On January 20th, the "Virtual Come True • Xiaopai Technology 2022 Online Media Sharing Meeting" was held, at which Mr. Ren Pan, CEO of Xiaopai Technology, introduced the views and concepts of Xiaopai Technology on the metaverse and the VR industry, including the relationship between VR and the metaverse, the significance of immersion in the metaverse, the requirements of immersion on VR hardware and the industry standard of VR 3.0, and shared with the media present the dual advantages of technology and brand formed by Xiaopai relying on the global high-end PC VR market in 2022. Entering the all-in-one machine market, entering the mid-end consumer market, and exerting force on the important dynamics of the domestic market. The following is a summary of the core points and information shared by Mr. Ren Pan.
First, the cornerstone of the metaverse is immersion, and high-performance VR is the guarantee of immersion
Metacosm is a comprehensive revolution that incorporates information, internet, artificial intelligence, and VR, AR, and MR game engine technologies.
The metaverse will eventually enhance the overall happiness of human beings, so that everyone has more opportunities to rise to the level of self-worth realization and respect, and make their lives more valuable.
The fundamental reason why PCs and mobile phones do not open the metaverse is that users "observe" the three-dimensional virtual world through two-dimensional devices, lacking enough "immersion".
VR technology affects our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, somatosensory, and tactile sensations by simulating the physical environment, thereby producing chemical hormones and electrical signals to affect the self, and then the ego and the superego. This is the psychological basis for VR to make people have a "sense of immersion".
With the true immersion provided by VR hardware, people can truly "enter" the virtual world that has existed for a long time. "Man is the measure of all things". With the occupancy of people, the "virtual world" becomes the "metacosm".
The eight elements of the metacosm are not parallel relationships, but have a primary and secondary distinction, and the sense of immersion is the bottom plate and cornerstone. The other seven elements have long existed, but only with the true immersion provided by the development of VR hardware can one enter the metaverse.
Second, excellent VR hardware is the entrance to the metaverse
Immersion is a core element that underpins the metaverse concept and requires high-performance VR hardware to achieve. This requires the current VR vendors on the market to achieve revolutionary technological upgrades. Xiaopai summarized the goals of this series of technological improvements into the technical standards of VR 3.0, that is, the technical standards in the three aspects of visual immersion, physical immersion and cognitive immersion.
Visual immersion corresponds to the "natural" dimension in the VR 3.0 definition
We usually think that PPD (Pixels per Degree) is the angle resolution, FOV (Field of View) is the field of view, refresh rate these three indicators have an absolute ceiling level, any VR headset these three indicators divided by the indicator's ceiling level (that is, 100% level) to get a percentage, it represents the performance of the headset on the indicator. The weighted harmonic average of these three percentages is UVI, and this model is a good measure of visual immersion levels.
100% UVI means that the human eye is completely unable to distinguish whether to see a virtual image or the real world. This standard sounds sci-fi, but in fact it is no longer far away from us: Xiaopai has released a UUV of up to 73% of the Reality series of 12K QLED headsets, which is very close to the "excellent" standard.
The bottleneck of UVI improvement is mainly the overall limited GPU computing power. GPU hash rate determines the number of frames (i.e., refresh rate) generated per unit of time multiplied by the total number of pixels in a single frame. In the case of a certain total number of pixels, under the premise that the aspect ratio is fixed, PPD and FOV are inversely proportional, and PPD needs to be reduced to increase FOV, and vice versa. That is to say, there must be direct trade-offs and compromises between PPD and FOV.
Only when the total number of pixels increases, there is more room to trade off between FOV and PPD to define different types of VR headset products that are visually immersive enough to meet the needs of different user groups.
To break through the bottleneck of UVI's increased computing power, it is mainly necessary to optimize algorithms to improve the utilization efficiency of limited computing power, some of which rely on additional hardware support.
Physical immersion corresponds to the dimension of "freedom" in VR3.0. VR hardware needs to achieve 6 degrees of freedom positioning, that is, head and hand positioning tracking, while the device needs to be good enough in terms of wireless, spatial influence, somatosensory peripherals, ergonomic design, weight and volume control and distribution.
Inside-out positioning scheme is the mainstream development direction, its accuracy is high enough, the price is cheap, easy to use, the associated see-through function has formed the prototype of the full field of view AR function, laying a good foundation for vr future transition to MR.
Cognitive immersion corresponds to the "self" dimension of VR3.0, and only with the support of full cognitive immersion can it be possible to form a truly effective social scene in VR. Cognitive immersion requires support for many functions such as face tracking, eye tracking, body tracking, and body tracking, as well as emotion tracking, in addition to the tracking and positioning of the head hand 6DOF mentioned above.
Third, technology research and development, road obstruction and long
VR hardware research and development involves many technical fields, the threshold is extremely high, and the relevance to the mobile phone industry is not high.
VR technology includes software, optics, sensing, perception science, computer vision, computer graphics, hardware, display, UI, OS, wear and audio and many other fields, and the requirements are extremely high, many requirements are not in the field of mobile phones. For example, for display, 16K resolution is the goal of the VR industry, while for mobile phones 2K is already the ceiling.
SLAM positioning in VR must achieve sub-millimeter-level high precision, millisecond-level low latency, ultra-high robustness, that is, no loss, no drift, no card. This all means a very high technical threshold.
The traditional display scheduling mechanism in the operating system can not meet the requirements of VR's MTP latency.
Xiaopai currently has four core technologies: high PPI technology allows Xiaopai headset to support both high resolution and high refresh rate; high-precision and low-latency CV positioning technology, which can achieve stable and accurate 6DOF positioning tracking; large field of view at the same time to distortion, chromatic aberration, volume, weight controllable, which puts forward very high requirements for optics; at the same time, we have Brain-warp technology, integrated with a variety of optimization algorithms, we can reduce the computing power burden on the GPU by more than half, in turn, On the same computing power platform, we can support twice the performance indicators of VR headsets.
Xiaopai chose to do high-end equipment first because the development of VR requires a higher sense of immersion; secondly, the life cycle of high-end products is longer, bringing higher value to users; third, at this stage of the industry, the performance advantages of products can bring user experience advantages, which can be transformed into competitive advantages. This is also the core logic of the leading edge of Xiaopai's products in the international high-end market; fourth, occupying the high-end market, you can very comfortably harvest the profits of hardware, and on this basis, you are considering the layout of the low-end market.
High-end positioning brings a good industry ecosystem to Xiaopai. When Xiaopai enters the mid-range market, the technology is to do subtraction, and the brand potential energy is to reduce the dimensionality, without any difficulty.
Fourth, 2022 small pie strategy: enter the all-in-one machine market and force the domestic market
In the past five years, we have gained a good global presence overseas and a good reputation among high-end players.
Xiao Pi has also built an overseas influence value network, which is built by hardware developers, software developer KOLs, game enthusiasts, and professional players, including Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
On November 26, 2021, Xiaopai released the Pimax Reality 12K QLED version for the first time, which means that Xiaopai will enter the all-in-one machine market. This product is an all-rounder, with PC VR, all-in-one dual mode, and the relevant parameters will achieve leapfrog growth.
Based on the baptism of the global high-end PC VR market, Xiaopai has formed a dual advantage in technology and brand, and in 2022, Xiaopai will enter the all-in-one machine market and exert efforts in the domestic market.