Eventually, such a city was built on top of a giant Möbius ring between the Earth-Moon orbits—a classic figure with no beginning and no end, as in the spiritual core of the city.
Wen | Feng Yingxing
Edited | The Golden Turn
Build a meta-cosmic city? Crazy!
The first time he heard Jin Zhe talk about building a Baidu Yuan Universe City, Liu Yun's feeling was: Crazy.
Everyone knows that the hot word for 2021 is the metaverse. Game company Roblox, which is listed on the U.S. stock market, is known as the first stock of the metaverse, from a valuation of $4 billion to $40 billion, in just one year, which ignited the concept of the metacosm. Zuckerberg followed suit, renaming Facebook Meta and claiming to transform Facebook from a social media into a metacosm company within 5 years.
In China, Ali, Tencent, Xiaomi, ByteDance, these Internet giants or active investment, or the next research and development, the meta-universe has become a must-compete place. In the investment world, there are already first-line funds including Jingwei China, Zhen Fund, Wuyuan Capital, etc. running into the game. According to the existing information, from September to November 2021, in the three months, there were 26 domestic investments related to the meta-universe with more than 10 million yuan, and 35 foreign investments, with a total amount of more than 10 billion yuan.
But it is precisely because the metaverse is so hot that any bit of wind and grass at this time will be questioned, whether it is the outlet or the hype. Liu Yun is the head of Baidu Internet of Things, ARM Cloud, security operations, when she heard Baidu marketing head Jin Zhe discuss this matter, she couldn't help but think: You really dare to think, we really dare to do.
The idea of building a cosmic city dates back to August last year, and Jin Zhe felt that the moment he said this idea, there was a sudden light in everyone's eyes. Everyone is excited, and the excitement is that if you can participate together, it will be an unprecedented experience.
The excitement of building a meta-cosmic city didn't last long. For more than a month, the same scene was staged inside Baidu — everyone looked at each other and frequently asked the organizers: What are you talking about? What exactly the metaverse is, no one can explain clearly. Some people say that it is an advanced version of the game, some people say that it is an advanced version of VR and AR technology, and some people mention that the layout of the blockchain in it is indispensable - there is no unified answer.
Ginger envisioned that this should be a space parallel to the real world, or that it should be built on the orbit of the Earth and the Moon, and it should be closely linked to the real world. But when she communicated her ideas to the team and the various business lines, the resistance she encountered almost made her mood fall to the bottom.
The worst part was not a straightforward refusal, but she explained to several people again what she wanted, and half an hour later, they nodded thoughtfully to show that they understood, but their expressions were dazed, and when they asked again, they found that the "understood" in everyone's mind was different.
Liu Yun's superior, Ma Jie, felt: This thing can be done. In his cognition, although the definition of the metacosm has not yet been agreed, the essence is the process of virtualization and digitization of the real world. Now, no one can deny that they can't live completely out of the digital state. You send a Weibo, a circle of friends, and make online shopping, all of which can form part of your digital portrait. If the digital trend that already exists in the real society is taken a step further, a second space parallel to the real world can be created.
Maybe even the unreal world of Ready Player One can be achieved. This is the oasis world, where the only limit is your own imagination – this is the image seen in the movie where the male protagonist Parsifal puts on a VR headset and enters the virtual world oasis, where people can be anyone and do anything. In the past year or so, Ma Jie has watched this movie clip hundreds of times.
Image source movie "Ready Player One"
Ma Jie feels that everyone does not want to miss the revolution in the new era of the Internet, and the concept of the meta-universe is just what Baidu just happened to encounter. If it is not called metaverse, even if it is called another name, this thing will be done sooner or later. The essence of the metacosm is to virtualize and digitize the real world, making it a second space that is always online and parallel to the real world. What Baidu has to do is the technology engine of the metacosm, and the entry is based on the accumulation of artificial intelligence technology and the huge amount of computing power and algorithm support. But Baidu needs to have a prototype of a domestic meta-universe product before anyone believes in its technology.
