preface
If VR and AR are inevitable trends in the future, what impact does this have on the future life and work of ordinary people? What kind of people is needed in this industry? What is the current situation? Where are the opportunities left for the average entrepreneur? In film and television dramas, "The Matrix" brings us a world that cannot distinguish between reality and virtuality. Let people who have seen it have an infinite reverie about the science fiction life in the next 100 to 200 years.
Tencent XR battlefield change play?
Recently, Tencent announced the withdrawal of the XR (Extended Reality) division. An industry insider responded that Tencent will partially disband the XR (mixed reality) team. The game XR business line will change the hardware development path and adjust the relevant business teams. This adjustment does not mean that Tencent will give up exploring the XR field, and Tencent Games will consider other development directions such as software technology and content ecology.
A number of industry insiders said that there were inaccuracies in the external information. The XR business did not stop work entirely, but adjusted some projects. The person said that after the acquisition of Great White Shark was blocked, Tencent initially planned to change the path of establishing an XR hardware ecosystem through direct acquisition, so it adjusted some projects within the XR business line. Tencent previously established an XR department on June 20, 2022, aiming to develop the metaverse concept of the virtual world, and will promote the introduction of Meta's Qculus Quest2 (VR device) and continue to develop it in the future.
Such collaborations are not unprecedented. In 2019, Tencent signed an introduction cooperation agreement with Nintendo. The cooperation mode between the two parties is Tencent's sales of the National Bank Edition Switch, which is responsible for the laying of offline channels, and the two parties jointly promote the localization and translation of the game.
According to people familiar with the matter, the cooperation with Quest 2 will also follow this model. However, the specific launch time of the Quest 2 National Bank version in the future, Tencent has not replied as of press time.
▲Source: Planet Daily
What is XR technology? What is the difference between VR and AR?
So here, let's first understand what these emerging technologies are.
Virtual Reality (VR): Virtual reality (VR), also known as computer simulation of reality. It is an experience created through human-computer interaction and computer-generated three-dimensional simulations. We can interact in the environment by using virtual reality devices, such as headsets, controllers.
Source: Freepik
Augmented Reality (AR): Augmented reality (AR) is a real-time, direct or indirect observation of the physical environment of the real world. It blends what we see in the real environment with the digital content generated by computer software to somehow enhance the real environment we are in. In other words, AR superimposes digital information on top of our real world.
Source: Freepik
Extended Reality (XR): Extended Reality (XR) is a term added to the technical vocabulary. Currently, only a few people know about XR technology. It refers to the combination of all real and virtual environments and human-computer interaction generated by computer technology and wearable devices.
In layman's terms, extended reality (XR) includes the above two emerging technologies, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). For the past few years, we've been talking about VR, AR, and MR. Perhaps in the future, everyone will be talking about XR.
▲Source: Niu Slice Network
For example, "Just to Meet You in a Dream" is an experimental short film with XR scenes, which for the first time uses a virtual shooting method: the camera moves freely between the real world and the virtual environment. The virtual engine creates unlimited space and the camera moves freely. This system can link the camera movement in the physical space with the camera of the virtual engine, so as to achieve interaction and unified control through programming.
There is no real scene, no green screen, all real-time rendering scenes, and the actors perform in the space built by the LED screen. It is precisely because the live LED can present analog images, bringing the actors in the studio directly into the actual scene, and can be more engaged in the performance, so that the actors can focus on the purpose and believe in the relationship between themselves and the space.
▲Source: Niu Slice Network
In scene rendering, XR augmented reality uses a real-time rendering engine to build photographic scenes. Through the media server output composition, the camera tracking system is used to locate the spatial information and map the spatial relationship between the character and the scene in real time. The real-time rendering technology restores the dynamic digital scenes one by one on the LED screen, and presents and outputs the virtual scene without dead ends in real time, and finally forms a short film with XR scenes.
Why did VR land earlier than AR?
The E3 game show, which just concluded in Los Angeles, seems to announce that VR and AR will lead the way in the future of technology.
There are certain differences between the two.
The experience brought by VR to users is an immersive experience, which needs to isolate reality to a certain extent, and is realized together with some intelligent hardware for content presentation, which also determines that it must be used in a specific environment - indoor or outdoor experience points. This has also become a limitation of VR technology.
▲Source: Zhihu @ Luxi
AR is to enhance people's awareness of the surrounding environment by adding virtual elements in the real environment, enhancing reality, so AR can be applied in a wider range of fields, and the environment that can be used is richer, whether at home or out, AR devices can be worn and used.
Because of the different ways of using them, they also determine their future development trends.
From the perspective of development potential, VR gives people more imagination, while AR is more closely related to people's daily life scenes.
The largest application market is obviously the game market, now whether in theaters or amusement parks, almost all equipped with VR experience equipment, from the device side, due to the sales of PlayStation VR and Oculus Quest has increased significantly, driving the entire VR game market has also increased by 30%.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, VR offline experience halls have gradually become an important industry in China, and data show that the market size of China's VR experience halls has reached 2.05 billion yuan, with a growth rate of more than 150%. It is expected that in the future, the market size of China's VR experience hall will exceed 4 billion yuan.
