In the era of digital technology, enterprises should not "go alone to seek speed", but should "go hand in hand to seek far" with the full support of the industrial ecology.
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The author | Liu Jia
Edited | Wang Chuan
Recently, Qualcomm announced the establishment of a $100 million Snapdragon Meta Universe Fund to invest in developers and enterprises that create unique immersive XR experiences, related core AR technologies and related AI technologies.
"We provide groundbreaking platform technologies and experiences that enable both consumers and businesses to build and participate in the metaverse, and connect the physical and digital worlds." Qualcomm President and CEO Anmont believes that Qualcomm's technology is the key to the metaverse. Through the Snapdragon Meta-Universe Fund, Qualcomm can empower developers and enterprises of different sizes to create more possibilities when a new generation of spatial computing is opened.
Based on the underlying technological innovation, building the technology portfolio required by various industries and facing the market that can bring long-term stable revenue in the future is the key to Qualcomm's rapid growth. Therefore, the increased layout of the meta-universe is not only to comply with the trend of technology, but also to lay a good foundation for the core technology of the underlying industrial chain to continue to occupy in the future.
And the self-proclaimed key to the metaverse may not be exaggerated for Qualcomm.
1
More than curiosity: find the key to the Metaverse
Metaverse, a combination of Meta (transcendence) and versa (universe), was born in 1992 in the science fiction novel Avalanche, which depicts a vast virtual reality world in which people live with digital avatars and compete with each other to improve their status.
Pictured: Theplaylist
Simply put, the metacosm is the deep integration of the virtual world and the real world.
A report by Grayscale Investments in November found that the proportion of active meta-universe users increased 10-fold from early 2020 to June 2021. According to a report released by gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, it is also estimated that by 2026, 30% of the world's organizations will have products and services in the metacosm, 25% will spend at least an hour a day in the metacosm for work, shopping, education, social and entertainment, etc., and the global metacosmum market is expected to reach nearly $42 billion.
In anticipation of the migration to the metaverse, major brand companies are already building infrastructure that allows users to digitally replicate their lives. And by moving from digital business to meta-universe business, enterprises will also have the ability to expand and enhance their business models in unprecedented ways.
However, the metaverse is more complex than the networked world, requiring a more powerful data computing core, a low-latency network environment that transmits huge amounts of data, and AR/VR devices with better display. This demand will drive the strength of related industries in storage, networking, display, computing power and other aspects, forcing manufacturers to upgrade technology.
AR glasses based on Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1
Therefore, Qualcomm hopes to set up the Snapdragon Meta-Universe Fund to provide financial assistance to leading XR companies, including developers who create XR experiences in the fields of gaming, health and wellness, media, entertainment, education and business. Vendors that receive fund investments or grants will also have access to cutting-edge XR platform technology, hardware suites, a global network of investors, and co-marketing and promotion.
For Qualcomm, XR is one of the key layout directions, on the one hand, because XR is the core technology that enters the metaverse, and for the future era of virtual and reality mixing and superimposing, the core technology occupying the underlying industrial chain is still Qualcomm's strategic goal. On the other hand, consumer XR devices are similar to the use scenarios of smartphones, and Qualcomm has deep technology accumulation and migration capabilities, which can reduce research and development costs.
It is reported that the application for the Snapdragon Meta Universe Fund will officially begin in June this year. As an important project that conforms to the public's understanding of the concept of science and technology and helps Qualcomm tap the growth curve of the second business, the fund is also of great significance in developing more partners and empowering and supporting the innovation of the entire XR industry ecosystem.
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XR Race: The first game of the "Metacosm" competition
Before explaining the relationship between the metaverse and XR, let's first understand what VR, AR and MR are.
VR (Virtual Reality) technology is called "virtual reality technology", it can use computers to simulate a virtual environment, bringing people a sense of three-dimensional immersion. That is to say, using the principle of imaging, through the combination of software and hardware to optimize the image, the scene is displayed in front of your eyes. You only need to wear a pair of imaging equipment and sensor devices to swim in the virtual scene.
AR (Augmented Reality), also known as "augmented reality," is a technique that calculates the three-dimensional position of a camera image in real time and adds the corresponding image. For example, if you turn on your phone's camera, you use the software to measure the length of the actual object in the lens, and when you can't find the direction, get help from the real-life navigation software in the phone.
MR (Mediated Reality) is a combination of VR technology and AR technology, which can merge the real and virtual worlds to create a new visual environment. Its biggest feature is that the virtual world and the real world can interact.
In simple terms, VR needs to use an opaque headset to complete the immersive experience in the virtual world, you see a 100% virtual world; AR needs a clear headset to see the real world and the information and images that overlap on it, you see the real world entity and the virtual information on top of it; MR presents a mixture of the real world and the virtual world, but the virtual object it creates is not only realistic, but also interacts with the real environment in real time.