Just a few days later, Zuckerberg suddenly announced that Facebook had launched VR virtual conference room Workplaces. The entire room can accommodate up to 16 people, where users can set themselves up as digital people, meet others in a virtual, real-world meeting room, and be able to collaborate on shared whiteboards or documents. In addition, on the VR shown by Zuckerberg, his own real desktop can even interact with the virtual desktop, sharing the computer screen in real time.
Is this the original form of the metaverse? Ma jie has no answer. At present, the metaverse is still in a very early stage of industrial exploration, there is no mature path to refer to, and the difficulty and pressure of development are self-evident. But Ma Jie feels that the capacity of the metaverse can be larger, and the imagination space should not be only between square inches. It can be a virtual city that can even accommodate 100,000 people interacting online at the same time. The metaverse must be an ideal state that is more open, more diverse, less latency, and more immersive and civilized anytime, anywhere.
Ideal city
So, what should this meta-cosmic city look like?
In the vision of Baidu programmers, there should be mountains, lakes, buildings, roads, and everything in real life, but there must be things that cannot be realized in the real world. They simply whimsical: in the real world, there are Baidu's self-driving cars radish fast running, in the city of the meta-universe, can the car fly in the sky, called radish fast flying? Can people dive into the water and explore the bottom of the lake? In parallel universes, can the essence of human civilization be gathered?
The design manuscript unfolds to create a city based on Howard's ideal urban model: the city center is a hundred-storey main building modeled after a pine tree, with more than 99,000 seats. The real bird's nest can accommodate up to 91,000 spectators at the same time, and the radius of the bottom of this pine tree building is exactly 1.25 times that of the base of the bird's nest, with the main building as the center, radiating out to the surrounding area, forming an urban space with a radius of 3.5 kilometers.
The ideal urban model argues that human communities should be surrounded by fields or gardens, and that the proportions of residential, industrial, and agricultural areas should be balanced. Therefore, in the meta-universe city, surrounded by snowy mountains in the north, the city pool adopts the Block block mode of the integration of Xi'an, Beijing and New York, and the community is dotted with rivers and green spaces that either penetrate or surround the side, and there are pastures in the northeast. Just like Baidu's location in Beijing, the City of Meta-Universe, Baidu Technology Interactive Experience Zone is also located in the northwest of the city. The blue road is built in the air and has a full sense of technology. West Lake and Lake Canberra are distributed in the east of the city, forming a huge water system, and on the island of the west lake, a Feng Tang Art Museum has been built. As the first Chinese artist to exhibit in the meta-universe, Feng Tang officially moved in with his art museum and released his meta-universe art work Yuancube.
Of course, the city has also welcomed some real-world indigenous people: the Communication University of China, the Yue Fresh Science and Technology Center, the Lotus Sports Car Track, etc. In order to hold the International University Student Animation Festival, the Communication University of China moved the campus into this place in equal proportions, and even every tree and flower bone on the campus was copied from the past.
Eventually, such a city was built on top of a giant Möbius ring between the Earth-Moon orbits—a classic figure with no beginning and no end, as in the spiritual core of the city.
The Mobius Ring – the first conceptual hand in the World of Greekland
The War of the Code Farmers
The ideal is very full, but the process of realization is not only between the square inches of the drawing, but also requires the competition of code and the breakthrough of technology.
The number of employees involved in the storm was as high as a thousand, and the demand for verification was raised by more than two hundred, and finally only more than sixty were passed. Because of the limitations of technology, too many beautiful ideas cannot be realized in the short term. In order to estimate that the image can achieve a more realistic effect, Liu Yun even led the team to disassemble and analyze the CG film "Alita: Battle Angel", and found that each frame of the picture takes about 30,000 devices to render about 500 hours, and the film-level CG production cost is hundreds of millions of dollars.
The construction of the Meta-Universe City cannot wait too long, and the direction will be discussed in August 2021, how things should be discussed in September, and the details will be implemented in October. It's too late to start work.
