The concept of metacosmology has attracted a lot of attention recently, and the emergence of the metacosmonic concept has given people a more realistic and concrete blueprint for the future of the virtual world. The emergence of such a new concept as the metacosm undoubtedly carries our infinite expectations for future life and the beautiful ideal of science and technology serving the well-being of mankind. So what exactly is the metaverse? How far are we from the metacosm? What kind of impact will the development of the metacosm have on the Internet industry? To this end, this article is a dialogue with Han Xiaochen, chief of Internet Media of Zhongtai Securities, who believes that the metacosm is a collection of virtual worlds that people expect, and the emergence of the metacosm has reshaped the relationship between people and people, people and society, and changed the business logic of the Internet industry. The realization of the metaverse requires the further maturity of the underlying technology, and the current technology cannot meet the requirements of the metacosm.
Li Xunlei: The metacosm has caused a lot of heated discussion, what exactly is the metacosm, and how should we understand this new concept?
Han Xiaochen: Metaverse is used to describe a future persistence and decentralized online three-dimensional virtual environment. First of all, we must be clear that there is no consistent definition of the metacosm at present, whether it is industry or capital market. The term "Metaverse" first appeared in Neil Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche.
Metaverse is a virtual urban environment that develops along a 100-meter-wide road that covers the entire 65,536 km circumference of an featureless, black, perfect spherical planet. Land in this virtual world can be purchased and buildings developed on top of it. Metaverse users can enter through high-quality personal virtual reality glasses, or through low-quality public virtual reality glasses, and interact with each other or software clients. I think the metacosm is a concept, it is a collection of virtual worlds that people expect from the future, a virtual world that is being formed as the underlying technology matures, the content becomes richer, and the number of users continues to increase.
Li Xunlei: Why does the metaverse get so much attention?
Han Xiaochen: On the one hand, after years of development, the application of low-level technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, 5G communications, and wearable devices has become increasingly mature; on the other hand, because the epidemic has made people's social networking more online, people stay in virtual space for a longer time, and the proportion of online life continues to rise. At the same time, the metacosm can allow people to participate in virtual concerts in games and participate in meetings in virtual spaces, so that the boundaries between people's online and offline lives are gradually blurred. By using virtual reality, augmented reality, virtual characters, and computers to generate lifelike images, metaverse concepts can be visualized and virtualized into reality. These new changes carry people's confidence in technological development and expectations for a better life in the future, and at the same time make the metacosm further attention.
Li Xunlei: The metacosm is the virtual world of the future that people are looking forward to, and this relative concept of the future is based on what needs people put forward?
Han Xiaochen: The emergence of the virtual world is due to the hope that people want to make up for what is missing in the real world. With the advancement of science and technology, the carrier of the virtual world has gradually evolved from early literature, music, painting, etc. to the forms of film and television dramas, games, etc., from simply relying on imagination to visual hearing can be truly felt. However, when we truly feel everything in the virtual world, we can only passively accept the creator's settings, and the real world and the virtual world are completely separated. Just as the virtual world is not a simple reflection of the real world, the emergence of the metaverse is fundamentally due to the expectation of reconstructing the relationship between people and society.
Li Xunlei: Why does the metacosm reshape the relationship between people and society?
Han Xiaochen: The most direct embodiment of the relationship between people is social interaction. The emergence of the Internet has enabled our communication and collaboration to transcend the limitations of time and space, but the number of people we know and the number of people we communicate with are limited by energy. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, proposed the "Dunbar number" in the 1990s, extrapolating from ape intelligence and social networks: the number of people whose human intelligence will allow humans to have stable social networks is 148, rounded to about 150. The emergence of the metacosm will expand this base range, thus realizing the reconstruction of human relations.
The more important reconstruction of the metacosm is reflected in the relationship between man and society. Due to the digitization of the relationship between people and society, the audience of the metaverse is no longer a single audience such as gamers and calligraphy and painting enthusiasts, and the carriers such as games, film and television dramas have become scenes in the metaverse, and the social relations in reality such as occupation and social status are no longer a single mapping to the virtual world, and the need for "self-realization" is easier to achieve.
Li Xunlei: At present, many Internet giants are actively laying out the metacosm, what role does the metacosm have on the development of the Internet?
Han Xiaochen: We believe that with the reconstruction of the relationship between people and people and between people and society in the metacosm, the business logic of the mobile Internet era will be reshaped. Looking back at the rapid development of the mobile Internet in the past more than ten years, we can see that the increase in smartphone shipments has brought about an increase in the penetration rate of the mobile Internet, the supply input of application terminals such as social networking, games, videos, and shopping has brought about a big explosion of content, and the innovation of business models such as streaming media and live broadcasting has changed the original content distribution rules. These correspond to hardware, traffic, content and monetization, but the content itself cannot be monetized, resulting in the underlying logic of mobile Internet business is still traffic.
