Chen Xiaohua
China's Economic Leader of the Year
Digital Economist
Pioneer of blockchain economic theory
Review expert of major industrial Internet projects of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
Expert of the National Blockchain Talent Standard Review Of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security
Chief Editor of Beiyou Blockchain Technology Series
On October 28, Facebook officially changed the parent company name to "Meta", saying that the company will focus on shifting to an emerging computing platform dominated by virtual reality. Meta means "transcendence" and "meta", taken from "Metaverse", which is the meta-universe that has been talked about in the venture capital circle in recent days. The concept originated in Neil Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche, which refers to the fact that people can live in a parallel digital world that is separate from the physical world but always online through virtual reality devices, which has a continuously developing cultural content and economic system, and can meet all the needs of individuals except eating and sleeping. Today, with the accelerated development of information technology/digital technology, this idea is gradually becoming a reality. In the context of repeated global epidemics, the online economy and industry have developed rapidly, and people have gradually become accustomed to online life. The metacosm is an Internet complex that integrates the next generation of virtual reality produced by integrating a number of new technologies. In simple terms, it provides an immersive experience based on expanded reality technologies such as VR/AR and brain interface, using AI and digital twin technology to produce scene content, and then building an economic system by blockchain technology, closely integrating the virtual world and the real world on the social system, and allowing each user to produce content and edit the world, while following economic laws such as transaction autonomy and clear property rights.
The metacosm will break the current Internet dilemma
In fact, with the continuous improvement of mobile Internet penetration, as of 2021, China's Internet traffic market has entered the era of relative stock. The stabilization of the user scale means that the Internet traffic dividend is gradually lost, and the result of the saturation of the stock market is the internal volume. As far as the current development is concerned, the Internet industry has lacked breakthroughs in content carriers, communication methods, interaction methods, participation and interactivity for a long time, and the platform form has fallen into an internal volume, and the effective growth has almost stagnated. At the same time, the mobile Internet market in the anti-monopoly wave of supervision is becoming stricter, because Google, Facebook and other Internet giants in the early stage of the development of network technology and mobile communications have accumulated a large amount of capital and production factors, so that they have tended to monopolize the international Internet industry, at the same time, due to a large number of unfair pricing, illegal use of user data, business exclusion and other serious impact on market efficiency, is bound to make the global Internet development gradually towards regional fragmentation or even disconnection. On February 7, 2021, the Anti-Monopoly Commission of the State Council of the People's Republic of China issued the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines on the Platform Economy, and a number of foreign Internet giants have also been subject to anti-monopoly investigations. Whether it is the peak of growth space or the unprecedented consistency of governments in the anti-monopoly pace of the Internet, it forces Internet companies to subvert innovation to seek new growth points, and how to find incremental markets from the stock market has become the main problem facing the current Internet industry. The meta-universe concept is this breakthrough, and more and more companies realize that the development of Internet technology is not linear, and the result of a variety of technology combinations can become the key to a new generation of technological revolution.
How to implement the meta-universe value chain
The currently widely accepted theoretical framework is a seven-tier model of building a metacosm from Beamable founder Jon Radoff, which is divided from experiential scenarios to underlying technologies: Experience; Discovery; Creator economy; Spatial Computing; decentralizition. Human Interface; Infrastructure.
Experience and discovery layers
The experience layer is simply to break through the barriers between the real activities and the virtual world that people participate in daily life, such as entertainment, social interaction, and consumption. The game is arguably the closest entry to the metaverse at the moment, with the most well-known examples being The Console-side Fortnite and the PC-side Roblox. The two take very different development paths, but they also have the characteristics of the metacosm. Fortnite attracts users with the traditional battle royale game mode, and on this basis, it constantly adds social, economic and other metaverse elements, and gradually becomes a virtual world beyond the game. In addition to the linkage with other worldview characters, it has also held a movie premiere in the game, and even invited real singers to hold a virtual concert in it last year, setting a record for more than 12 million viewers to watch the interaction. If the former attracts users through core gameplay, adds new elements and enriches linkages, Roblox realizes a player-led decentralized world through an open UGC (user-generated content) platform and creative incentive mechanism. Players can not only participate in other people's games, but also create their own creations using simple built-in tools and profit in reality through unique economic models. Not only that, metaverse will also provide users with more social, consumption, education and business work content with gamified thinking, reshaping around the virtual economy, covering various life scenarios, such as VR fitting rooms, virtual conferences, immersive theaters, etc.
