What does the next generation of games look like with the Internet? As the most potential development direction, "Metaverse Meta universe" has become the most optimistic direction of the entire technology industry, which has aroused the high attention of technology giants, entrepreneurs and capital. The construction of the virtual world is indispensable to the 3D image engine technology, in the recent Tianfeng Securities Autumn Strategy Conference "XR into the Metaverse" sub-forum, Unity Greater China Strategy and Market Leader Liang Lu, for the peer to bring a meta-universe topic sharing based on Unity technology.
In his speech, Liang Lu said: "The metaverse is not a simple game, but the game is the earliest product with the characteristics of the metaverse. The metaverse is coming, whether in the game or in the industrial scene, if you really want to realize this dream, first of all, you need to achieve seamless transmission and real-time 3D interaction, Unity is the most likely to become the future virtual world technology base of the technology platform. ”
The following is the transcript of Liang Lu's speech:
Lu Liang: Hello everyone, I'm Lu Liang, Head of Strategy and Marketing for Unity Greater China. This year there is a word that is particularly hot, Metaverse Metacosm. So what is the metacosm? In fact, it can be simply understood that a super-large virtual world, like an open world game, each of us can play our favorite role in it.
But that sounds like a vacuum, and we're still far from the day we actually implement Metavalse. But what I want to share today is the new technology that Unity has developed to support us one step closer to the meta-universe, and the new technology that leads the future direction of the game, and even the broader virtual world.
We say that Unity has the potential to be the technical backdrop for all future virtual worlds, why do we say that?
First, Unity is the most widely used game engine in the world. More than 70% of the world's top 1,000 games were created with Unity.
Domestically, Unity is growing rapidly.
From last year's hit "Original God" and "Jiangnan Hundred Views" to this year's "Eternal Destruction" and "League of Legends Mobile Game" are all developed with Unity, made with Unity's works are really too many, and only a small part of the screen can be displayed.
By the end of 2020:
- Made with Unity app with an average of over 5 billion downloads per month;
- We have 1.5 million monthly active developer users worldwide who use the Unity engine to create content;
- Unity creates and operates a business that reaches an average of 2.8 billion monthly active players worldwide.
These data fully illustrate Unity's leading position in the field of games.
However, the application of Unity's real-time 3D technology is far more than just in the field of gaming.
From visual architectural design, to self-driving car simulations, to film and television animation, Unity is being used.
These are our partners in industrial, manufacturing, construction, e-commerce and, of course, our cross-industry customer list is growing rapidly.
Unity supports more than 20 major content platforms and keeps updated almost in sync with them. Especially for AR and VR, Unity is the universal engine that provides the most platform support.
Our core technology is real-time 3D, so what is real-time 3D technology and why is it important?
In simple terms, the real-time 3D screen will be refreshed at a high frame rate, the average game is 30 frames per second, vr games usually have a higher frame rate. This gives a sense of immersion, and a real-time interactive experience.
We believe that with the continuous iteration of technology, all 2D content will shift to real-time 3D content in the future. People expect a more polished, immersive, interactive 3D experience that is the foundation that makes up the metaverse. In the future, we are about to enter the era of real-time 3D, which means that the traditional creative tools of the past are no longer applicable. Real-time 3D engines like Unity will become the "infrastructure" technology for building the virtual world of the future.
Next, I would like to introduce you to a few key technologies and application scenarios of Unity to build a metaversmic ecology.
The metaverse is by no means a simple game, but the game is the first product with the characteristics of the metacosm. Unity has been keeping an eye on the direction of gaming technology developments, and we've identified some trends:
First, AI will explode in full swing. Now, whether it is game development, gameplay iteration, or art creation, different AI technologies are used. The benefits of AI are many, such as reducing costs, personalizing experiences, optimizing operational strategies, and so on. We believe that there is no doubt that AI will be one of the main drivers of the rapid development of the next generation of games.