From the perspective of the revenue structure of global Internet giants, their monetization methods are still mainly advertising. From 2011 to 2020, Tencent, Google, Facebook, Alibaba, and Amazon rely on traffic revenue CAGR of 51.1%, 17.2%, 42.3%, 43.6%, and 31.4%, respectively, except for Tencent, the proportion of traffic revenue accounted for more than 80% of total revenue.
Different from the market view, metacosm is a new growth point chosen by Internet companies after the mobile Internet penetration rate reaches the ceiling. Metaverse is the form chosen by the public, users in the metaverse can use the underlying technology to produce their own desired content, breaking the PGC era limited scenes and content, limiting the rules of many frameworks, to achieve the content itself monetizability, and enterprises in this form, to provide the underlying technology, scene, IP as the basic disk, can also participate in the process of content creation. This reshapes the new business logic, from content must be monetized with the help of traffic as a complementary carrier, to the content itself can be monetized.
Li Xunlei: Why can't content be monetized in the mobile Internet era? How does the metaverse help monetize content?
Han Xiaochen: Content monetization cannot be achieved mainly due to two reasons: first, content monetization requires pre-payment, which requires content to be non-reproducible, which is difficult to achieve in the context of imperfect copyright legislation; second, the user base corresponding to a single content form is not enough, and it is difficult to release potential demand.
And these two points are expected to change in the metaverse scenario. First of all, the application of the underlying technology blockchain in the metaverse ensures the non-reproducibility of the content, and the process of content generation and dissemination can be observed by every user. Secondly, the metaverse itself is a fusion scene parallel to the real world, and the generation of each content is facing all users, and the user base is the complete set of the mobile Internet era. Finally, the emergence of a single UGC will form the assets of the platform, and the assets in the fusion scenario will become the UGC itself.
The realization of the metacosm requires a large and complex underlying technology. From the link division, it can be divided into network communication, data processing, image rendering, virtual and real interaction, and asset encryption transactions.
Li Xunlei: Now many people are saying that the metacosm is the direction of the future development of the mobile Internet, how to build this idealized virtual world?
Han Xiaochen: The game engine can build realistic, real-time, interactive 3D virtual worlds. Games are the product of the combination of technology and music, literature, film, architecture, painting and other art forms, and are one of the content foundations in the metaverse world, and the real-time interactive 3D virtual world in the game can bring people an unparalleled sense of immersion and participation. At present, the use of game engines is not limited to the game industry, but also widely used in automotive, architectural engineering, film animation and other fields that require virtual real-time 3D rendering.
Li Xunlei: What is the game engine?
Han Xiaochen: The name of the game engine is easy to make people naturally compare with the car engine, thinking that the game engine is a component of the game, but the actual game engine can be compared to a car assembly workshop, responsible for combining various functional components with rules to finally produce a game product that can be operated. The game engine includes a number of functional components, such as graphics rendering, physics simulation, animated bones, sound effects, and more, which are lowly coupled and reusable.
Li Xunlei: How is the game engine industry developing now?
Han Xiaochen: From the perspective of commercialization, the game engine can be divided into 1) general engine; 2) own engine, for the general engine, any third party can directly use the engine for game development, and the own engine, mainly used internally by the game company, is not authorized externally. Therefore, commercial competition is mainly concentrated on the general engine side, the world's two most well-known general commercial engines are Unity and Unreal, of which unity accounts for more than 60% of the use of mobile game development as of 2020, occupying an absolute advantage, and Unreal is in a leading position in console game development.
Game engine development belongs to the industry of high-tech accumulation, which requires long-term continuous investment, and the short-term monetization speed is slow, so the entry threshold is very high.
Li Xunlei: You just mentioned that the two most well-known general-purpose commercial engines in the world are Unity and Unreal, what is the difference between these two universal engines?
Han Xiaochen: Although we call Unreal and Unity engines universal engines, they are not completely universal in actual use, which is due to the fact that 1) the functional requirements involved in the game development industry are complex and diverse, and it is difficult to include them all in one engine; 2) the development design of each game is extremely personalized, and the use of functional components is also very different.
Specific to the Unreal and Unity engines, the difference is more obvious: Unreal was originally designed for the development of host-side FPS (shooting) type games, and the update iteration of the engine is also based on products, so the support for partial shooting type console and PC games is more prominent, and the running efficiency and picture quality are more extreme.
Unity engine, designed at the beginning of the positioning as a general engine, not designed for a certain type of product, so the adaptability is good, to meet the needs of cross-platform development of different types of games, for power consumption, limited computing power of mobile terminal support is better.
