In fact, this should have been a year-end inventory of "lifestyle", listing the efforts made by major car companies in this field in the past year, and interviewing some industry insiders about the experience of these achievements. But after I read a book on the "metaverse," I suddenly realized that it seemed possible to define the past 2021 in a different way.
When mentioning the "metaverse" in 2022, the words that everyone thinks of may be "hype", "gimmick", "scam", just like when the Spring Festival Gala sketch mentioned the "metacosm" this year, the elderly were confused, and the young people scoffed, just like the magic elixir of "99 yuan to cure all diseases" on TV shopping 20 years ago.
But Roblox, known as the "first stock of the meta-universe", had a market value of more than $40 billion on the first day of listing, and Epic Games, which only dipped a little bit of the concept of "meta-universe", easily took $1 billion from investors. Can attract so much capital pursuit, even at the expense of Zuckerberg to change Facebook's name and surname, the "metacosm" is naturally not a "wind outlet scam" can be simply summarized.
Zuckerberg officially renamed the parent company "Meta"
What exactly is the metaverse?
Before we can scold something, we first need to understand what it really is. In reality, people in the jet metacosm do not necessarily know clearly what is blockchain, what is NFT, and what is decentralization. People who tout the metaverse like to use the seven elements of the metaverse (identity, friends, immersion, low latency, open login, economic system, and civilization) to try to define the sense of superiority of the metaverse, which leads to the two sides always arguing over the definition of a word, and ignoring the new world behind the concept.
"Metaverse" is not a new word, it was born 30 years ago in the science fiction novel "Avalanche", the novel depicts a huge virtual reality world, everyone wears eyepieces, in this virtual world to play, work, if you have seen the movie "Ready Player One" or "The Matrix" audience may have a more realistic sense of this description.
Promotional image for the movie Ready Player One
So, many viewers may ask, what is the difference between this and the current Internet life?
Indeed, our current Internet technology has been able to allow you to buy clothes thousands of miles away without leaving home, see concerts on the other side of the ocean, and even virtual mobile AI assistants can already make a living for you.
But the "metacosm" is about allowing you to get the same immersive experience as shopping in real life, not the tedious process of searching for items, clicking to buy, and relying on the information flow brought by the algorithm to find new products when shopping online; it is the tedious process that allows you to be like thousands of people, who are at the concert site, with passionate rock music in your ears, rather than you being off-screen and watching people on the screen waving glow sticks; it is the tedious process that allows you to really interact with virtual everything, rather than trying to "tame" the less intelligent The "Smartphone Assistant" sets an alarm for you.
A concert of the virtual idol "Hatsune Mirai"
On this basis, several basic concepts involved in the "metaverse" are also well understood: VR is the basic equipment you participate in the "metaverse", after you put it on, you can see the virtual products projected by AR in your real-life scenes, such as the future, you wear VR, your home will be AR into beijing's SKP mall.
So, how can you guarantee that it is you who is shopping for something on the other side of the mall? You know, in the virtual world, you are just a line of code, as long as you copy and paste, there will be a steady stream of you. This "true and false Monkey King" problem needs to be solved by the NFT, which is like your DNA, guaranteeing your uniqueness in the virtual world.
And when you see a piece of clothing need to pay, the normal process is that you take out 100 yuan from the bank to pay the merchant, at this time, the positioning of the bank is a central institution that manages the currency and supervises the authenticity of the currency, which is as large as the state, as small as the community neighborhood committee, and is all-encompassing. The "decentralization" of the meta-universe is to abandon these management of the central institutions, there is no manager, let all users make their own, metric this virtual community, and the work of identifying authenticity is handed over to the blockchain.
Speaking of this, you will find that in fact, the various elements needed by the "metaverse" have actually slowly appeared in our lives. So, what is the inspiration of the "meta-universe" for car companies?
The meta-universe space introduced by modern cars
User co-creation is the future
If you want to say that the most favorite words of major car companies in 2021, "user co-creation" must be unyielding, small to the body color, large to the interior function, the right to choose to create to the user, almost has become the consensus of car companies.
Nezha Automobile put forward the slogan of co-creation
And this line of thinking almost coincides with the spiritual core of the metaverse. Because of the sheer size and complexity of the metaverse itself, its technology and cost far exceed the scope that a company or a company can provide. It must be a product of user co-creation, everyone provides content, and everyone consumes content.
We know that the past 20 years have actually been 20 years since PGC (ProfessionalLy Produced Content) to UGC (User Generated Content). 20 years ago, TV stations, newspapers, magazines produced exquisite content for us to talk about after dinner; 20 years later, even illiterate children can follow the recording template of short videos and occupy 15 seconds of your life.
This is actually to transform the high-cost, high-input platform output content into coarser and more equal user-produced content. The rich and diverse UGC content allows everyone to find what they like to watch and love to watch, which is the vast world provided by user co-creation.
For car companies, standing with users can not be engulfed by the tide of the times. After all, the "metacosm" may be a gimmick, but "user co-creation" is certainly not.