"The outlet has not yet come, but the pigs are already standing." Talk show actor Zhou Qimo's ridicule of the metaverse in the variety show can be said to summarize the trend of the concept of the metacosm in 2021.
In an article published in March 2022, Liu Run, founder of Runmi Consulting, director of 5 Minutes Business School and a well-known business consultant in China, used the Gettler curve to describe the five stages that a technology will go through. They are: technology budding period, expected expansion period, bubble bursting valley bottom period, steady climb recovery period, production maturity period. He also marked the coordinates of the current metacosm—between the embryonic period of technology and the expected expansion period.
(Image source: Liu Run WeChat public account)
Public opinion gimmicks and bubbles will burst, and technological developments will not stop. Putting aside ridicule and spitting, what exactly is the metaverse and what does it mean? If the metacosm refers to the virtual space cloud life, then contrary to it, why do many automobile companies that serve the real social travel also seize this outlet?
Metaverse: An era is being generated
The term metacosm was born in the science fiction novel Avalanche, but it is not whimsical. In the early 1990s, Mr. Qian Xuesen had a vision of virtual reality and the metaverse, gave it a rather interesting name - "Spirit Realm", and through the production and development of virtual reality technology, foresaw the deep changes that the deep combination of man and machine will bring to human society. In fact, the metacosm is synonymous with technological evolution to reconstruct the real world.
Everyone looks at the world with a subjective perspective, and each character has a different understanding of the metaverse. Leaving aside imagination and deduction, and looking at the metaverse from the perspective of technical path, it should be a digital evolution form, a digital world that integrates entertainment, socialization, learning, production, and life, and is closely integrated with the real world.
Zhigang Think Tank wrote in the article "Narrative Economics of the Metacosm" that the metacosm is not a technology, an industry, but an era. A metasymonic unifies the development imagination of the communication revolution (5G/6G), the Internet revolution (Web 3.0), and the artificial intelligence revolution. It can be said that it is a consensus and an ideal. Building this beautiful new world full of imagination is a huge systematic project, which requires cross-industry technology integration, the participation of all walks of life, and the joint participation in building a huge technical support system.
Automotive: An important application scenario for the metaverse
At present, most of the discussions about the application scenarios of the metaverse focus on entertainment, social and other fields. But this is only a facet. From the perspective of application value, Zhigang Think Tank divides the metaverse application scenarios into consumer metacosmology, industrial metacosmology and urban metacosm. The key to supporting the power of the industrial metacosm lies in digital design, digital manufacturing, digital management and digital marketing. And that's what Chinese auto companies are doing.
One of the technologies essential to the metacosm is digital twin technology. This technology is to make full use of physical models, sensor updates, operating history and other data, integrate multi-disciplinary, multi-physical quantity, multi-scale, multi-probability simulation process, and complete the mapping in the virtual space, so as to reflect the whole life cycle process of the corresponding physical equipment. If summed up in a simple sentence, it would be to create a digital twin for the entity. At present, many car companies are already applying it and regard it as the focus of Industry 4.0.
The changes that digital twins are making in automotive manufacturing are systemic. In the R&D phase, digital twin technology can break the inherent tradition of new model design import, thus transforming into rapidly designing a digital twin and testing this digital twin in various application scenarios. This is equivalent to extending the agile development of commonly used software to the entire automotive development.
In the manufacturing process, in addition to establishing a digital twin of the product itself in the manufacturing process, the equipment of the production line can also have a digital twin. In this way, sensors on product and production equipment can synchronize the collected data to the digital twin, and then monitor the manufacturing process status as well as the equipment status based on the model. This not only improves product quality, but also optimizes costs, and also provides a scientific and flexible basis for the final pricing of products.
Digital twin technologies play an important role in the operational phase of the after-sales service. On the one hand, the application of digital twin technology can monitor the real-time status of vehicles, support vehicle diagnosis and even predict vehicle failures, etc., which helps car companies improve service quality and increase user stickiness; on the other hand, digital twins combine V2X and digital city technologies to further help the iterative upgrading of intelligent driving and the construction of smart cities.
Speaking of smart cities, it extends to the urban metacosm. Digital twin cities are currently one of the closest technologies to the metacosm in the field of urban planning management. Through simulation technology, the population, space, resources and other elements in the city are fully clouded online, and applied to urban planning and design, emergency response and other fields through huge data calculations, forming a virtual world mapped with real-world projects. While digital cars are integrated into digital twin cities, and the government improves the level of governance refinement, real-world travel will also undergo changes that break through imagination.
Is the metacosm a conceptual operation or a new era, whether the metacosm + car is a gimmick or inevitable, time will give the answer. Sooner or later, this future will come. Take a rational stance and anticipate.