Li Xunlei: What are the difficulties facing the current game engine industry to further develop?
Han Xiaochen: The pain points facing the engine industry are mainly in the balance between monetization and investment.
Input side: The functions of the game engine should be continuously updated and iterated according to the development of the hardware industry and changes in industry needs, so a large amount of R& D investment is required every year, and Unity's R& D expense rate in the past two years has basically remained above 50%.
Monetization: Game engines are currently difficult to meet the continuous increase in R&D investment through the licensing engine. There are two main reasons for this, 1) the game industry head effect is obvious, 28 differentiation, the number of long-tail enterprises accounts for a large proportion but the proportion of revenue is relatively low, it is difficult to bear the cost of the engine, some of the head companies have self-developed engines, no need to use third-party engines, and the other part even if the Unity engine is used, pay according to the seat, Unity can not enjoy the turnover of product success; 2) the piracy rate is higher.
Therefore, the main income of the current engine is actually from the engine licensing business, for example, Unreal's main income comes from the game "Fortnite", and unity's revenue contribution core is the advertising distribution business.
Li Xunlei: What do you think is the competitive landscape of the game engine industry in the future, and what is the development trend?
Han Xiaochen: From the perspective of the competitive landscape, in addition to its own engine, the commercial general engine field is expected to maintain the competitive pattern of Unity and Unreal duopoly for a long time. From the perspective of development trends, it is expected that game engines will continue to penetrate into non-gaming fields, providing professional software services for XR (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality), construction engineering, automotive industry and other fields.
Li Xunlei: The game engine can build a virtual world in the metaverse, so how can we enter this virtual world?
Han Xiaochen: Immersive interactive experience is an essential part of the construction of the metaverse, and mobile peripheral devices such as mobile phones and computers cannot provide players with a full range of immersive experiences. High-resolution, high-refresh rate VR/AR panoramic immersive interactive devices are an important means of interaction between players and the metaverse. VR virtual reality can allow users to enter a fully simulated environment, fully connect the player's visual, auditory and tactile senses, and realize the input and export of information through motion capture. AR augmented reality allows the virtual world and the real world to coexist and merge with each other.
Li Xunlei: How is the current VR/AR technology developing, can it meet the standards required by the metaverse?
Han Xiaochen: According to the technical indicators of the immersive stage of virtual augmentation technology, the technical parameters of most mainstream products can only reach a partial immersion level in the virtual reality immersion experience classification. Due to the current technical development and cost constraints, there is still a big gap from the access terminal equipment of the full immersion level. The Facebook Oculus Quest 2 is the consumer VR device on the market that balances price/performance and performance, but it still lags behind the top products on the market in terms of visual angle and screen resolution. The HTC ViveFocus 3 is the industry's top VR device, with excellent resolution and visual angles but at a high price. The ideal metaverse VR device is expected to achieve a visual range of around 150°, a resolution of 8K and a refresh rate of 120Hz, and a lower price. The realization of large-scale commercialization of vr equipment at the ideal level requires iterative upgrading of manufacturer technology and further compression of costs.
Li Xunlei: In addition to the requirements for game engines and VR/AR technology, does the metacosm have requirements for network conditions?
Han Xiaochen: The sustainability of the meta-universe and the high immersion level put forward extremely high requirements for the network. If you want to achieve uninterrupted life or work in a real-time interconnected virtual network space, it is indispensable to rely on a strong network to support. 5G relies on the characteristics of high bandwidth, low latency, and wide connectivity to provide a communication network foundation for the realization of the metaverse. 6G network technology will further promote the deep integration of the real physical world and the virtual digital world, and create a new world where everything is intelligently connected and digital twins are created. The high bandwidth, low latency, and low packet loss rate of 5G/6G can significantly improve service indicators and bring a higher sense of realism and satisfaction to the human-computer interaction experience.
Li Xunlei: Just mentioned that the blockchain is one of the underlying technologies of the metaverse, what is the blockchain in the end? Where is the connection between blockchain and metacosmity?
Han Xiaochen: Simply put, blockchain is a database technology; in essence, blockchain is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network-based, distributed ledger database. In the distributed ledger database, each node will synchronously store, share, and copy the data of the entire ledger database, and the entire database is encrypted by cryptography technology, and the stored information cannot be tampered with or forged.
Blockchain is the "infrastructure" of the metaverse era. If a company in a metacosmic wants to develop well, it must be deeply rooted in blockchain technology. In 2019, Facebook released Libra, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency that marked the beginning of Facebook's layout of the blockchain. In October 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta, and many people were surprised. If you understand that the blockchain is the "infrastructure" of the metaverse, then Facebook's early layout of the blockchain to the back embrace of the metaverse is a natural thing.
