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Text: Lou or
"VR is the next computing platform."
On December 28, 2021, Huang Feng, founder and CEO of Play Out of Dreams, said so in an interview with Business Jianghu.
Play Dream founder and CEO Huang Feng
On the same day, Play Dream Group released their first generation of VR all-in-one machines in Shanghai - YVR glasses priced at 3999 yuan, officially entering the "meta-universe".
YVR is equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip, two 2.89-inch Fast-LCD displays, single-eye resolution of 2160x2160, with a 100 ° wide-angle field of view, the highest support for 90Hz refresh rate. In addition, YVR uses a rechargeable battery with a capacity of 4200mAh, which supports 4 hours of battery life, and the weight of YVR after including the battery is 595 grams.
In terms of system, the VR version of the operating system "YOS" has a large interactive range, millimeter-level positioning, ultra-low latency, and high robustness. At the same time, it also develops a six-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) interaction method, which can perceive various body movements such as standing and squatting, moving and walking, and meet the user's needs such as walking and jumping in the virtual space.
Play out the dream released YVR all-in-one
After having these functions, YVR ranks among the domestic first-line VR all-in-one machines, and correspondingly, playing the dream has also become another technology company involved in vr all-in-one machines and meta-universe concepts after Xiaomi, Byte and other companies.
Founded in October 2018, Play Out Dream has three major business sectors: offline game e-sports social space net fish net café, online e-sports ecological aggregation platform Bixin, and VR intelligent hardware company YVR, which was officially established in 2020.
At the press conference, Huang Feng said that YVR benchmarked Facebook's (Meta) Oculus Quest series VR all-in-one.
The Oculus Quest is a hot product in the VR industry, and the Oculus Quest 2 released in September 2020 has triggered a rush from American consumers; the data shows that the product topped the list of the most popular Christmas gifts in the United States during the 2021 Christmas holidays just past.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has said that Meta has sold 10 million Oculus Quest 2 units on November 16, 2021.
Meta's Oculus Quest 2
The industry regards the annual sales of 10 million units as the inflection point of the VR industry explosion, and it is obvious that in such a critical period, playing the dream hopes to kick out the "door kick".
"We use the development of smart phones to analogize the development of VR, in 2007 Jobs released the iPhone, and until 2011 Xiaomi released the first generation of mobile phones, that is to say, in the development of smart phones, domestic and international release interval of 4 years." In the VR field, in 2019, Meta released Quest, and today for about three years, we feel that the current rhythm is faster than the smartphone era, so it should be a stage of benign development of the domestic VR industry. Huang Feng believes that the domestic VR industry will break out in 2022-2023, and YVR is committed to becoming a "meta-universe infrastructure builder" - VR glasses are an indispensable equipment to connect the virtual reality world.
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The VR ambition of the godfather of the Internet café
Huang Feng's confidence comes from his understanding of the domestic VR market - as the owner of the country's largest (and indeed the world's largest) Internet café group, his sensitivity to game products far exceeds that of his peers in the technology circle.
"We didn't want to do VR hardware at first." Huang Feng said that when he first approached VR in 2014, he just wanted to be a "VR experience store", when he realized that "Internet cafes are the product of PC games, and the future belongs to VR games."
Therefore, in order to continue to operate, it is necessary to expand the Internet café from a simple PC game space to a VR game space.
And this is exactly what Huang Feng has always been best at doing - from the owner of a small Internet café in Songjiang to the chairman of the country's largest Internet café group, Huang Feng has always been the person who "first perceived the Spring River plumbing".
In the sixth grade of primary school, in order to motivate Huang Feng to study, his mother promised him to buy him a game console when he reached the top ten, and after getting the game console, Huang Feng became obsessed with this baby and soon became a game master, and this hobby also became Huang Feng's lifelong career.
In 1998, Huang Feng's first Internet café started in Songjiang. 23 years have passed, and at present, the net fish Internet café has more than 700 business stores and more than 20 million members in more than 100 cities around the world, and its coverage has been extended to Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and other places. By the end of 2017, the annual service of net fish exceeded 30 million, and the highest daily reception was 150,000.
History of the development of net fish Internet cafe
The success of the net fish Internet café has also led to the upgrading of the entire Internet café industry, and for a time various Internet cafes have sprung up on the streets, and Huang Feng has also become a well-known "Godfather of Internet cafes" in the industry.
Now, this keen "godfather" has turned around again, and the heavy pressure has been on the VR industry.
"When I was doing VR products, I also kept asking myself what advantages we had to do this project, but then I wanted to understand that the bottom thing of doing business is 'insight into user needs'. In Jobs's words, "the crossroads of technology and humanities", it is actually the insight of users and the ability to integrate resources, and from this point of view we have this advantage. Huang Feng said.