When Wen Xiangyuan received the order to make the Meta-Universe City, it was the day before the eleventh holiday last year, and it was urgently activated. In the months that followed, he became the person in charge of the end-side of the project— ensuring that the Metaverse City could be adapted to all ends (different phones, computers, including VR headsets), and that 2D and 3D users could achieve optimal immersion in each interface.
Personalized things are not difficult for programmers, but it is extremely difficult to adapt a system to various scenarios.
The difficulty is even far beyond imagination, and since the work, it is the most difficult in history. Unlike the previous business of Internet companies, there is usually a process of slow accumulation, and the new tasks received by Wen Xiangyuan have no foundation, no benchmarking, and they start completely from 0 and move forward by feeling the stones. Chai Wei, the head of the front end, even feels that this is constantly challenging the bottom line of his own humanity. For programmers, the pursuit of the beauty of code is almost an occupational disease engraved in the genes, but in three months, this goal may not be achieved.
More personnel are temporarily seconded, they are required to ensure the greatest degree of immersion, low latency, the picture should be realistic, the server should be able to drive 100,000 users at the same time, in an unserious way to achieve the same screen gathering, interaction, but also to ensure that when there is a problem, can be timely extinguished, and switch planB, plan C when the user is not aware.
Feng Zheng, the person in charge of voice, director and video, is one of the people who have been pulled over. Before that, he was the core of Baidu's security business, and he knew nothing about everything in the studio, let alone allowing the original traditional graphic photography camera technology to extend in the virtual world, which was equivalent to starting to study the most advanced video production processes such as XR and VR.
Before the start of construction, Feng Zheng had already conceived an ideal world in his head, but the first time he entered the studio, he was still asked by the front-line photographers. The photographer thought that the leaders sent by this group were all proficient, so he asked how to solve the field record in the timeline of the virtual space and how to do it, and Feng Zheng was confused. He quietly wrote down one unfamiliar word after another in his mind, came home from work and searched for noun explanations one by one, and after a month, he could finally understand what they were saying.
When it comes to solving specific problems, it is extremely delicate. Any detail can rise to the level of worldview discussion. For example, on the stage of the real world, the speaker stands in the center of the stage, the audience on different seats, the angle of the picture seen, the size of the sound heard, are all different, only a few people can see the stage, and more people just go to feel the atmosphere of the scene. If you hold a concert in the virtual world, what kind of experience should the audience with different seats have? Is it time to restore the real world, or to create a completely different world? The result of a group of technologists arguing is that they should transcend the real world, otherwise people will simply change their identities and do the same things in a virtual world as in the real world.
When the project was too tight and there was no particularly good way, the whole team was extremely anxious. Finally, Feng Zheng and his team made an attempt: recording in two perspectives, one is the real proportional camera position that meets the user's position perspective, and the other is a variety of far-and-medium close-up camera positions for the director, and the two camera positions are simultaneously rendered and transmitted, and the algorithm is automatically coupled with the user behavior, providing the user with a visual experience of different perspectives to the greatest extent possible.
I don't dare say whether it was a successful attempt or a failed attempt, but after all, it was a small step, we want to put these two models together, you can have the feeling of sitting with 100,000 people in the audience to listen to the concert, although your neighbors are a little bit dull, but there is a sense of presence where everyone is sitting together, you can even hear the neighbors complaining.
In order to do this, when Lin Qing, the head of audio, first received the task, his first reaction was: Do you really want to do this? He was originally an AIoT security architect, and it wasn't until after three meetings that he knew exactly what to do, and his mood changed from confusion to excitement. I play games and watch anime, and there are many episodes in anime that put on a helmet and enter another virtual world, and if it can be realized, it feels like it is one step closer to the ideal world. Lin Qing said.
However, no matter how realistic the sound field in the game is, it can only distinguish between distant gunshots and nearby footsteps, to simulate the ambient sound of 100,000 people online at the same time, and according to the distance of people, convey different decibels of sound field, the server's access level per second needs to reach millions, or even tens of millions.