Li Xunlei: We know that the first application of blockchain was Bitcoin, and now the application of blockchain has expanded to the metaverse. So what stages of development has the blockchain gone through since its inception?
Han Xiaochen: It is generally believed that the development of blockchain is divided into three stages:
1) Blockchain 1.0 stage is from 2008-2013, 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", marking the beginning of the first application of blockchain - Bitcoin. Innovation in the cryptocurrency field represented by Bitcoin is the main feature of this stage, and application scenarios include currency functions such as money transfer, redemption, and payment.
2) The blockchain 2.0 stage is from 2013 to the present, characterized by enterprise-level application field innovation represented by smart contracts. Blockchain applications have expanded from the monetary system to commercial contracts involving transactions, such as the registration and transfer of equity, creditor's rights, and property rights, the clearing and settlement of futures and financial contracts, and other financial fields such as gaming and anti-counterfeiting. At present, we are in the blockchain 2.0 stage, with small-scale local applications and few industry-level and ecological-level applications. The metaverse is still in its infancy at this time, and blockchain technology within the framework of the metacosm has evolved, among which the representative is the NFT (Non-Fungible Token, non-homogeneous token). NFTs are unique, irreplaceable, and indivisible, and can be used to mark ownership of digital assets. At present, digital artwork NFTs have developed within the framework of the metaverse.
3) In the blockchain 3.0 stage, blockchain technology will fully enter the field of social governance, and the application scenarios include transactions, identity authentication, notarization, arbitration, auditing, logistics, medical treatment, visas, voting, etc., and its application scope is expanded to the entire society. Mature blockchain technology will greatly promote the development of the metaverse, and blockchain will become the lowest technology of the interconnection of all things in the metaverse, the interconnection of the virtual world and the real world.
Li Xunlei: In addition to blockchain, computing power and artificial intelligence are also indispensable components in the metaverse, what role does NVIDIA's GPU play in it?
Han Xiaochen: Deep learning in artificial intelligence is a machine learning technology based on deep neural networks, and the vast majority of operations are matrix operations, and matrix operations are inherently easy to parallel operations, GPUs that are good at parallel computing are very suitable for deep learning, and its high-bandwidth cache effectively improves the efficiency of large amounts of data communication, providing high accuracy, low time-consuming, low power consumption and low computing costs. NVIDIA GPU + CUDA architecture from the hardware and software level to release the GPU's ability to do parallel computing, is the first choice for deep learning algorithms, but also promotes the development of artificial intelligence.
At present, the continuous penetration of digital and intelligent application scenarios has brought about the continuous incremental demand for computing power by algorithms, and data centers have become an important infrastructure to support the digital economy, and one of the most important reasons for the outbreak of artificial intelligence is the improvement of hardware computing power. In the case of massive data growth, more complex algorithm models, heterogeneous processing objects, and greatly improved computing performance requirements, AI chips can carry out targeted design in the algorithms and applications of artificial intelligence, and efficiently handle various complex computing tasks in artificial intelligence applications.
Giants such as Microsoft and Google are using NVIDIA's GPUs as artificial intelligence acceleration chips in data centers, and NVIDIA's GPUs can have superior performance in terms of energy consumption and computing power, becoming the standard for many of the largest cloud vendors' data centers.
Li Xunlei: What is the core highlight of NVIDIA's recently launched Omniverse, and why is it called the metacosm of engineers and creative workers?
Han Xiaochen: For engineers, simulations that conform to the laws of physics are valuable, and for creative workers, what is needed is high-fidelity real-time rendering, NVIDIA's Omniverse platform can accurately solve the pain points of developers and engineers, create an efficient collaboration platform, and improve the work efficiency of enterprises and entrepreneurs. The Ominiverse platform has several main features, first of all, it conforms to the laws of physics and can solve the difficulties in engineering manufacturing simulations.
Secondly, ray-traced RTX technology can comprehensively improve the rendering quality of the picture and achieve efficient and high-quality content creation.
The third is wide connection, the universal scenario portal USD is completely open and scalable, all areas of the platform can be accessed and continuously expanded, can be transmitted to the Omniverse platform to do timely calculations and simulations, improve the convenience of users in various fields. The fourth is to support multi-user real-time collaboration, equivalent to the 3D version of Google docs, significantly improving work flexibility, work efficiency, and achieving an immersive work experience. And with Omniverse digital twins to create a model replica of the physical environment, enterprises can debug and optimize to the best level in the virtual environment, and then invest in the real world for production and creation, greatly reducing costs and improving profitability.
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