The discovery layer focuses on the way new users understand the experience layer, including the ad system, the active discovery mechanism of the app store class, and the real-time discovery mechanism of the community class. In the metaverse, a large part of the value is reflected in the two-way interaction between user circles and the dissemination of shared content. Some gaming platforms, such as Steam, allow players to view games that their friends have recently purchased and played. Last year's hit Clubhouse also offers the possibility of this architecture, and the user's generated watch list largely determines which chat room he will join. This decentralized identity ecosystem can transfer the power of communication to the users themselves, and the content market will replace the application market as a new means of discovery.
Human-computer interaction and spatial computing layer
The main role of the human-computer interaction and spatial computing layer is to maximize the user's immersive interactive experience, on the other hand, to allow players to maintain a perception of the real world. The metaverse needs to combine the virtual world with the real world, and even the virtual is more realistic than the real, relying on immersive interaction technologies such as expanding reality, spatial perception, and digital twins. With the realization of miniaturized sensors, embedded AI technologies, and low-latency edge computing systems, it is expected that future human-computer interaction devices will carry more and more applications and experiences in the metaverse. In terms of human-computer interaction, the virtual-real interface of the metacosm is mainly formed by expanding reality technology, including VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) and MR (fusion reality). VR technology will achieve information input and output in the metaverse by fully taking over the user's vision, hearing, touch, and motion capture (Avatar). Ar technology adds a layer of virtual information to the preservation of the real world. Mr technology, on the other hand, can achieve partial retention and free switching between virtual and real by projecting a light field onto the retina. It also includes wearable devices, brain-computer interfaces, and other devices that further enhance immersion.
At the level of content production and spatial computing, due to the complexity of the metaverse system, and the content will be provided to users in the form of real-time generation, real-time experience, and real-time feedback, there are extremely high requirements for supply efficiency. Ai technology can intelligently generate non-repetitive massive content through self-deep learning and evolution, realize the spontaneous and organic growth of the metaverse, thus getting rid of the limitations of artificial scripts, allowing players to create freely. In addition, AI can also censor the massive amount of content in the metaverse that cannot be done manually to ensure its legitimacy. Paired with digital twin technology, it will further allow users or AI to build dynamic twins of real things within the virtual world. Through sensors, the operating state of the body and external environment data can be mapped to the twin in real time, creating a realistic environment with extremely rich detail and creating an immersive on-site experience.
Decentralized and creator economy
In order for the metaverse to truly achieve interconnection, interaction, exchange and integration with reality, it is also necessary to have an independent economic system and financial attributes that can be integrated with the real society. The reason why the current virtual world cannot make users feel real, in addition to the slightly weak interactive experience, is also because the assets obtained in the virtual world cannot be circulated or applied in reality. The economic system of the metacosm is both the foundation and the key, and can even be said to be the engine that can drive the continuous development of the metacosm in the ideal state of the metacosm, users can use virtual currency to consume content in the virtual platform, but also can replace the real currency through a certain proportion. The emergence of blockchain technology provides the perfect solution, allowing the metacosm to achieve a qualitative transformation at the economic level. Blockchain technology ensures that the circulation of virtual assets can exist independently and decentralizedly, and ensures the fairness and transparency of the rules through open source code, making it possible to identify, circulate, monetize and authenticate virtual identities in the metaverse. At the level of creator economy, NFTs derived from the Ethereum ERC-721 protocol will become the main carrier for content creators in the metaverse to obtain economic benefits. Compared to bitcoin-equivalent homogeneous virtual currencies, NFT is unique in that it provides a way to mark the ownership of native digital assets, and is not reproducible, non-separable, has natural collectible properties, so it is very suitable for recording and trading some unique digital assets, such as virtual artwork, for content creators. In addition, the trading system that joins the smart contract does not require the participation of a third party to ensure the security and efficiency of the transaction during the circulation process.
