You can grasp everything big and small in the venture capital circle
Tencent Venture | ID：qqchuangye
"The 'metaverse' exploded, in addition to Facebook changing its name to Meta high-profile into the meta-universe, the big manufacturers represented by BAT have embarked on it"
The source of this article is "Operation Research Agency" (ID: U_quan), reprinted by Tencent Venture with permission.
Author/Zheng Yuxuan
Editor/Peiwen Yang
Design / Wang Haonan
In recent months, the "meta-universe" has exploded, in addition to Facebook's renaming of Meta high-profile into the meta-universe, the big manufacturers represented by BAT have embarked on the "meta-universe" new business.
In an instant, the meta-universe has become a new outlet, in addition to technology companies, all walks of life have also begun to appear in the "meta-universe" figure.
There is a "meta-universe cattle breeding" under the banner of the meta-universe:
There are also many micro-merchants who have combined to form the "Yuan Family" (micro-businessmen have changed their surnames to "Yuan" and called themselves Yuan Future New Retail, preparing for "All in the Meta Universe").
Image source: Instant
There is even a meta-universe of knowledge payment.
The knowledge payment of the first lesson of the meta-universe has accumulated 2673 paid users and a cumulative total income of nearly 160w.
Image source: Network
However, although the metaverse has been on fire for nearly half a year, when asked "What is the metacosm?" At that time, most people may still be confused, and even the president of Nintendo said that he did not plan to enter the metaverse for the time being, because he did not understand.
Image source: Caijing Network
Today, the operating agency will talk about it, what is the meta-universe in everyone's mouth? How did it catch fire? How is it going now?
1
What exactly is the "metacosm" in everyone's mouth?
2021 is known as the "metaverse first year", but for most Internet people, in addition to the endless news, the metaverse seems to be very far away, so what is the metacosm?
1) Metaverse concept source
The concept of metaverse was first proposed in 1992 when Neal Stephenson first proposed the concepts of "Metaverse" and "Avatar" in his science fiction novel Snow Crash.
In the novel, the metacosm refers to a shared online world in which people can live and work.
2) The current concept of the metacosm
Simply put, the metacosm is a virtual space built according to reality.
Like the real world, metaverse users can not only experience the functions of the real world, but also experience the experience of "impossible" realization in the real world, and even experience the feeling of jumping off a building.
So, the closest thing to the metaverse at the moment is the game industry.
Dave Baszucki, CEO of game creation company Roblox, summarized and distilled the concept of the metaverse, arguing that the metaverse should include at least the following eight elements:
Identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, anywhere, economic system and civilization.
Therefore, the sandbox game "Minecraft", which occupies several elements of the eight elements, has also been temporarily called "the prototype of the metaverse" by netizens.
Players build a new world in Minecraft, day and night, can be online, can add mods, can build their own houses, explore the world, fight monsters and upgrade.
But the metacosm is not equal to video games, nor is it equal to the virtual world, video games and virtual worlds are only the prototype of the metacosm.
At present, there is no real meaning of "meta-universe products" on the market.
Regarding the concept of metaversm, there are currently different opinions, and the self-media person @fox Junraphael wrote in the article "Metacosm may destroy this world" that the metacosm can be divided into four stages:
Stage 1: The virtual metaverse, which mainly reproduces human sensory feelings in the real world;
Stage 2: Brain connects to the metaverse, detaches from VR and other devices, and connects electronic signals through brain interfaces to obtain sensory experience;
Stage Three: The Metacosm of Consciousness, which transfers human consciousness to the server to achieve "immortality";
Stage Four: Twin Metacosmum, replicating the laws of the real world, allowing the metaverse to gain more randomness.
According to this phase division, the current metacosmonic technology only stays in the prototype of stage one (virtual metaverse), and is not really a metacosmic form.
For example, the current metacosm can only reproduce human sensory sensations in the real world. In some of the current metaverse games, the visual and auditory effects presented are simulating reality.
However, some film and television works provide a future reference for the metacosm.
In the movie "Ready Player One", users can enter the virtual world through "wearable devices" such as VR, and can smell, taste, and perceive the entire world.
Image source: Ready Player One
2
How hot is the Metacosm?
This somewhat abstract and incomprehensible "metacosm" has been a mess from last year to this year.
In fact, in 2020, the trend of the metaverse is beginning to emerge.
During the 2020 pandemic, renowned American pop singer Travis Scott hosted a virtual concert in the game Fortnite, with about 12.3 million gamers worldwide attending the virtual concert.
Image source: Tencent Video
In addition, the stock market has also been affected by the "meta-universe explosion".
On March 10, 2021, The sandbox game (creative game for players) platform Roblox, as the first company to write the concept of "meta-universe" into the prospectus, successfully landed on the New York Stock Exchange, with a market capitalization of more than $40 billion on the first day of listing, detonating the circle of technology and capital.
Then, the metaverse boom struck.
1) Big factories flock to the metaverse and compete to lay out the metacosm
On October 28, 2021, Facebook, a well-known overseas social platform, announced that it had changed its name to "Meta" and fully "bet" on the metaverse.