Second, we see that high-definition, high-quality game works are constantly raising the ceiling of the industry. Now major game manufacturers are competing in technical strength, ultra-realistic digital people, open world, physical rendering, etc., are the direction of future games. In addition, the picture quality of mobile games is also constantly breaking through, becoming closer and closer to console games. Now that there are games released by multiple terminals at the same time, I believe that the data interconnection of the terminal hands will soon be realized in the future.
Third, we believe that everything will be "clouded" in the future. What does that mean? For example, we say Metavalse, in fact, it is closely related to cloud services, because we want to create a world, the resources in hand are crucial, and only the cloud empowerment side can unlock more computing power and storage. Metaverse emphasizes connectivity and realism, and to achieve ubiquitous connectivity, unity actually has to be considered. Currently Unity supports almost all XR devices as well as the IoT ecosystem. We can imagine that Unity's data-oriented technology stack could make Unity's particles small enough to run on smart hardware devices and make your software ubiquitous. Even the engine itself can be clouded. Not to mention that in the future 5G era, large-scale cloud rendering will become possible, and then we will truly unlock the infrastructure that Metavalse needs.
These three are the game technology trends that we think are very important at present, and we will introduce the specific technologies related to them.
At its most basic, Unity provides developers with powerful real-time 3D content creation tools. For example, the universal rendering pipeline URP, developers can quickly build a high-definition virtual world, produce realistic water waves, transformed sunlight and other very realistic effects, and can be compatible with various platforms such as mobile phones, VR, and car HMI.
This is a demo made with URP. It can be seen that this flame and lighting effect has been very realistic, and has supported all mainstream mobile phones, VR, AR, MR and other platforms, and all screens in the future, regardless of size, can show more exquisite three-dimensional pictures.
Unity also has an HDRP HD Rendering Pipeline, a tool tailored for high-quality rendering on high-end hardware that unlocks the full visual fidelity of PCs and consoles.
As you can see, with Unity HDRP, you can create a blockbuster movie. More and more film and television animation works have begun to use Unity real-time rendering, which not only achieves AAA screen effects, but also saves a lot of post-production time. Maybe in the future, you don't even need real actors, you can use digital people to make a first-line blockbuster, and you don't have to consider various issues such as scandals and contracts.
Friends who follow our public account may have found that we recently released a new digital demo. Let's take a look.
It took us 2 months to model a colleague from Unity. Of course, our digital demo is not perfect enough. In fact, what we really want to do is not this demo, what we really do is to explore a full process of digital human production and open it to developers. By making the full development process of digital people public like this, Unity is the first in the industry.
Our full process of digital human production includes: 4D real person scanning, high-precision face modeling, etc., and we have opened up this process to everyone in the community.
Now virtual idol is an outlet, many domestic companies are doing, two-dimensional, real people, but the quality is uneven, there is no unified standard in the industry. What Unity is doing is establishing a set of industry standards. With this process, developers themselves can create a real-time-driven avatar based on Unity, which can be a virtual real person, a cartoon image, an alien creature, or any.
We will continue to iterate this process, and we will also add some AI algorithms to make the production of facial micro-expressions more natural. Our ultimate goal is to lower the threshold for developing digital people, so that more developers can make virtual idols at a lower cost, and will be open to everyone in the future.
Next for you is the Unity Auto Streaming streaming rendering technology. This technology has enhanced the loading module of the engine to allow developers to quickly load cloud resources without modifying the code. Its characteristics are that it can greatly reduce the package body, do not modify the code, support resource updates, and run very stably.
Why should we develop such a technology? Because we found that now that the game is getting bigger and more complex, it is possible that the game will face hundreds of megabytes of resource updates when downloading, so that players have to spend a long time waiting. With Auto Streaming technology, we can make the game's package very small, so that players can open it instantly without waiting, and they can also play while going down.
We made a comparison with Boat Attack, a rowing game we developed ourselves.
This is the effect of using Auto Streaming technology, you can see a lot of material in the scene, gradually and quickly load in real time, and finally achieve a high-quality effect, the loading speed is very fast.