XR (Extended Reality) technology, known as "Extended Reality Technology," is all the real and virtual environments generated by computer graphics and wearable devices. Simply put, it is the intersection of ar, VR and MR technologies.
You know, in the metaverse through the "digital body" multi-crowd interaction, communication and other social behaviors, the simple sense of VR, AR or MR technology may be difficult to satisfy. Therefore, what the metacosm needs is a collective virtual technology that can support the infrastructure, as well as smart devices that support XR technology.
Through a series of technical applications such as large-scale construction of 3D maps, centimeter-level spatial calculations adapted to the whole scene, AI rendering algorithms with high effects and efficiency, and 100,000 hair-level digital human rendering, coupled with AR/VR wearable devices, XR can be powerful enough to build a visual, smellable, touchable, and tasteful illusion for all users, and confuse these illusions with real objects.
Based on this, as early as 2015, Qualcomm began to lay out XR, and successively pushed the Snapdragon XR1 and XR2 platforms, which to a large extent solved the problems of XR product latency, poor mobility, low resolution, and refresh rate, and greatly improved the experience of XR products. Among them, Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 is the world's first 5G XR platform, which can support high-speed AR and VR mobile processing, becoming the cornerstone of building a metaverse. At present, the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 platform has been widely used in AR/VR headsets of mainstream companies such as Meta and HTC, and has also been selected as one of the best inventions in 2021 by Time Magazine.
In the past, Qualcomm mainly provided XR core technology and feature support to OEM equipment manufacturers. Now, with the boom in the metaverse, Qualcomm needs developers to join the development of XR applications.
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Accelerated landing: How does "Ready Player One" shine into reality?
Although the XR track has become hot due to the boom of the meta-universe, the development of the XR industry has been restricted by problems such as the lack of uniform industry standards, the difficulty of innovation and upgrading of key technologies, and the uncertainty brought about by the rapid iteration of software and hardware. Overall, XR technology is interdisciplinary, multi-domain, and slow to mature, but once matured, it will be a new disruptive computing platform.
Last November, Qualcomm launched its head-mounted AR development kit, the Snapdragon Spaces XR developer platform. The platform enables some of the main environmental understanding features, including spatial mapping and spatial meshing, occlusion, plane detection, object and image recognition and tracking, local anchors and their persistence, and scene understanding. Qualcomm also acquired the team and some of the technical assets of HINS SAS, a provider of hand tracking and gesture recognition solutions, to enable Qualcomm's XR products to have a better hand interaction experience.
Not long ago, Qualcomm announced a partnership with Square Enix, the world's top AAA game publisher, to help Square Enix's development studios and intellectual property networks around the world create XR experiences based on the Snapdragon Spaces XR developer platform.
As one of the top players in the gaming world, Square Enix has launched a series of popular series such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Tomb Raider. Ben Taylor, its technical director, said: "Square Enix believes the time is ripe to innovate with XR for the classic genre games that we are particularly good at, and we are looking forward to creating XR experiences with Snapdragon Spaces and sharing them with the world." ”
It is worth mentioning that before that, Companies such as Lenovo, Xiaomi, and OPPO were already the initial partners of the Snapdragon Spaces platform.
At the same time, Qualcomm also joined hands with XR industry chain leaders including Unity, Unreal Engine, HTC Vive, Quili Technology, OPPO, Pico, Adventure VR, Yingchuang Technology and Play Dream YVR to create the "2022 Qualcomm XR Innovative Application Challenge".
For more information, please visit the official website of the Contest
https://xr.qualcomm-challenge.com/
As one of the most influential innovation competitions in the XR industry, Qualcomm's "Qualcomm XR Innovative Application Challenge" aims to unite the XR industry ecological chain, integrate hardware manufacturers, developer ecology and channel distribution and other resources, provide participating companies with all-round support from technology to training, from promotion to customers, help them deeply understand the needs of the scene, break through information barriers, and thus create more abundant and diverse high-quality XR software application products and promote the rapid development of the entire XR industry.
At present, the "Qualcomm XR Innovative Application Challenge" has been held for the fourth time. This competition will provide 8 commercial XR terminals based on the Snapdragon platform as development equipment for participating developers, and a total of 10 sets of tracks will be set up throughout the course, including a total of 41 winning places, and the total prize of the competition will be worth more than 540,000 yuan. In addition, the competition will also provide rich publicity and promotion, technical training, capital resource docking and other services for the participating teams.
The ever-changing technology has created the connectivity of the scene, the coherence of data and the interoperability of value, which also makes it possible for enterprises to "go alone and seek speed" in the era of digital technology, but to "go far with the crowd" with the full support of the industrial ecology.
Perhaps it is too early to accurately predict what the metacosm will be. But what we do know is that it will open up entirely new experiences and improve our lives. Until then, more companies are still needed to work together on the XR track to be the first.
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