Zuckerberg announced to the world that "from now on, we will be metaverse first, no longer Facebook first". Subsequently, from December 1, Facebook's stock code will also be changed from "FB" to "MVRS".
Domestic BAT, ByteDance and other major manufacturers have also announced the layout of the meta-universe.
On August 29, 2021, VR startup Pico released a full letter announcing that the company will be merged into ByteDance's VR business, and it is reported that the acquisition price has reached 9 billion yuan.
In November of the same year, Byte Investment's "Code Qiankun" officially launched "Restart world" on the whole platform, which was called the "first version" of byte meta-universe games.
In October 2021, at the Yunqi Conference 2021, Alibaba DAMO Academy announced the addition of two laboratories: the Operating System Lab and the XR Lab.
XR, also known as extended reality, is a fusion of VR (virtual reality technology), AR (augmented reality technology), MR (mixed reality technology) and other technologies.
On November 30, 2021, Tencent's "Super QQ Show" debuted.
In the 1.20 beta version, users can see some functional changes: not only can they get their own exclusive image by "pinching their faces", but they can also disguise, or even buy furniture, and decorate and build in the "QQ nest", as if they are reshaping a world.
On December 27, 2021, Baidu announced the launch of its own meta-universe product "Xi'an" at the "Baidu AI Developer Conference".
2) Celebrities drive out of the circle
News about the metacosm is also frequently searched on Weibo, and the metacosm is gradually out of the circle with "celebrity publicity".
There are more than a dozen Weibo hot searches about the meta-universe.
On the morning of November 5, 2021, Luo Yonghao posted on Weibo that "our next entrepreneurial project is actually a so-called meta-universe company", which has attracted speculation from many parties, and everyone has discussed whether the creativity of Teacher Luo of the industry can be successful this time.
Subsequently, "Luo Yonghao's layout meta-universe" was also on the hot search.
At the end of October 2021, @Liu Yexi, the first virtual person blogger of Douyin, released the first video content, and sucked 150w+ of fans in two days, bursting out of the circle;
As of this post, @Liu Yexi uploaded a total of 8 videos, with a cumulative number of fans of 867.2w and 2452.9w of likes.
Image source: Douyin @ Liu Yexi
Many media have equated Liu Yexi with the meta-universe, although this statement has yet to be examined, but Liu Yexi's explosion out of the circle has undoubtedly made more people understand this concept.
3) Metaverse "products" are sought after
At the same time, the products of the metaverse are also sought after by everyone, not only including the NFT artwork of "Curry also loves", but also the knowledge paid content of the metacosm.
Exploding NFT digital collection
As the concept of the metacosm exploded, the "new concept" of NFT was also noticed by more people.
NFT, Non-fungible Token (non-homogeneous token), unlike Bitcoin (homogenized token), is not interchangeable.
Most of the people who know about NFT artworks may have started with Curry - the online library spent 18w US dollars (about 113w yuan) to buy NFT ape heads.
Image source: Twitter
In the Tiger Poker community, the discussion about the NFT avatar of the same model in Curry has nearly 85w+ views, which is a hot topic of "Warrior Zone".
In the comment area, not only many users popularized the concept of NFT, but also extended the discussion of many celebrities to buy NFTs, some users said that not only Curry, Simmons also spent 253,000 US dollars (about 1.5993 million yuan) to buy "Curry same", the two NFTs belong to the "Boring Ape" series.
Not only celebrities, NFT artworks in the mass market, but also in the state of "hot speculation", just like shoe circles, medal circles, many users began to buy and hoard a lot of money in anticipation of value-added.
After entering some "NFT art buying groups", users in the group often say "buy 10, sit and wait for the price to rise" and "in the rush, there will be no more for a while." ”
Everyone's enthusiasm for the overall NFT art market is no less than that of "philately" in that year.
But why did the NFT explode? Are NFTs related to the metaverse?
Some users believe that the NFT digital collection will become an important part of the construction of the economic model in the metacosm.
Because, in the concept of the metaverse, the core of the future metaverse is virtual assets and virtual identities, NFTs as non-homogeneous tokens (there are no two identical NFTs in the world), so it can guarantee the uniqueness of virtual assets.
The current public opinion is that in the future virtual world, your ownership of a virtual object is not guaranteed by a company or institution, but by mathematics and algorithms, that is, to achieve complete "decentralization".
Therefore, the NFT collection will be considered by some netizens to be the economic lifeblood of the future metaverse world.
Metaverse knowledge payment is sought after
Users' enthusiasm for the metaverse has also led to the payment for the knowledge of the metaverse, and after experiencing various "out-of-the-loop events", everyone is generally curious about the concept of the metaverse.
On the "Get" platform founded by Luo Zhenyu, nearly 8w people have participated in the 12 lectures of the frontier course Meta-Universe, and the estimated income is about 370w+.
