Author 丨 Liu Qian
Editor 丨 Zhang Weixian
Figure Source 丨 Figure worm
In the capital market in 2021, "meta-universe" was selected as the keyword of the year, and I am afraid that no one will oppose it. If 2021 is the first year of the metaverse, 2022 will be the year when the concept of the metacosm is accelerated.
According to PWC data, the meta-universe market size is expected to reach $467.4 billion in 2025. With the spiral iteration of technology and products, the development of each link will bring about the expansion of the overall market scale, and the future growth potential is worth looking forward to.
At the beginning of the new year, the wrestling and competition in the metaverse of various cities has quietly unfolded, and local governments have cut into the meta-universe track in different ways.
On January 10 and 11, Hefei and Wuhan successively held people's congress meetings, and at the same time wrote the metacosmology into the "Government Work Report".
Hefei said in the "Government Work Report" that in the next five years, Hefei will look forward to the layout of future industries, aim at the meta-universe, superconducting technology, precision medicine and other frontier fields, create a number of pilot enterprises, cutting-edge technology, high-end products, and win the future of the city with future industries.
Wuhan also said that it is necessary to accelerate the expansion of the digital industry, promote the integration of meta-universe, big data, cloud computing, blockchain, geospatial information, quantum technology, etc. with the real economy, build a national new generation of artificial intelligence innovation and development pilot zone, and build 5 digital economy industrial parks such as Xiaomi Science and Technology Park.
"The soil of the metaversic is not the same as that of China and abroad, and the development of the metacosm in China is inseparable from the support of policies." Pan Helin, member of the Information and Communication Economy Expert Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and executive dean of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, said in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald reporter that in the future, the virtual world of the meta-universe will accumulate a certain amount of traffic, which can empower the real economy through traffic and increase the sales channels of the real industry.
It has a considerable industrial base
In December last year, Shanghai issued the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Electronic Information Industry", proposing to strengthen the forward-looking research and development of the basic capabilities of the underlying core technologies of the meta-universe, promote the development of new terminals that deepen perceptual interaction and the construction of systematic virtual content, and explore industry applications. This is the first time that the metacosm has been written into the local "14th Five-Year Plan" industrial planning.
This time, the reason why Wuhan and Hefei mentioned the meta-universe in the government work report is because these two places have a considerable industrial base.
To develop the digital economy, Wuhan belongs to the "gifted players", with a solid foundation in industry, talent, transportation, etc., economist Ma Guangyuan commented that Wuhan's digital economy is "the most promising, the most potential and the most imaginative". At present, Wuhan has formed a new digital industry system characterized by "optical core screen end network cloud wisdom", conquered a number of key core technologies in the fields of optical fiber cables, high-end optical modules, memory chips, etc., has a number of leading enterprises such as CITIC Branch, Changfei, Yangtze River Storage, Lenovo, etc., and nearly 40% of the top 100 domestic enterprises in the digital economy have taken root in Wuhan.
Located in the Yangtze River Delta, Hefei has made early efforts in the field of digital economy. As early as 2018, Hefei took the opportunity of the release of the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Integrated Development of the Yangtze River Delta Region (2018-2020)" to accelerate the layout of the digital industry. According to the "Hefei Digital Economy Industry Development White Paper (2021)", the scale of Hefei's digital economy will exceed 400 billion yuan in 2020, accounting for more than 40% of GDP, and the added value of the core industries of the digital economy will account for about 9% of GDP.
Essentially, the metacosm is a virtualized, digitized process of the real world that is still evolving. However, it is certain that the landing of the metaverse requires a larger and more powerful AI infrastructure. Building a large-scale artificial intelligence computing center and providing more inclusive public computing power is becoming a key element in promoting the healthy and rapid development of the metaverse. In this regard, Wuhan has always been at the forefront of the country.
Wuhan and Hefei are both listed in the 18 national new-generation artificial intelligence innovation and development pilot zones approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology. At the end of 2020, Wuhan, with the help of Huawei, took the lead in building an artificial intelligence computing center, and it took only 5 months from the start of construction to the completion and operation of the artificial intelligence computing center.
Wuhan also creatively proposed the "Wuhan model" of "one center and four platforms", introducing artificial intelligence into new infrastructure planning and construction, relying on the Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center to create a public computing power service platform for thousands of industries, an industry application innovation incubation platform, an industrial aggregation development platform, a scientific and technological innovation and talent development platform.
At present, the peak COMPUTING power of AI provided by the Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center is as high as 100P, which is equivalent to a billion billion computing speeds per second, and it is about to reach 200P. On December 18, 2022, the relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Science and Technology said that the Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center will be used as a pilot to improve the construction of a public computing power open innovation platform.
Strengthen the digital governance capabilities of local governments
2021 is known as the first year of the meta-universe, and the frequent entry of domestic and foreign Internet giants such as ByteDance, Facebook, and Tencent has made the concept of the meta-universe widely known.
Pan and Lin said that in foreign countries, the metacosm takes the underlying blockchain and UGC as the starting point, and provides an editor through the game platform, allowing users to spontaneously expand the metacosm. In China, there are many compliance problems with this model, "so the domestic metacosm needs to be jointly promoted by the government and Internet platforms to form." For example, the game system in the metacosm, foreign is the use of virtual currency, the domestic can consider the establishment of a meta-cosmic economic system by integrating the digital yuan, the government and policies can provide a soft environment for the operation of the meta-universe economic system, and the Internet platform provides a hard environment for the formation of the meta-universe economic system, that is, infrastructure.
Judging from the actions of local governments, some cities in the Yangtze River Delta are ahead of the curve and are running into this new track, and the central and western cities are also following suit to accelerate their layout.
The 21st Century Business Herald reporter combed and found that at present, Hangzhou has established a meta-universe special committee; Wuxi issued the "Taihu Bay Science and Technology Innovation Belt Leading Area Meta-universe Ecological Industry Development Plan", proposing to build a domestic meta-universe ecological industry demonstration zone; Beijing also said that it will promote the formation of a new type of meta-universe innovation consortium to explore the construction of a meta-universe industry gathering area; as China's fourth largest communication technology and equipment research and development center after Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, Chengdu layout and establish a meta-universe industry alliance, which will build a meta-universe center on Jiaozi Avenue.
In Pan and Lin's view, only by opening up the regular soil produced by the metaverse can it be possible to promote the development of the metacosm. "To strengthen the digital governance capabilities of local governments, the first step is to understand, the second step is to add rules on the basis of understanding, seek balance in Chinese and foreign Internet rules, and find a breakthrough, and the third step is to maintain tolerance for some technologies, such as blockchain and NFTs, if you want to develop a metacosm, you must sweep away the concerns of enterprises, especially regulatory concerns."
According to the metaverse ecological map given by the New Media Research Center of Tsinghua Metascope University, the metacosmonic ecology is divided into three aspects: underlying technical support, front-end equipment platform, and scene content entrance. Yao Haoran, a researcher at Hualong Securities, said that most of the manifestations of the metacosm are based on games, and gradually integrate the Functions of the Internet, digital entertainment, education, medical care, etc., with the passage of time and the continuous improvement and progress of technology, in the long run, it can even integrate the allocation and utilization of resources in the whole society to achieve the optimal solution of resources.
Pan and Lin believe that the starting point of the metaverse is in the virtual world, so the Internet is still the early entry point of the metaverse track. Each city should make full efforts in talents, taxes, policy incentives and other aspects according to the characteristics of its own industrial base to form a development accumulation force.
This issue is edited by Liu Xueying Intern Zhan Huinan