Infrastructure layer
5G as the connection point of the new generation of information technology will become the communication foundation of the metaverse. Virtual reality devices need higher frame rates and resolutions to achieve true immersion, so more advanced mobile communication technologies and video compression algorithms need to be explored. 5G's high speed, low latency, low energy consumption, and large-scale device connectivity can support the large number of application innovations required by the metaverse. At the same time, the metaverse has the potential to open up the gap in public demand for 5G with its rich content and strong social attributes, and improve the coverage of 5G networks. Cloud technology will become the computing power basis of the metaverse. Metaverse is a collection of multiple elements such as massively multiplayer online games, open missions, editable worlds, XR portals, AI content generation, economic systems, social systems, avatar systems, decentralized authentication systems, and real-world scenarios. This makes its own operation extremely demanding on the stability and sustainability of algorithms and computing power. To lower the user threshold and expand the market, it is necessary to separate the operation from the client, complete the calculation in the cloud or real-time cloud rendering. Therefore, a cloud system that dynamically allocates computing power will also become an important infrastructure for the metaverse.
Metacosm empowers the development of the digital economy
In the "14th Five-Year Plan" and the "2035 Target Outline", the mainland for the first time put forward the lofty goal of vigorously developing the digital economy, promoting digital industrialization and industrial digitalization, and promoting the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy. In this context, the future evolution of the digital economy will be an excellent opportunity for the metacosm, and the metacosm will also help integrate digital and real economy. By absorbing the information revolution (5G), the Internet revolution (web3.0), the artificial intelligence revolution, and the achievements of the virtual reality technology revolution including XR, especially game engines, the metacosm shows humanity the possibility of building a holographic digital world parallel to the traditional physical world, while guiding the interaction of information science, mathematics, and life sciences. At present, the digital economic infrastructure around the new industries of science and technology, such as 5G networks, data centers, and industrial Internet that are currently being promoted in China, provide an excellent hotbed for the integration of meta-universe technologies. In addition, the various new formats spawned by the metacosm are expected to become new engines driving high-quality growth in the next stage of the digital economy in the future. As a concept with a relatively broad connotation, the digital economy can be included in the category of any economic form that directly or indirectly uses data to guide resources to play a role and promote the development of productive forces. The metacosm is such a complete and self-consistent economic system, which is the whole chain of pure digital product production and consumption. At the same time, the progress of digital technology is often accompanied by the elimination of some traditional industries, and in recent years, the epidemic has led to an accelerated transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry to unmanned and intelligent, and the global unemployment rate has soared. As countries pay more attention to the metacosm, PwC expects the "metacosm" related economy to usher in substantial growth, and the market size is expected to reach $1.5 trillion in 2030; Bloomberg Industry Research expects the "metacosm" market size to reach $800 billion in 2024. This means that the "metacosm" will also release a large number of jobs and income sources while producing economic benefits. In the world of meta-universes, people around the world can communicate and collaborate efficiently, fully networked smart devices will be effectively linked, and industrial chain collaboration will become more transparent and efficient, promoting the deeper integration of the digital economy and the real economy, and then empowering the real economy to go to new spaces, open new markets, and find new breakthroughs.
In summary, as a next-generation Internet complex that has attracted much attention, the metacosm has brought great opportunities and revolutionary effects to the Internet industry and even the entire economic system. At present, the biggest problem facing the concept of metaversity is still at the technical level, in order to open up the "wormhole" between the virtual world and the real world, it is necessary to make continuous technological breakthroughs in the industrial chain such as VR, blockchain, and digital twins. I believe that under the continuous advancement of technology and people's demand for a new Internet ecology, it is only a matter of time before a parallel digital world with a high sense of immersion and embedded with emotional links, social relationships and free markets is created.