When ChatGPT was born, the large model seemed to instantly cover up the limelight of the metaverse, and people no longer talked about the metaverse as they did in the past.
The metaverse is a digital world and the vision of the next generation of the internet. It's about technology, it's about imagination. It is built to resemble the real world, with infrastructure, community and governance all indispensable.
In the third episode of the micro-documentary "The Teacher is Coming", Yang Wei, Associate Professor of Management at CEIBS, and Zhang Wan (EMBA2019 CEIBS), former head of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Association and Metaverse Special Committee, discussed the myth of the "Metaverse".
The future has come, when the technological revolution turns the virtual space into a part of the world, human beings can transcend the five senses and use the life form of digital consciousness to perceive the virtual and the unknown. At that point, everyone will be a "super player".
The following is an excerpt from the conversation:
The metaverse is the vision of the next generation of the internet
Zhang Wan: The topic of the metaverse was quite hot before. What do you think the metaverse is?
Yang Wei: Actually, at the beginning, we all said that the metaverse is a concept in Neil Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash", and the "metaverse" in the novel is the metaverse, which is actually a very advanced Internet concept, and we use some particularly advanced equipment to enter a virtual space and interact in this space.
What will the metaverse look like, what will it look like? What will it look like? I think this is actually the reason why people are so enthusiastic and interested in the concept of the metaverse.
Furthermore, the Internet is more of a communication tool than a social concept. It may be that in the next generation of the Internet, we will not only have a real physical world, but also a virtual digital world, which will not only allow us to better communicate further, but also make some economic exchanges.
Zhang Wan: Actually, the metaverse as I understand it is more like a big ecology, and this form is like the one we saw in the movie "Ready Player One", which is a concept that virtual and reality can be switched uninterruptedly.
If the metaverse is the form of the next generation of the Internet, then my understanding is that it is still in a relatively early stage, although there are some breakthroughs in various technologies, but it still needs a greater breakthrough in the complete ecosystem.
Are AR and VR glasses necessary?
Zhang Wan: Is the metaverse a false proposition? This is a point of controversy in the outside world. And how do we understand how maneuverable and interactive it is?
Yang Wei: I think this involves another layer of imagination in the metaverse. The vast amount of information that we transmit and create with Internet technology is actually very valuable, but we can't capture it well in the Internet. This requires an economic form, what we are talking about now is Web3, digital currency, including digital collections are all attempts in this regard, how to establish digital assets, how to exchange digital currency, in fact, are attempts at a new economic form.
Therefore, the metaverse is not only a technology, nor is it just an application for a specific scenario, but also an exploration of the system, that is, how we can create an economic form in the digital world and the virtual world, so that we can capture and obtain the value brought by information assets.
Zhang Wan: Today, when we talk about the metaverse again, hardware devices such as AR and VR are still in the stage of needing more good content and better immersive experience, which makes people confused about the arrival of the metaverse world, how do you see the relationship between AR, VR and the metaverse?
Yang Wei: I've been thinking about this question for a long time, do I really need to wear glasses to experience virtual reality?
Zhang Wan: I don't think you have to wear glasses in the future.
Yang Wei: That's right, I think glasses are just a medium, and the sense of interactivity and immersion is a personal feeling, which comes more from the content than the form.
If the digital world is developed enough, do we still need the real world?
Zhang Wan: I think the development of the metaverse is hierarchical.
The first level restores the real world to the virtual world 1:1;
The second level is to combine the virtual and the real, whether it is through VR glasses or other means, in fact, it is to add some virtual modes in the real world that we cannot experience.
Perhaps in the future, a completely virtual world will appear in the third level, which may not be based on the real world at all. I don't think it's technology that limits innovation, it's the human imagination that determines how to create the future.
Yang Wei: I think there are already a lot of practical cases in the first and second levels, such as digital twins, and the third level is probably the most potential and the most interesting point for everyone, how to create a real virtual world. We can even have our own digital identities and doppelgangers in the virtual world, which is a kind of imagination of our future lifestyle, which I find very interesting.
Zhang Wan: You made me think of an identity issue, from the ethics and management of identity, will digital doppelgangers cause a lot of trouble?
Yang Wei: This question is also hotly discussed at the moment, that is, how to further manage digital identity in the future development of the Internet? How to protect our privacy and make better use of data? How to build our system in the future, and how to better adapt to the development of productive forces? This is also an issue that the whole society needs to pay attention to.
Zhang Wan: Do you think there will be a completely virtual world in the future?
Yang Wei: This is to answer the question "If this digital world is developed enough, do we still need the real world?" I think of the movie "Ready Player One", and I think it reflects the thinking, even worry, of how to reconcile the digital and real worlds.
The digital world should be complementary to the real world, rather than putting the cart before the horse, which requires us to maintain a balance in policy and technology, which is also something that needs to be faced in the development of the metaverse.
Now the brain-computer interface that Elon Musk is talking about, I think it is also a part of the metaverse, and it is a very imaginative part, and there may be more than one form of human beings in the future.
The questions we talked about seem very philosophical, but as a professor in a business school, I think these imaginations are our business prospects, and how to combine our own lives, and even self-awareness, with technology and science, will have great economic potential and business opportunities.
Epilogue:
The three dimensions of the construction of the metaverse
Yang Wei: To sum up, the metaverse is an idea for our next-generation Internet. The construction of the metaverse needs to follow three dimensions: infrastructure, community, and governance.
Infrastructure is the same as infrastructure in the real society, we need advanced information transmission technology, such as 5G, 6G communication, so as to have high-fidelity information transmission, to ensure the reality of the "digital world"; secondly, we need to have information storage and processing, such as cloud computing; at the same time, some information exchange platforms are also an indispensable part of our construction of metaverse infrastructure, such as Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu in the Internet world.
The second dimension in the metaverse is community, or content and applications. For example, games and other entertainment and interactive content, or digital twins used to ensure industrial production and train autonomous driving algorithms, without which the infrastructure of the metaverse is like an empty city with only houses and no people.
We are now focusing more on the infrastructure level, such as VR and AR, but I think this track will be a competition for giants in the future, because the consumption of funds and supporting assets is too great. The hardware ecology of the metaverse involves the coordination and cooperation of multiple industries, from upstream communications, chips, cloud computing, to the R&D and production of equipment on the consumer side, there is competition and game of unified standards and compatibility in each link, and the uncertainty is very large, and it is not known what form the metaverse will really take.
I think that more opportunities are at the second level, which is more friendly to start-ups, because like the current Internet, each community and each application scenario is a relatively unique segment, and it is easier to grasp the opportunities.
Third, I think the more important dimension of the metaverse is the construction of institutions. We need institutional safeguards to carry out value-creating activities in a virtual digital world. For example, the exploration of virtual social and economic systems can make the value of digital assets better perceived, measured, captured and distributed. Although communication technology is now developed, we are still willing to talk about many complex or important things face-to-face, because face-to-face trust cannot be reproduced by modern technology, which is also a challenge for the current development of the metaverse.
In the future, which will not be long in the future, if no one talks about the metaverse anymore, it is probably not because the concept is already cold, but because we are really living in the era of the "metaverse". Just like now, no one will say "information superhighway" or "mobile Internet", because as long as you turn on your mobile phone and WeChat, these technical concepts have long been integrated into every moment of our lives. If we truly embrace a new social form, we may be facing a richer and more diverse world.
Source: Chinanews Shanghai