After tech mogul Zuckerberg renamed Facebook's parent company Mate, the metacosm, a concept that was previously unfamiliar to everyone, took to the forefront and quickly became a new trend.
Although the metacosm has become the hottest new trend at present, there are still a few people who are unfamiliar with the concept of metacosmology, so what is metacosmology? The current explanation of the metacosm is that the virtual world that is linked and created by scientific and technological means, maps and interacts with the real world, and has a digital living space with a new social system.
This digital space provides immersive experiences based on expanding real-world technologies, generates images of the real world based on digital twin technologies, builds an economic system based on blockchain technology, closely integrates the virtual world with the real world in economic systems, social systems, and identity systems, and allows each user to produce content and edit the world.
To put it simply, the metacosm is a digital world that gives you a fully immersive experience.
However, due to the reasons of hardware equipment, the concept of metaverse is currently more applied to games, but in the view of the travel bureau, games are always a pastime, and the final form of the metaverse should be "virtual reality combination", people can freely buy and sell items, property transactions in the metaverse, and even regard the metacosm as a second world. It is also based on this direction that many Internet giants have begun to lay out the concept of "meta-universe", and even some car companies are the same, but is the automotive industry really compatible with the meta-universe?
The collision of cars with the metacosm
The concept of the automotive industry and the metacosm may be difficult for most people to associate, and even feel that they should have had a strong competitive relationship before. Because the car is a means of transportation with humans swimming in the real world, the value of the car exists in the real world, and the final form of the metaverse is "virtual reality combination", even if it is separated from any wearable device can also swim in the virtual world, with the gradual improvement of the concept of the metaverse, the pursuit of the real world by humans will be reduced, and the existence value of the car will be greatly reduced. But is this really the case?
Chen Rui, chairman and CEO of Bilibili, has his own views on the metacosm: "All the discussions about the metacosm are at the capital and media level, and almost no one who really makes products is discussing this, because the metacosm is indeed a very far-reaching goal, and it needs a breakthrough in products and technologies to achieve this concept, not in the last two or three years." ”
Wei Qing, chief technology officer of Microsoft (China), is more extreme in his view of the metacosm, saying that the "metacosm" has practical value only if it returns to the physical world.
The ultimate goal of the metaverse is "virtual reality combination", based on the current technology, this is more like an extreme idea, the current metacosm brings us more broad ideas and more choices, many people feel that with the development of technology, the perfection of the metacosm, many people will be overly addicted to the virtual world, but in the view of the travel bureau, today's Internet is also developed, there are also a large number of people addicted, but the automobile industry has not been affected, people's traffic demand for the real world has not decreased, The metacosm will also be difficult to impact the automotive industry in the future. And now car companies have begun to gradually enter the meta-universe, and as Wei Qing said, let the meta-universe achieve a certain value in the physical world, so the car will only merge with each other under the collision with the meta-universe, and create higher value.
The fusion of the automotive industry and the metacosm
Before the concept of the metacosm, people already had the idea of creating virtual space, the original intention of which was to strengthen the physical world, improve production efficiency, and reduce production costs, and the essence of the metacosm is virtual reality technology. For ordinary people, the metacosm is just a simple virtual experience, and for the automobile industry and even all traditional manufacturing industries, the metacosm is a virtual world that can carry the automotive industry to make a new qualitative leap.
As mentioned at the beginning, the construction of the metaverse is indispensable to the digital twin technology, the digital twin is to make full use of physical models, sensor updates, running history and other data, the integration of multi-disciplinary, multi-physical quantities, multi-scale, multi-probability simulation process, in the virtual space to complete the mapping, so as to reflect the corresponding physical equipment of the whole life cycle process. Many car companies have long been or are applying this technology to automobile manufacturing, and regard it as the focus of Industry 4.0 application.
Previously, the BMW Group announced that it would work with Nvidia to develop the Omniverse virtual platform to create a virtual factory.
The Omniverse platform, which leverages digital twin technology, will be able to collect and collate real-time data from all relevant databases, eliminating the need to re-import data. This transparency will enable planners and production experts to plan highly complex production systems more quickly and accurately without loss of interfaces or compatibility issues. Omniverse consolidates data from a variety of different producers' specialized design and planning tools and leverages this data to generate photorealistic, real-time simulations in a single, collaborative environment.
The Omniverse platform is not only that, but also allows employees in different locations in different time zones to access at any time and jointly plan and optimize the details of the process or production system. Even omniverse platforms can be used for logistics planning, providing data consistency from planning to production.
In addition, autonomous driving technology can even take advantage of the fact that everything in the metaverse can be virtualized for testing and growth.
In 2021, Nvidia has proposed a solution to virtually a "high imitation" earth for autonomous driving road testing, to obtain a large amount of road data for the testing of autonomous vehicles. In addition, crash tests involving autonomous vehicles can also be carried out through the metaverse scenario to reduce the wear and tear on the test vehicle, and at the same time, it can also save a large amount of test costs.
In addition to enabling car companies to better manage factories and help with autonomous driving research, metaversity can even be associated with car manufacturing.
Why should the car be defined by the car company
One of the great properties of the metacosm is the freedom to produce and edit the world, and it is based on this feature that PIX Moving, a smart car development and manufacturing company from China, links the metacosm and car manufacturing.
At a global event called DeAuto Hackathon (Decentralized Car Hackathon) organized by PIX Moving, design and algorithms from all over the world worked together to design cars collaboratively in the metaverse based on VR car design tools such as Gravity Sketch.
In order to protect the absolute creative rights of the contestants, PIX Moving also carried out NFT confirmation of the rights of each entry, and the car produced was engraved with the designer's name, as long as the order exceeded 100 units, the vehicle would be mass-produced. For well-known car companies, 100 vehicles for mass production is definitely a loss-making business, but PIX Moving is based on the characteristics of the skateboard chassis universal collocation, and the use of automotive algorithm design and real-time molding system can not only meet the individual needs of users, but also reduce the huge cost of mold development and design, so 100 vehicles will not lose money for mass production.
It is worth mentioning that if your vehicle is mass-produced, then as a designer, you will also have a share of two-thousandths of sales, and there is no cap.
The concept of metaverse in recent months may have to listen to vomit, for ordinary us metaverse is more like a gimmick, scam, but for enterprises, with the development of science and technology, metacosmity in the future must be promising, the current metacosm for the automotive industry and future travel out of the beautiful picture, I believe it will also be realized step by step.