"Man can never know what he wants, because he can only live once, and he can neither compare it with his previous life nor correct it in his next life. There is no way to test which choice is good, because there is no comparison. Everything is experienced immediately, only once, can not be prepared. Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Life.
Even so, humanity has never ceased to confront the "one." From the initial completion of the Internet to the upgrade, people have gradually broken the limitations of physical time and space, making instant communication and cross-regional on-site witness possible. The emergence of the concept of the "metacosm" may give humanity the opportunity to further break through the limitations and bring the vision of experiencing "many, many" lives into reality.
This concept from the science fiction novel "Avalanche" has become hot in the commercial field with the addition of domestic and foreign giants, and the related technologies have been rapidly commercialized in various forms. For example, VR glasses have become the entrance to the metaverse of the public experience, allowing people to begin to dream of becoming another self in the virtual space.
In the view of Zhou Wei, founding partner of genesis partner CCV, when "Avalanche" first came out many years ago, the content was very shocking. Today, the novel's similar plot about the metaverse has been repeated over and over again in different settings in various films and novels. As an investor, Zhou Wei has also laid out in this field. He believes that this year's listing of Roblox provides a direction for the industry to work hard, which makes him convinced that the first year of the meta-universe has arrived.
What exactly is the "metacosm"? Is it an outlet for future trends, or a bubble carnival that will eventually dissipate? When everything is virtualized, as people's spirits migrate, do things that exist in the physical world also lose their meaning? Which is the more real me, the "me" who lives in the metaverse, or the me in the physical world? On these issues, Fortune (Chinese Edition) held a dialogue with Zhou Wei.
For the sake of brevity and clarity, the dialogue has been edited.
Fortune (Chinese Edition): First of all, a very simple topic, what do you understand the metaverse?
Zhou Wei: Although this is a simple topic, I think it is the most difficult to answer. In the eyes of a thousand people, there are a thousand Hamlets. Overall, my understanding is that the metacosm is a so-called cyberspace.
In virtual space, we can create a world that is very similar to the real world and can complete various interactions. But the laws in it can be different from the physical world. In my perfect imagination, it can accomplish a lot of things that can't be done in real life, including changing the laws of physics.
I've also recently looked at some companies that do metaverse-related physics engines, and some companies have physics engines that are completely based on the physical world. But there are also some practices that virtually a world with different parameters has different physical laws.
I think it's all interesting, but for me, maybe different from the physical world would be more like the concept of the metacosm. I think everyone is looking forward to the metaverse because they are a little tired of the real world, and they want to have a completely different experience, and it is more interesting to have a crazier imagination.
Fortune (Chinese Edition): How does an ordinary person enter the metaverse world? How costly is it?
Zhou Wei: Because the participants are all giants now, there are many startups. It is conceivable that the initial stage of the creation of any platform by the giants will allow people to enter for free, and the more users the better. But that world, like the real world, must have a cost.
But what I find more interesting is that there are a lot of creators like Roblox today who can get a lot of income. There are reports of an 11-year-old British boy in Minecraft (a sandbox-building game) who can earn millions of dollars a year by selling what he creates. Although it is a virtual world, it can make a lot of people profitable in it.
In other words, the revenue of today's big games may all go to Tencent (this kind of Internet giant), right? But in the future, in the metaverse, you can open your own playground, open your own movie theater, and like the real world, people who run well can still get a lot of income.
So in the future metaverse, some people come in with real identities, and some people use completely different identities and personalities to make friends with different groups of people. There will be some people who come in for entertainment, and there will be people who come in to do business. You're bound to see McDonald's inside and see the commercial scene created by Warner Pictures.
Fortune (Chinese): McDonald's in the metaverse, unlike games like Fortnite, or concerts in virtual spaces that satisfy the senses. McDonald's in the virtual space does not meet the need to keep the body alive, so what if you buy it?
Zhou Wei: Of course, people cannot be separated from the flesh. But buying a virtual space of McDonald's can also be a gift you give to others, just like watching a live broadcast to brush a big rocket for the anchor.
McDonald's will definitely open a store in the meta-universe, because it will not let go of the commercial publicity scene. Maybe you'll sell virtual burgers to you, or you'll be promoting a ticket in the Metaverse, stored in a digital vault that you can use in the real world. The metaverse is bound to have a large number of real-world commercial elements entering.
Fortune (Chinese Edition): After the popularity of the metaverse, many business plans will also mention related concepts, will there be hype? There is a view that the metacosm is similar to the existing concepts of TMT and the Internet of Everything, and that there will be newer vocabularies in the future, and there will be no difference in essence. What is the difference between the metaverse we are talking about today and the concepts that preceded it?
Zhou Wei: First of all, I don't think hype or bubbles are necessarily bad. Which of the world's greatest startups today is not left behind after fierce competition in the industry bubble? The best companies actually go through bubble periods. To some extent, if there is no bubble at all, it means that there is no money actively entering this field, and correspondingly, it will inevitably lead to the relatively small resources available in this field. Of course, too much foam can lead to excessive vicious competition and the consequences of a chicken feather, but I don't think the bubble itself is necessarily a derogatory term.
To compare the current metacosm with the Internet of Everything, I think it might be a bit like the concept when it was hottest. The good thing is that we all know that it will eventually happen, it's only a matter of time. Since it will be realized, it means that it has value in itself, and I think the ultimate value will be great.
There is indeed hype information at the moment. Just like in the era of the great construction of the American railway, if it were not for the fact that all the rich people wanted to build the railway, could the railway be repaired so fast? Of course, there were also many (later) abandoned railways, which had no commercial value at all, but they laid a foundation.
Fortune (Chinese Edition): Metaverses evolve to the end, if we put aside VR glasses, how do we get into metaverstem space? Where are its barriers and boundaries?