2
Chinese VR
Huang Feng's insight into user needs is reflected in the research and development experience of VR equipment.
After being exposed to VR in 2014, Huang Feng began to build a VR experience store with a version of the net fish Internet café, and his goal at that time was a VR egg chair.
"Vr at that time also had a very pronounced sense of vertigo, mainly because of the incongruity between physical and virtual. Often the egg chair moves to the left, but the picture is deflected to the right, and there is also some refresh rate and delay. Huang Feng said that this type of vertigo affects the consumer experience, prompting him to consider developing his own egg chair.
In order to solve the problem of vertigo, he lived in Panyu, Guangdong Province, for a week, "talking about all the factories that do VR." Finally developed a suitable VR egg chair, and opened a VR experience store of net fish Internet café, which has become the "first generation of VR products" that play the dream.
But even after developing the egg chair, Huang Feng and net fish Internet cafes at this time still want to do the consumption scenarios they are good at instead of upstream hardware manufacturing.
But the development of the industry eventually changed their plans.
"Good content should run on good hardware, but at that time, there were very few domestic companies doing VR hardware, and the overall level was also very general." In 2019, we hope to introduce Quest to China, but there is no negotiation of cooperation. So we came up with the idea of making our own hardware. ”
YVR press conference site
Then Huang Feng began to form a team, they poached from Silicon Valley 3D graphical interface and 3D human-computer interaction senior expert Frank, he is the United States space physics doctor, has been in Nokia, Panasonic and Amazon laboratories involved in VR-related technology research and development, led the team to achieve the world's leading 3D gesture recognition and SLAM technology; and Zhang Gonglin, who is responsible for hardware, is a former partner of Dapeng VR.
At the same time, Huang Feng also set up his own optical department to specialize in the development of optical lenses, and the team is currently tackling the "optical zoom" technology. This can directly solve the problem of wearing the "glasses party" - previously myopic groups needed glasses to wear VR glasses, and after having optical zoom and electronic zoom, the glasses party can take off the myopic glasses and wear YVR directly. ”
"We currently have more than 100 R&D personnel." Huang Feng said that most of the system research and development department is an old employee with many years of experience in the research and development of intelligent terminals and VR devices, while the algorithm department is a new team "because the algorithm iteration is very fast, we need to have fresh blood to join." ”
But these 100-person R&D team has some common characteristics: they are all technical talents who are obsessed with scientific and technological innovation; at the same time, many of them are the earliest "veterans" who entered the VR industry in China, and their judgments and expectations for vr prospects have never changed due to industry fluctuations.
This group of post-80s technical talents was jokingly called "white-haired and red-haired" by Huang Feng.
"In 2020, I summoned the earliest wave of brothers who ate crabs in the VR field in China, and found that this group of white-haired naked people's enthusiasm for VR was not reduced, and even had a consensus: VR technology is mature." Huang Feng sighed in a speech.
At the beginning of the research and development of this group of technical men, YVR was positioned as a "VR device more suitable for Chinese users", for example, they carefully adjusted the nose distance of the glasses to make it more in line with the facial contours of the Chinese.
"Americans and Asians have different pupil distances, the size of the nose bridge is also different, Quest is designed according to the size of the European nose, the nose bridge is high, and the eye mask will leak when Chinese users wear it, affecting the use experience." From an ergonomic point of view, we have specially designed the nose spacing and nose bridge height, so that YVR is more in line with the size of the nose bridge, interpupillary distance and head circumference of the Chinese people. ”
Immersive experience YVR
Huang Feng said that there are many design methods that conform to the consumption habits of the Chinese people, for example, they consider that female consumers will worry about the problem of makeup scratching after wearing the VR all-in-one machine, so their designers choose fabrics closer to the skin from hundreds of materials to design the lining, for which the designer even bought different massage eye masks and sleep masks to experience.
In terms of system, YVR adopts a "tiled interaction method", which is more in line with the thinking mode of Orientals. In addition, in order to reduce the user's feeling of vertigo when wearing, YVR employs a variety of algorithms to reduce latency.
"There is a time difference between when a VR device receives a signal and when the human eye sees the picture, which is the most important parameter in a VR system: latency. The system uses a variety of different algorithms to shorten and hide this delay. Our goal is to make users feel no latency in any scenario." Zhang Song, who is in charge of YVR software, told Business Jianghu.
YVR offers a wide-angle view
At the end of 2020, the YVR team began to build a test system for the handle, which is a very complex high-precision test system based on optics, in order to ensure the accuracy of the test, they looked for all the companies in China that can provide SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping, synchronous positioning and mapping), including Ali Damo Academy, SenseTime, NetEase, etc., but finally found that it is difficult for everyone to complete this level of high-precision, super stability test system In desperation, YVR developed the system on its own, and in subsequent tests, it was found that their system tests received very high ratings.
