needs to be concentrated and a number of evolving high-tech, such as weight, battery heat, vertigo problems and other shortcomings, all need to be solved before they can be broken.
Effervescent: Chaos means infinite possibilities, do you think it's possible for us to overtake in hard tech corners?
Zhuang Minghao: At present, China has made good attempts in hardware technical capabilities and research and development. The probability and difficulty of breakthroughs in the field of traditional chips are relatively large. From the perspective of mobile phones, it is very difficult to really do CPU and Qualcomm. But these chips that are partial to the image layer and the partial AI layer may have to fight, and China has a chance in the field of specifically targeting certain special scenarios. Because there are enough scene applications and manufacturers in China, such as autonomous driving, there are also opportunities.
Meta-Cosmic Faction VS Spaceship Faction – Virtual Reality or Sea of Stars?
"There are two paths before humanity. One outward leads to the sea of stars; one outwards leads to virtual reality. "--Liu Cixin
Virtual architect Liu Cixin mentioned that the virtual world is a very tempting and highly hallucinogenic "spiritual opium". Should the future be to explore the virtual universe or to explore interstellar civilizations? Is it Facebook called Meta, or Is it Musk SpaceX, Bezos' Blue Origin with Richard's Virgin Galactic?
Effervescent: Is this going to be a black-and-white question, and what do you think?
Zhuang Minghao: What is the future of mankind? Taking a step further, must we explore the sea of stars in the flesh? Can I use brain waves to explore? In fact, it can be non-conflicting. Everyone may think too concretely, the problem itself may not be so extreme, and the virtual world will not be just entertainment.