Zhou Wei: Maybe everyone thinks of the meta universe too much as the ultimate. Rome was not built in a day.
Maybe at some point in time, people need a full set of (body-feeling) costumes to make you have a better experience. But if not, it is nothing more than to reduce some gameplay. For example, universal studios in Beijing, if you just walk around out of curiosity and don't play anything, it can also be a way of playing when you meet an acquaintance to say hello. One mobile phone can be achieved, without the need for a very complex device to help, to experience more dimensions of things.
At present, IT seems that VR glasses are very important in some scenes. In fact, the intelligent electronic devices in today's physical world are far from keeping up with the metaverse.
After all these years, people have been saying that software is going to eat the world. Today, we feel that intelligent hardware devices cannot catch up with the development of software, and many of the hardware carriers needed are not mature enough. Including VR glasses, it is also this year that everyone is more satisfied with the progress. It had been experimental for so many years, and I felt there was still a long way to go. As the Indians say, if we go too fast, stop, or the soul will not be able to keep up with the body.
Fortune (Chinese Edition): Some people say that the metacosm is the next Internet, is there such a possibility?
Zhou Wei: First of all, the metaverse itself is still running on the basis of the Internet, and at the upper level, it will be a very large ecology, and from this point of view, I completely agree with this statement.
But from another point of view, there may be a lot of metaversms in the future, just like today we have a lot of big platforms and a lot of verticals. And I think people don't want to experience just one rule, people may want to experience multiple other rules. Each metaverse platform may have its own different rules, or even different laws of physics.
Fortune (Chinese edition): The idea of multiple metaverses is still quite brain-opening, a bit like the movie "The Night the Comet Came", multiple parallel worlds. Since everyone can create metaversms, there are large and small, there are all-encompassing and vertical, instead of saying that we will copy a current human society, right? Will there be many other civilizations?
Zhou Wei: Yes, I believe it should be. "The Night the Comet Came" is actually a very serious physics discussion, and its English name ("Coherence") is actually a quantum decoherence concept, a particularly orthodox concept in modern physics, not pure fantasy.
Fortune (Chinese): In the story of the movie Avalanche (the novel of the same name is the first book to propose the concept of "metacosmology"), the real society no longer has the concept of the state, and has become a private territory, the power is concentrated, and human society is deteriorating. Then there is a metaverse parallel to the real world.
Is it that human nature can never let go of an obsession, and each generation has different dissatisfaction with reality and wants to find something more beautiful? Since the metaverse was created by man, it may still embody desire and greed. Can we create a civilization in the Internet world that is different from the real world, or more advanced and perfect?
Zhou Wei: The question is very simple, even in our physical world today, there are Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and happy Chinese people, although the two are next to each other. So the answer is yes.
Every small environment, like a company, has a culture that is determined by the group of founders. The earliest batch of seed users who created the platform, as well as its platform concept, will interact with each other to produce a set of values that are more internally recognized, or civilization. These people who eventually gathered in the metaverse and preferred this value naturally gradually formed a different atmosphere.
So don't think of the metaverse as too mysterious. It's the projection of all kinds of crazy imaginations in the real world, only here you can achieve more things that can never be achieved in the real world. For example, humans can't fly, but they may be able to do so in the metaverse.
Fortune (Chinese edition): If everyone can change their identity at any time, the ultimate state is that people's desires will be satisfied, then will my desires in the real physical world naturally weaken?
Zhou Wei: If the brain-computer interface is perfectly implemented, this can be done. Theoretically, I have always held the view that man is a highly sophisticated machine.
There are still many things we can't understand or manipulate today, because people are too complex to see such complex machines. In fact, whether it is the love of a person for his parents, the love for his children, or the love for his lover, all of these can actually be explained by the hormones produced by chemical reactions.
When we understand it very clearly, what Musk is doing now is like this, the brain-computer interface can be virtualized to a certain time all kinds of happiness or unhappiness, and even the satisfaction and taste generated in the process of eating McDonald's just mentioned can be achieved under some technical means. Of course, this (for now) is a bit of science fiction, and may be farther away from being achieved, but it can be achieved. The problem is that the body is not really nourished, what about the flesh?
"Fortune" (Chinese version): In the movie "Inception", everyone is immersed in their own dreams, in fact, the brain receives different signals and mistakenly thinks that they are in the real world. So dreaming became the most important thing in that world at the moment.
Zhou Wei: In fact, another very lively topic that everyone discussed was that many people think that we are actually living in a program, that we are living in a virtual world.
Because there's so much in the universe that can't be explained. I myself studied physical electrons, and physics research has found that there are too many things that are very confusing now, including the reversal of causal laws and many things in quantum mechanics. Therefore, it is often said that the operation of this world is too similar to the game, and the programs, processing methods, and control of energy consumption in the game are very similar.
So we're not sure we're not living in one program, so even if we're living in another program, I don't think that's a problem.
Just like the movie "The Night the Comet Came", it is about a group of people who look bright in real life, but everyone has something that is not satisfied. When the comet came, causing multiple parallel universes to overlap, someone found that she in the parallel universe was better off than her in the one thing she cared about most. The characters in the play choose to beat themselves to death in that world and then play her.
So from this point of view, the attraction of the metaverse to many people is that if it can really make people experience life so perfectly (although this goal is far away), many people will be willing to go in and at least satisfy the missing part of their hearts.
Many people may say that wearing a brain machine every day is very unhealthy from our perspective today. But everyone has the right to choose their own way of life. If a person is living well in another virtual world where the sense of experience is exactly the same level, and he himself finds it more pleasant, then why not? (Fortune Chinese Network)
Author: Yang Anqi, Wang Fang, Xu Xiaotong
