In Stephenson's 1992 novel Avalanche, people connect to and work and live in the virtual city of Metavalse through virtual reality devices. This brings people a whole new concept – the metacosm.
With the continuous development of technology, the concept of the metaverse has now moved from science fiction to reality. But when people eagerly put on expensive and heavy VR headsets, the imaginary grand digital city did not appear.
Only the endless "pixel stones" and the "square virtual people" that stagger forward are all that comes into view.
People who return to reality realize that technological progress is nothing more than a "big bang" for the metaverse, the construction of the metacosm has just begun, and the "natives" of the metacosm will embark on the same path as the mononuclear organisms of billions of years ago: to change the desolation of this universe and add vital "vitality" to it.
In this long journey, it is particularly important for chip manufacturers that have mastered the underlying technology.
Put on Qualcomm and see the metacosm
There is a famous fable about the origin of leather shoes: in an ancient kingdom, the king ordered the slaughter of all the cattle in the country and paved the road with cowhide so that his subjects would not be cut by sharp stones. One of his servants said that he could get people to wrap their feet in small pieces of cowhide. The king adopted this suggestion, and eventually leather shoes were born.
In this era, people began to pursue "immersion" in the digital world. The screen is getting bigger and bigger, the screen ratio is getting higher and higher, and there are more and more screens on the table.
But people who do this are gradually discovering that what limits "immersion" is the interactive way of the screen itself. Just as the king could not pave the way for the whole country, even if he killed all the cattle in the country.
Thus the "leather shoe" that entered the digital world - the XR device came into being. The so-called XR, the full name of "Extended Reality", actually includes AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality), MR (fusion reality) three technologies. Faced with the complex needs of the metaverse, it is difficult to achieve pure AR, VR or MR technology. Only by combining them can we achieve social behaviors such as multi-group interaction and communication through "digital avatars" in the metaverse world.
This new way of interacting is fascinating. Si Hongguo, vice president and general manager of XR business of Qualcomm Technology, said of the future of XR: "Now with the blessing of VR and AR technology, computing has evolved to the stage of spatial computing. That is, the traditional sense of the screen disappears, the whole world becomes your 'home screen', and this transformation has just begun. ”
Although XR devices for individual users have been on the market as early as 2016, XR devices have long been regarded as chicken ribs in electronic products. Bulky and expensive has almost become synonymous with XR equipment. Consumers have to spend a lot of money to put on a bulky helmet and enter the virtual world. Ordinary people can't afford to enter the metaverse, and consumers don't buy into such a user experience.
This can be seen in the sales of XR equipment. In 2016 and 2017, when the VR concept was just known, capital once poured into this market like crazy. According to IDC data, in 2016, global XR equipment shipments once increased by 383% year-on-year to 9.04 million units, but expensive XR equipment did not bring users a satisfactory experience, which led to a rapid decline in VR fever: in 2018, the global shipments of VR headsets fell from 3.75 million units to 3.5 million units, and the shipment of AR glasses plummeted from 450,000 units to 260,000 units, almost waist-cutting.
Qualcomm has begun its layout in the XR field in 2015. In 2018, the first chip platform dedicated to the XR field, XR1, was launched, followed by the first XR chip XR2 to support 5G.
The XR device, which has been "rubbing" the mobile phone chip before, finally has its own chip.
The Snapdragon XR platform, which was specially built for XR products, has largely solved the problems of high latency, poor mobility, and low resolution of previous XR products. The XR2 chip has been adopted by the head players in the XR field such as Pico, HTC, and Oculus, occupying half of the XR field.
At the same time, due to the maturity of technology, the price of XR equipment has also moved from expensive to affordable. The Price of the Pico Neo 3 VR all-in-one equipped with Snapdragon XR2 is only 2499 yuan, and it has also launched the "180-day punch card return half price" campaign at the beginning of the release, and the Oculus Quest2 released by Facebook's Oculus is only $299. Compared with the price of tens of thousands of high-end headsets in previous years, the cost of entering the metaverse has been greatly reduced.
In 2020, Facebook officially released the Oculus Quest2, a VR headset equipped with snapdragon XR2, which became the first phenomenal explosion in the field of XR devices.
In 2021, the Quest2 sold about 8.1 million units, while the Xbox sold about 8 million units. This is the first time that VR devices have surpassed traditional consoles in terms of sales.
Qualcomm's efforts have finally made the XR market, which was considered "cool" in previous years, boil again.