This is the original Boat Attack. Let's compare the picture quality, basically the same as the Auto Streaming version, the quality is not lost at all. The original package of this game had 167 megabytes, but after using streaming rendering, the package body was only 43 megabytes, which is equivalent to 1/4 of the original. The original package you can not use WeChat to share, but after compression is only 40 trillion, this size can also be shared with WeChat.
This technology is very important, because if we look at the evolution of game platforms, from terminal games to mobile games to mini games, we are actually pursuing a quick start. The possibility of a quick start is to acquire users quickly, becoming an explosive growth.
Based on Auto Streaming technology, we have now cooperated with platforms such as Douyin, Hand Q, and Kuaishou to launch an Instant Game instant game platform that converts mobile games into mini games. We have helped developers successfully convert dozens of mini-games, with the highest daily active level of millions, including "Never Give Up", "Graffiti Knight" and so on. It is equivalent to opening up a new monetization channel for these high-quality stock games and making them "revitalized".
So after the game, I will share a few industrial application examples. The metaverse we are talking about, that is, the three-dimensional digital world, may not be limited to games in the future, and the imagination space is infinitely vast.
Take architectural design, for example. The traditional design drawing modification is very troublesome, and it is a waste of time to remodel each time a place is changed. With Unity, designers can render the architectural model with various parameters in real time, once there is any modification, everyone can see it in real time, and can also add crowds, lighting changes and other effects, so that everyone can understand it at a glance, greatly improving communication efficiency.
Let's take a look at the next demo. This is a real-time BIM manager for the engineering and construction industry. With Unity, multiple people collaborate in real time, making it easier to communicate design intent. Through visual operations such as drag and drop, designers can use it without a lot of coding.
We all say that the next generation of smart cars is coming, and how to provide a personalized and immersive intelligent driving experience is the focus of competition for car companies at present. Unity is the key engine driving the next generation of embedded HMI experiences.
We say that the smart car of the future is a large mobile smartphone, and with the help of driverless cars and 5G, watching movies and even playing games in the car is becoming a reality.
We also recently partnered with Wandu, a South Korean self-driving technology company, to develop an ADAS front-facing camera emulator. Self-driving cars require a lot of training and learning to recognize road conditions, but many extreme situations rarely occur in real life. We've deeply customized Unity's editor to create thousands of possible road conditions to train the front camera and perform machine learning.
This project was developed and delivered by the Unity technical team in China. We're also working with many other leading companies, including Microsoft and Baidu, to support AI and deep learning testing for autonomous driving.
In the past two years, the concept of digital twins has been very popular. The so-called digital twin is actually a digital three-dimensional copy of the real world, which can truthfully reflect the changes in the real world and even predict the future.
We partnered with Hong Kong Airport to render several Ts of BIM data from the entire airport in Unity in real time, and at the same time, they also made it accessible to everyone in real time through the web page, which greatly improved real-time operational support and forecasting capabilities, which was unimaginable before.
In addition, Unity supports airports to build a complete set of automated data toolchains, reducing the time for scene updates from months to hours, providing a human-centered digital experience.
Finally, I want to mention Unity's cloud services. We're all saying that the metaverse is coming, whether it's in the game or in an industrial scene, if you really want to realize this dream, you first need to achieve seamless transmission and real-time 3D interaction, if we can really have a virtual avatar, into a digital world to do anything, it must be inseparable from the cloud. This includes stable game servers, smooth real-time voice communication, matching mechanisms if you want to fight, and most importantly, this metacosm is cross-platform, multi-platform network synchronization architecture, stable and rapid cloud streaming, and so on.
Unity is now not only a creative engine, but also provides a one-stop service from development to operation, empowering creators to build a complete metaverse ecology. That's why Unity is the most likely technology platform to be the technology base for the future virtual world. We hope that in the future, together with the creators of the metaverse, we can build a multi-dimensional virtual world of the future. This is also our beautiful vision.
Two days ago, there was an article in which Liu Cixin said a sentence, one leads outward to the sea of stars, and the other leads inward to virtual reality. We are going down this path, and we hope to build the virtual world of the future with you, thank you.