When all the elements interact together and superimpose into 100,000 people's data, it is a terrifying state. If 100,000 people move in the venue at the same time, then the server needs to carry and emit 10 billion times of computing power a second, and the 32-core, 64G server that is already advanced enough can only carry thousands of people-level actions.
If you compare this matter with the game, the difficulty is more intuitive. Zhang Chi, who is in charge of the back end, has a background in games, and he clearly knows that almost all high-capacity games are using the method of server partitioning. Just like entering the "Eat Chicken" game, the user must select the time zone to log in, and the player can only see the whereabouts between the hundred people in his service area. Outside of your "time zone, there is another server that is completely closed to you, the world of others." Zhang Chi explains.
In the end, Zhang Chi and his team broke down the technical barriers that could not be connected between servers, and realized cross-regional interaction between 500 servers, which can ensure mutual visibility under the condition of 100,000 user scale gathering, real-time interaction based on different locations of participants, and can ensure stability.
Metacosmic City Concept Art Set Diagram
in space, extra space
In the Baidu Science and Technology Park on Wangdong Road in Northwest Beijing, a conference room called Juan Jiangyue, about 10 meters long and 5 meters wide, several tables are pieced together, and a large screen is supported at the entrance, which becomes a wartime venue.
Starting from October 2021, Liu Yun, together with the heads of the seven subdivision chains of the Meta-Universe business line, began to set up camp in this conference room. All the people most directly related to the Metaverse City will gather here, the data will be projected on the big screen, and the problem will be solved immediately.
In the past three months, trepidation has become the most frequent word in this room. The project will not be seen until December, and the R&D results will be initially seen, and if the emotional curve is used to determine the state here, the curve must be ups and downs. At first it was just a dream, but then it was decided to do it, and everyone would be happy to be able to innovate. It can enter the implementation stage, encounter various difficulties, and the mood has fallen to the bottom. When you slowly feel that the dry is formed, take it out for everyone to see, and the new needs will immediately appear again, be added, and it is another round of new pain. Ginger described the state of everyone in the room.
A group of technicians get together, and Internet black talk cannot be avoided. In this room, the universe inside and outside the universe became the code word that distinguished responsibility from work. The front-end, imagery, audio, and all other content related to the internal architecture of the Metaverse City are collectively referred to as the intra-universe, and the support departments such as ensuring the back-end of the server, the end-side responsible for adaptation, and the operation and maintenance responsible for fire extinguishing have become extra-cosmic. As soon as someone enters the room to report a bug, someone immediately shouts in the conference room: Looking for "inside the universe" or "outside the universe"?
And Lin Qing woke up every morning, and the first words that came out of his head were: Is the bag coming? Packets are packets of data that link the universe inside and outside the universe together. If the upstream package cannot be supplied to the next link in time, the work of the next link will be forced to stall. In order to ensure the development efficiency of each link, the deadline of each link in the month of The River is calculated by the hour.
Sun Mi, the head of operations outside the universe, wants to be in charge of the art package, which is provided by external partners, and the other party is delayed in giving, and Sun Mi can only rush around the room. After the Nth inquiry about the progress, Sun Miao directly grabbed the door and went to the supplier's company to stay in the scene, staring at them to do it, from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, nearly two days, boiling like an eagle, and finally took the bag back.
The most damning time, when Wen Xiangyuan got the bag, his upstream had been delayed for 8 hours, and he did not dare to sleep, waiting from 9 p.m. the first night to 4 a.m. the next day, and the bag finally came. Writing that by 10:00 a.m. on the third day, it was extremely difficult to continuously dispatch across regions in the middle. On the afternoon of the third day, there was finally a slight progress, by which time Wen Xiangyuan had been working continuously for 48 hours and was driven home by his superiors.
As usual, if such a situation occurs, a group of programmers ask each other for needs, blamed and urged is normal, but in this extremely tense wartime state, whenever the upstream package stagnates, everyone's first reaction is to ask: What problem have you encountered? What can I do for you? After all, the industry has no mature experience, we are walking a road that no one has walked, the cramped construction period has worn away the emotions, no one is relaxed, encounter problems, let's solve it together.