According to Counterpoint's forecast, XR headset shipments are expected to exceed 100 million units in 2025, a tenfold increase over 2021. The huge sales growth has not only brought about an increase in sales, but also brought a group of "natives" to the originally "desolate" metaverse. Just as the "fire" of the metaverse was out of the circle, Qualcomm added a handful of dry wood to the burning fire.
During the GDC in 2022, Qualcomm announced the establishment of a total of up to $100 million Snapdragon Universe Fund to invest in developers and enterprises that build XR technology experiences and related AI technologies.
Qualcomm is proving its confidence in the XR track with real money and silver that it has smashed.
Today, with Qualcomm's efforts, XR devices are shedding the impression of being bulky and expensive in the past. More and more people are able to explore the metaverse through XR devices.
At the other end of the glasses, another chip giant, Nvidia, is carrying out a vast "big infrastructure" in the world of the metacosm.
Sowing "Earth Ii", Nvidia will be "Cyber God"
In The Matrix, the mutated Sever says at dinner with Agent Smith in The Matrix World, "I know this steak doesn't exist." But when I put it in my mouth, the mother tells my brain that it's tender and juicy. ”
As a GPU head manufacturer, NVIDIA has always been considered one of the most important promoters of meta-universe construction. Rather than trying a juicy steak in the digital world, Nvidia now seems more interested in how to use this virtual steak to improve the skills of real-world chefs.
In fact, long before the concept of the metacosmology was "out of the circle" by capital, NVIDIA's engineers had already begun to build a lot of construction in this digital world. Shi Chengqiu, senior technology marketing manager of NVIDIA China, told Leifeng Network (public number: Leifeng Network) that when the industry has not yet formed the concept of "meta-universe", NVIDIA has mastered a relatively mature digital twin technology.
Before Nvidia's new headquarters, Voyager, in California, broke ground in the real world, Nvidia employees had already put on VR headsets, toured the building's digital twin, left countless footprints, and made their own suggestions for the building's design in the digital world.
"We hope that some training of artificial intelligence can be completed in the digital twin," Shi Chengqiu told Leifeng Network, "like robots, intelligent driving, intelligent warehousing, smart cities, we can train the AI model in the digital twin in the early stage, until the effect reaches a certain stage and then put it into reality." This will save us a lot of development costs and time while avoiding many unexpected dangers. ”
The technology to build this virtual building in the "meta-universe" is the predecessor of today's NVIDIA Onmiverse platform. As the core technology in NVIDIA's meta-universe planning, the Onmiverse platform has been repeatedly mentioned by NVIDIA on various occasions in recent years.
The underlying technology of this platform is the NVIDIA RTX graphics platform and CUDA architecture that gamers are familiar with.
Different from the "pixel painting style metacosm" made by some so-called "meta-universe manufacturers" that rub heat, these two core technologies provide solid technical support for NVIDIA's meta-universe strategy. The former provides a more realistic physical environment for the metaverse, including ray tracing, while the latter provides easier development conditions for developers.
Based on these two "killer weapons", NVIDIA believes that it already has the ability to create a world of "fake and real". To prove this, NVIDIA "stole beams and changed pillars" at the GTC in April 2021, and let the "virtual lao Huang" "host" for CEO Huang Jenxun for 15 seconds in the online speech. And "Virtual Old Yellow" was not known until the official behind-the-scenes documentary released at SIGGRAPH 2021 in August because of NVIDIA's self-exposure.
The ability of "virtual old yellow" to fake the real is shocking enough, but NVIDIA's ambitions do not stop there.
In his 2021 GTC keynote, Jen-Hsun Huang told people about his vision for the metaverse: "We can create digital twins of Earth that can run continuously to predict the future, calibrate with observed data and refine predictions and then predict again." ”
The meta-cosmic world in "Lao Huang's" eyes will be a vastr world than the real world: where numbers will be all-encompassing, from macro to micro, from weather to factories, from physics to biology. You can even choose whether or not to follow the rules of real-world physics.
But to achieve all this, one of the simplest but most critical elements is needed: people.
Only with the participation of more developers can the world of flowers and flowers that people expect to grow under this vast world. To this end, Nvidia strives to attract more people to participate in the development of this virgin land.
Nvidia is happy to define itself as "the provider of the metaversic solution." Like a grocer who sells pickaxes to miners during the gold nuggeting frenzy, Nvidia is standing on the wasteland of the metaverse selling tools to the pioneers of the universe.