"We will integrate product design around hardware, software and content to solve user pain points, of course, these pain points will continue to improve as the user experience increases, but our design will also improve." Huang Feng said.
3
Do the VR field apple
Of course, the reason why VR is most attractive to Huang Feng is that "this is the next computing platform." ”
Just as smartphones opened the era of mobile Internet, Huang Feng believes that VR will also open the door to the metaverse.
"We set YVR's corporate vision as an infrastructure builder for the meta-universe, and our egg chairs, VR experience stores, and YVR all-in-one machines are all part of the infrastructure. In the metaverse, VR equipment is a highway, the content is a vehicle, we build a highway but do not produce cars, do not do content. ”
Although it does not produce content, Huang Feng will "build a content ecology and create an APP store in the VR field".
Simply put, YVR wants to replicate the Apple model in the VR field - to be a hardware + platform ecological enterprise.
Therefore, like Apple's IOS, YVR also spent two years developing its own VR operating system.
Vr systems and mobile phone systems have similarities, but the two sides also have complete opposites.
Owen, head of YVR system design, told Business Jianghu, "The logic of PC and mobile phone systems is 'people understand devices', while VR is the opposite, its system logic is 'devices understand people'. ”
When people use PCs or mobile phones, it is people who operate smart devices, to understand the operation rules and properties of smart devices, and then to control according to certain logic and paths; but VR is completely opposite, people interact with VR devices through the "natural language" of body movements, so VR devices need to be able to understand people's action intentions.
Today's VR systems use a combination of traditional UI and 3D UI, but the entire industry has not formed a unified standard, and different brands of VR controllers are only suitable for their own interactive systems.
YVR wants to replicate the Apple model in vr
This has also formed the status quo of "siloed" - and Android IOS defines the smart phone system differently, today's VR industry is still a state of "a hundred flowers blooming, ten thousand horses galloping", the system logic between different brands is completely different, for example, Oculus is based on Western logic to do the system according to product and technical logic, but Chinese users prefer but Chinese users prefer to have a "local way of thinking" of the subconscious" operation (commonly known as "fool" operation), Therefore, YVR also designs the specifications and details of the language when designing the system.
"The VR system is a three-dimensional stereoscopic system – the photos in the mobile phone system are specific objects in the VR system." Huang Feng explained that these differences have caused VR systems to have more complex ways of developing them, such as the need to draw 8,000 facets to develop a game character on a mobile phone, compared with 80,000 in VR systems.
"The higher the clarity, the more details of the painting, and the corresponding screen, computing power, chip, and battery life must be improved, so once there is an upgrade, it is an overall iteration."
This iterative approach will bring corresponding negative effects, putting performance pressure on each new generation of equipment.
But Huang Feng is also ready to deal with the fluctuations of the VR industry" The success of a company does not come from a product, but relies on the support of several generations of high-quality products, you see Apple and Xiaomi have similar experiences, they do not have any products that have too big problems, so they can slowly grow in such a long time, and in the future we may also face such a problem - how to continue to launch quality products." ”
YVR all-in-one machine
Huang Feng said that he hopes that he can calm his mind and not argue for short-term gains and losses: "I don't force myself to seize a certain opportunity, and I don't have the concept of opportunity in my mind, in the words of Jobs, 'strategy is a kind of waiting'." ”
On the contrary, YVR will invest more in basic equipment in the future: "We will learn from Apple's self-developed chips or make tools for shooting VR videos." Huang Feng was a big fan of Jobs, having repeatedly read jobs and "emotionally crying at least 20 times." ”
Of course, like Apple, Huang Feng also began to support the development of the VR content industry, they invested in ifgames, the first batch of companies in China to carry out VR content production, and also began to do more support and assistance in the content field.
"The gap between China's VR device sales and mobile phone sales is still very large, a very important reason is that the VR application market is not active, the mobile phone market is so hot because there are many mobile apps suitable for Chinese habits, and the VR market also needs more developers to release games and content suitable for Chinese people to play." Huang Feng said that this is the reason why they invested in Ifgames, playing a dream and hoping to make the domestic VR industry bigger.
"In the past, people always said that playthings are lost, and we put forward 'plaything inspirational', I think that after the material life is satisfied, people will pursue spiritual life, in fact, great entrepreneurs are pursuing their dreams, while also creating user value and social value, with a detached state to do what they love, by the way to achieve the dream." To make a great product you have to be passionate about this thing, so we call it playing out the dream. ”
Today' Huang Feng is still full of love for games and entertainment, just like the young people who played games in the Songjiang Internet café 20 years ago, except that he hopes to "play bigger dreams".
--Ends--
Copyright: Commercial Jianghu
Lu or, an ocean crew member with 2 years of maritime experience; 4 years of market experience in oil sales, 8 years of media experience as a business journalist and self-media person.
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