For Feng Zheng, after working for 20 hours continuously, it has become the norm to find a simple bed and clothes to sleep. The most damning thing is when I enter the studio and the group, the whole biological clock is completely chaotic. The film crew used to start work in the afternoon and finish work in the middle of the night, and their 4 a.m. was like 10 p.m. for the yard farmers. When the sun rose, Feng Zheng had to get up again to cooperate with The work in the moon.
He hadn't seen his son, who was jet-lagged with himself, in a long time. When he went to the studio again, Feng Zheng walked from the northwest fifth ring road to the east fifth ring road, looked at the few dead leaves scattered on the branches outside the car window, and suddenly remembered that he had not chatted with his wife for a long time, he called his wife and chatted a few words, which was a report in the past few months.
Night view of the future city of the main venue of Hiram
-7.0 version of Hiram
The last to carry the Metaverse City is a platform called Shih-a-Lo. The name comes from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the one who rests on the soil, and the soil is infinite in its own eternal breath. It is said that this is a piece of soil left behind by Nuwa when she made up the heavens, and it is a piece of soil that can grow indefinitely. Ma Jie felt that this should be a fertile land full of hope, so he called it Xi Lang.
After logging in to the Hiram platform, users can create their own avatars, take a spaceship to the metaverse city built on the earth-moon orbit, and begin to walk freely through the city.
Liu Yun said that unlike the narrow worldview in the game, there is only one goal to enter the game, that is, to pass the level, in the city of the metaverse, the worldview is more open, and you can do anything according to your own stream of consciousness. Moreover, the Metaverse City also encourages users to create, in addition to the most basic infrastructure, even in the plan, Greem will open source code, technology enthusiasts can work together to build their own ideal city.
This is not the same as the concept of speculation that has been disturbed in the market. Not long ago, singer Lin Junjie posted his meta-universe property on social media. It is said that in the meta-universe, a property has been fried to more than two million yuan, but this is not Baidu's expectation of the space of Xi'an. We prefer to build a beautiful house where people are willing to play, bring traffic and value, and then give it back to developers. Here, everyone will have a clear intellectual property right for what they make, and can form a virtuous circle. This is difficult to achieve in the real world. Ma jie said.
It can even achieve the most direct link to the real world, where people can see exhibitions, shops, and then move their favorite objects directly into their real homes.
Shaolin Temple in Xi'ao
In early December 2021, the first judging meeting before the launch of The land was held, and the technical staff, content personnel, and participants of various business groups saw for the first time what the Meta-Universe City really looked like. In the month of The River River, everyone has different opinions on the realization effect of the meta-universe, and some business group participants feel that it is better than expected, but there is no shortage of professional and technical personnel who feel that there are too many unsolved technical problems, or too rough.
On both sides of the Möbius Ring outside the metaverse city, half of it is starry sky, half is day, and the sun, moon, and stars alternate. The city is extremely clean, the highways are like ribbons in the air, and cherry blossoms fall from the side, enveloping people in it. Shen Teng, Sanbao, Green Snake, and White Snake will pass you by - that is the prototype of a domestic meta-universe city. The mood of the R & D personnel is nervously happy, happy and worried, because there are still boundary bug problems, mold wearing problems, etc., and there are countless details waiting for this group of people to continue to improve.
On December 21, 2021, Greeng opened the internal test to the media for the first time, the time was set a week in advance, and the invitation letter was also sent out by the brand department. The first night, Chai Wei called Ma Jie and said: Boss, the "bag" may not come out. Before participating in the project, he was the leader of Baidu's intelligent cloud Internet of Things virtual reality technology, and in this new battle, he was almost at the core of the universe. Ma Jie told him: Top again.