Metaverse social apps are emerging
On May 10, 2021, Soul defined itself for the first time in its prospectus as a social metacosm, advertising "building a soul-linked social metacosm."
However, in terms of specific gameplay, Soul users do not actually feel its connection to the metaverse.
Zhihu user @ two three things said that the existing gameplay on Soul does not actually meet the concept of metaverse, and the popularity is not high enough, even compared to Soul, World of Warcraft and Sword Net Sancai is more like the metaverse.
Source: Soul
But in fact, the real circle is the social app "gel", on February 11, 2022, the gel in the Appstore ranking surpassed WeChat, ranking to the top.
In the game, players can not only change clothes and publish dynamics, but also produce a variety of simulated reality behaviors such as "rushing, eating, and sleeping".
Image source: Gel
However, then gel was removed from the shelves on February 13, while suspending the entry of new users, although it was removed, it is not difficult to see that the concept of metaversal social networking is gradually rising among users.
3
How long will the Meta universe be on fire?
On the question of how long a "new concept" can catch fire, gartner, a well-known consulting firm, once gave a "hypecycle" (technology hype cycle curve).
Since 1995, every hype and disillusionment of a new technology has mostly gone through the following 5 stages:
Phase 1: Technology Trigger
Phase Two: Peak of Inflated Expectations
Stage Three: Trough of Disillusionment
Phase 4: Slope of Enlightenment
Phase 5: Plateau of Productivity
There is no doubt that the heat of the metaverse continues to rise and is "hyped" by the outside world, allowing this "new thing" to enter a "period of expectation expansion".
But after the madness, we also need to see the reality clearly. The metacosmonic concept seems to be gradually "cold".
On the one hand, the head meta-universe company handed over a stage report card, and the results were not satisfactory.
According to Meta's latest financial report, its Reality Labs division specializing in "Metacosm" lost about $10.193 billion in 2021.
Source: Official earnings report
Another game platform with "the first share of the meta-universe" Roblox (RBLX.N) stock price has also been slashed, according to @Xuan Kr reported, as of 19:59 on February 23, Roblox price per share of $45.68, more than its highest price of $141.6 retracement of more than 67%, the market value has shrunk significantly.
On the other hand, in the domestic market, meta-universe concept stocks are also constantly cooling.
For example, the share price of Zhongqingbao, a game company that focuses on the concept of meta-universe, also fell from a high price of 42.64 yuan to 26.34 per share. (Close price on February 18), the retracement is about 40%.
Other stocks related to the metaverse concept (mainly virtual people, VR), the stock price has also been retraced.
Image source: Xuan Krypton
Although the results are not satisfactory, it does not mean that everyone's expectations and actions for the metaverse have weakened.
Zuckerberg said that it will continue to focus on voice translation and voice assistants to help AI in the virtual world have the ability to understand the environment and learn like humans.
International data company IDC also predicts in its "IDC Global Augmented and Virtual Reality Spending Guide" that China's AR/VR market will reach a market size of $25 billion by 2024, with an annual growth rate of 20%.
On December 23 last year, the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection published an article titled "Deep Concern: How the Metacosm Is Rewriting Human Social Life", in which it mentioned the following views:
In the industry's view, the metaverse will become the goal of the development of the next generation of Internet for a long time, which depends on the core technology breakthroughs, technological evolution and changes at the underlying technology and computing power levels.
At the same time, the advent of the 5G era also provides a hotbed for more development of the metaverse, and the most intuitive change is the increase in network speed, which can bring lower "latency" to real-time interaction between users.
B station UP master @ teacher hello I am He classmate Mentioned in the video that in the future, due to the "low latency" of 5G technology, doctors are even expected to remotely control the instrument in real time for patients in the future.
It is not difficult to find that the attitude of all parties to the metaverse is generally "open and optimistic" and willing to "embrace" new technologies. However, it also makes some people skeptical, worried about the negative impact that the metaverse may bring.
For example, some literary, film and television works have already made predictions about the metacosm, and deduced their evolution through the form of words and comics.
Back in 2012, the anime Sword Art Online depicted a metaverse blueprint and tried to join the conflict between the virtual world and the real world.
In the play, the player enters the game by connecting the new AR device Augma in the brain, and the food in the game is also transmitted directly to the brain in the form of "brain waves", so that the player has a feeling of "eating".
In the animation plot, due to the malicious tampering of the AR device developer, the player who joins the game needs to complete the game before exiting, otherwise they will die of brain death, which is actually a prediction of the conflict between the "metaverse virtual world" in the early days.
However, as He once mentioned in the video, "People's predictions about the future cannot jump out of the limitations of current technology and thinking." ”
4
epilogue
What changes the metaverse will bring to society as a whole is currently unknown, but it is foreseeable that in the future, connecting with others and having more sensory experiences will become a trend.
However, for most users, while understanding the metaverse, we should also treat the metaverse more rationally, so as not to be cut leeks if we are not careful...
As for where the future of the metaverse will eventually go, we will wait and see.
END
How do you see the metaverse?
Welcome to leave a message in the comment area and share it with you.