▲Source: Network
The two need to improve in different areas. The key to VR lies in how to achieve users' immersive experience through positioning and virtual scene rendering, and the current application bottleneck lies in positioning accuracy and transmission speed. The key to AR is how to achieve "reality-virtual" interaction by reconstructing real-world objects in the virtual environment, and the current bottleneck is mainly in algorithms and computing power.
The cost of the two is different. After years of development, VR products have gradually entered the commercialization process, and the current retail product quotation is between 500-4000 RMB, facing end consumers. AR products are still in the early stages of development, and the price of related new products is between 20,000-50,000 RMB, which is reserved for specific enterprise-level users.
Source: Freepik
VR is mainly used in games and entertainment, just like putting a game console in front of you; Games and entertainment are only a subset of AR applications, and in the future, AR will also have huge development potential in medical, industrial, education, retail and other markets.
Which industries will AR disrupt
It is undeniable that AR has a broad market space, such as the 2022 Qatar World Cup held some time ago.
Deutsche Telekom's live app builds AR spectators for fans. Using AR technology, it is possible to create interactive playing venues at home using smartphones and display World Cup team performances, statistics, starting lineups, and more on the screen in real time. In addition, we are familiar with: AR navigation and AR shopping in the shopping mall showroom experience. In fact, AR technology has penetrated into people's clothing, food, housing and transportation, and has been widely used in cultural tourism, fashion, industry, family, education and other industries.
Whether it's using AR try-on/makeup, try to solve the problem of not being able to really feel the effect of the product. Or through AR technology to restore some of the ruins lost in the long river of history, generate virtual tour guides or docents, and make the visit more interesting, all because AR is a window that can access the digital world at any time, which shows that AR glasses will indeed become a necessity of daily life in the future.
▲Source: Zhihu @ Zhutai Information
Of course, it can also be applied to production and work scenarios, for example, to generate high-resolution screens at any time. If you need a monitor, then you just need to simply pull the screen into your field of view and adjust the size. It will also reduce people's reliance on display devices such as TVs, computers, mobile phones and tablets. Browsing, taking notes, project management, etc., these tools needed for daily work can be presented in AR. Because there are no physical screens, AR makes it easier for users to design computers they like to interact with.
Is that all it does? No, it can even transform into your personal assistant, checking your schedule and reminding you. When POV sharing replaces screen sharing, it will make it easy for both parties to reach cooperation. If you're in a meeting and someone mentions a word you don't understand, you can use AR to quietly search for that word, and it will show the answer in your own vision. Even, when we need to do the analysis of user feedback, we can also use product testing, psychological experiments, expression capture and other ways to conduct psychological analysis, so as to obtain more objective feedback.
What are the application prospects of AR in industrial manufacturing?
During the Industrial Revolution, the most important achievement was to achieve product scale.
For example, when we want to eat iced watermelon, we don't want a refrigerator, but iced watermelon, no matter what means are used to achieve it. The industrial revolution has laid the foundation for the large-scale of products such as refrigerators, so we will buy refrigerators to ice watermelons.
In the era of artificial intelligence, because artificial intelligence is combined with all walks of life, products are no longer what we need at the core. The reason why we will enter the era of experience scale. It is because VR can simulate a person's human body and copy an expert's operation experience to the robot in batches. That is, one person operates, and a large number of robots follow.
This achieves a purpose – not a worker, but a pair of hands.
Not only can we achieve it through AR glasses, but also experts provide remote guidance, without the need for experts to spend time and money running back and forth. It can also be used to enhance the human eye, thereby gaining the ability to see distant landscapes and enhance the color of light. It can even enhance the human brain and reduce the cost of information input.
AR technology can also be used to solve many problems, such as some security risks, we can use AR system equipment life cycle monitoring data and data mining and other technologies to achieve equipment fault diagnosis, location, alarm or dynamic prediction.
The reason why we say that AR has great prospects in the field of industrial manufacturing is because industrial manufacturing itself requires many aspects to accumulate experience. It can organically combine digital information with industrial equipment and scenes in a virtual and real interactive way, so that front-line workers can free their hands, cross spatial and information barriers, so as to obtain the ability to digitize anytime and anywhere, help traditional industries complete the transformation from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing" as soon as possible, and is also an important part of the application of industrial Internet technology.
▲Source: Zhihu @AR Augmented Reality Alliance
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Disclaimer: Some of the reference sources for this article are:
1. "Why is consumer AR delayed?" Source: Zhihu @Ian in the AR industry
2. "Tencent is not suspending the entire line, and will still consider the development direction of software technology and content ecology in the XR field", source: Southern Metropolis Daily
3. "On the Eve of the Virtual Reality Revolution: One of the Keys to the Fourth Industrial Revolution - VR & AR In-depth Industry Research Report", source: Zhihu @LS Sloppy Taoist
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