Hearing this news, Sun Mi, who was in charge of operations, could not sleep again. It wasn't until 8 a.m. the next morning that the bag came out and I was relieved. However, the product development team is still not satisfied, there are many scenes of interaction has not been fully realized, the real immersion of the meta-universe city is insufficient, the content and gameplay need to be enriched, and some known problems are still being modified. Chai Wei also stayed up all night. Ma Jie knew that this almost extreme approach to development should not be the norm for teams.
They all want to seize the initiative in this new era of internet revolution. Just like Feng Zheng's wife, she knows that her husband has been tired lately, but he also feels that there is light in his eyes and he enjoys it.
DEF CON is the world's premier conference in the field of security and is held annually in Las Vegas. The world's top hackers, security experts, researchers, and enthusiasts gather here for 28 years. In May 2018, DEF CON and Baidu Security joined forces to introduce it to China for the first time: DEF CON CHINA. In the third year, under the epidemic, the global flow of people was blocked, in order to make DEF CON CHINA continue, after consultation with the United States, in March 2021, the organizing committee moved the conference to the online virtual space, Baidu provided it with the technical bottom, participants only need to wear a VR headset, or download an APP on the end side, they can enter the virtual space of the conference, this APP is the predecessor of Green.
In the coverage at the time, the media almost always used the words "all-VR conference" in the history of DEF CON to highlight the creative significance of the conference in the media. Although, Ma Jie believes, it will take 7 years to truly achieve the absolute, smooth, low-latency immersive interaction that everyone wants. Therefore, they joked that this version of the Meta-Cosmic City was the -7.0 version of Xi'an.
In this DEF CON CHINA, Ma Jie lurked a careful machine: he changed the DEF CON on the lintel outside the virtual venue to The DEF CONstruct. The word Construction comes from a science fiction novel called Neuromancer, in which the protagonist is able to break away from physical consciousness, cut into the world of sympathetic illusions, and travel through cyberspace. This novel was born even earlier than "Avalanche", hailed as the pioneering work of cyberpunk, and directly gave birth to the movie "The Matrix". It is now common to attribute the metacosm concept to the Avalanche.
At the end of August, the Xi'an-6.5 version was quietly launched, and the sharp-eyed technology enthusiasts keenly captured this uneritated but pre-occupied application, and there was no shortage of content in the comments that used the visual effects of large-scale end games, interactions and contrasts with Xi'an, of course, there were some obvious bugs, such as the first perspective can not see their legs, the role overlap will appear when the mold phenomenon occurs, the body of the person walking in the lawn will be covered by the scene, the person directly through the wall from the building balcony to the flat ground, the character is still impassable without obstacles...
Admittedly, the metaverse is not yet another social gaming platform. As Shenyang, executive director of the New Media Research Center of Tsinghua University, pointed out in the "2020-2021 Metacosm Development Research Report", the metacosm is a new Internet application and social form that integrates the virtual reality produced by a variety of new technologies, and its transformation of the entire human civilization may be all-round.
In the future, if you want to realize this vision, you need to start from the underlying technology, and it is inseparable from the organic cooperation of all aspects of technology companies, content companies and capital. What Baidu needs to do is to provide infrastructure support for partners, but it still needs to break through multiple technical problems and expand the ecological cooperation of hardware and software. Even the 1.0 version of Xilang takes Baidu a long time to build and mature.
The most cutting-edge wave of technology, never waiting, the birth of every technological achievement, is not easy, this stems from Baidu's engineer culture, every 10 Baidu people, there are 6 are engaged in research and development, bit by bit of progress, are inseparable from the efforts of engineers.
Liu Yun later went to see the aborigines of Greece and a professor at the School of Animation at the Communication University of China to ask how to deal with these comments and bugs. The professor told him: In the 19th century, when the car was first born, it was slower than the horse-drawn carriage, so should we deny the significance of the birth of the car?
Liu Yun felt that this sentence gave her great strength.
The City of Creators in Hiram
(Jin Zhe, Liu Yun, Lin Qing, Wen Xiangyuan, Feng Zheng, Zhang Chi, Sun Mi, and Chai Wei are pseudonyms)