In order to attract more pioneers, Nvidia recently launched Onmiverse Cloud on the basis of Onmiverse, which can reduce users' dependence on front-end devices and eliminate the need to spend a lot of money to buy equipment to participate in the construction of the metaverse. According to Nvidia, Onmiverse Cloud will help small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups build a meta-universe "how fast and how to save money".
Today, NVIDIA's metaverse is full of the hard work of "digital miners". The results of the development based on the Onmiverse platform have blossomed in many fields such as intelligent driving, smart cities, and intelligent warehousing. The world that "Lao Huang" was looking forward to seemed to be getting closer and closer.
Intel, which often "fights side by side" with Nvidia on the computer, has also quietly started its own meta-universe journey.
The metaverse is a long way, and Intel is only accompanied by computing power
Compared with Nvidia and Qualcomm, Intel's layout of the metaverse is late. It wasn't until 2021 that Raja Koduri, head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, announced at a conference on metaverse technology that Intel had "taken the first step toward the metaverse."
Compared with the fanatical pursuit of the metaverse by players and capital, Raja Koduri, who comes from a technical background, is very calm about the metaverse.
"To power the metacosm, we need much more powerful technology than we do today, and computational efficiency is 1,000 times more advanced than it is now." While talking about Intel's metaverse plan, Raja also poured cold water on the metaverse concept.
In Raja's view, the metacosm is destined to become the next major computing platform after the mobile Internet, but the current technology "is not even close to the metaverse." ”
Because in Intel's view, computing power is everything.
In Liu Cixin's novel "The Three-Body Problem", the importance of basic technology is expressed through the mouth of Zhang Beihai: "Genghis Khan's cavalry attacked at a speed comparable to that of armored units in the twentieth century; the bed crossbow of the Northern Song Dynasty, with a range of 1,500 meters, was similar to that of sniper rifles in the twentieth century; but these were still just ancient cavalry and crossbows, and it was impossible to compete with modern forces." ”
In Intel's view, expecting the world of the "metacosm" to arrive within a few years is tantamount to commanding a cavalry unit to complete the combat mission of the armored unit.
Intel's concerns are justified. Some of the "meta-universe" applications that have been put into use at present have been elbowed by computing power. Meta's Horizon Worlds is a Roblox-style chat room with a maximum of 20 participants when players are only shown in rough animations. This is indeed a far cry from the metaverse that people imagine.
The future will not come immediately, but people will still have to move towards the future.
Based on this understanding, Intel will devote all of its energy to the metaverse on how to increase computing power.
Intel's first step toward the metaverse was software.
On December 13, 2021, Raja Koduri, head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, announced Intel's continuous computing technology at a conference on meta-universe technology. This technology, in a "clever" way, can make the device get stronger computing power without upgrading the hardware.
The technology will allow devices to "borrow" hardware from other high-profile devices, somewhat similar to cloud games that have prevailed before, but at a higher application level: the technology calls on the high-performance hardware of other devices to participate in computing, transmitting computing data in real time rather than just images.
In the technical demonstration, Intel used a notebook without discrete graphics to smoothly run the highly configured game "Killer 3".
Theoretically, as long as the hardware that satisfies the software protocol can be included in this "leased device" network to share computing power. With this technology, it is even possible to obtain some unique features of hardware without upgrading the hardware, such as the DLSS technology on Nvidia's RTX graphics card.
This allows future computer hardware resources to be "leased" in this way, without bearing the high cost of high-end hardware, but also to take advantage of a large number of idle resources in the Internet. In Intel's view, this will become an important way to increase computing power in the transition period before the hardware reaches the requirements of the metaverse.
In addition to black technology, there must also be hard power. Intel knows that walking on two legs needs to rely on the truth, in addition to the use of continuous computing technology on the software to "borrow" computing power, Intel is also trying to follow up on high-performance computing hardware.
The just-released Intel Arc series GPU is Intel's breakthrough in hardware from scratch. Raja Koduri once described Intel's Arc series of graphics as the cornerstone of Intel's technology for building the metaverse. Although Arc's original products are not high enough to compete with AMD or Nvidia products in terms of performance, as a newborn baby, Intel's GPU road can be expected in the future.
Perhaps the future of the metacosm may be quite far away, and Intel is still trying to explore. Intel believes that the dream of giving everyone 1 Petaflop (petagreet floating-point operations per second) and transferring 1 petabyte (petabytes) of data in 1 millisecond will eventually shine into reality.