VR technology continues to develop, the concept of "metaverse" in the virtual network world is also becoming more and more popular, VR is no longer limited to games and film and television, it will serve more industry fields as a tool to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
Wen 丨 Liu Jian
On August 26, VR Gyro released the news that ByteDance acquired Pico, a hardware manufacturer that currently has the largest market share in VR in China, and the purchase amount is speculated to be about 5 billion to 10 billion yuan. In March this year, Pico just completed a B+ round of financing of 242 million yuan, and the new generation of VR all-in-one Pico Neo 3 released in May, with sales exceeding 10 million in 24 hours.
On August 18, the Baidu World Congress, jointly hosted by Baidu and CCTV, can also be watched simultaneously in the Baidu VR World "Xi'an" sub-venue. This is also the first time that Baidu World Congress has tried to build a VR virtual venue.
On August 19, Facebook also launched its first VR virtual remote meeting.
As of the 26th news, China's VR/AR related financing reached 134 in one year. Whether it is the huge financing in the primary market, high-priced acquisitions, or the attempts of technology giants, the hot sales of products in the consumer market, it seems to indicate that VR, which has been silent for a long time, is about to make a new wind.
Behind the resurgence of the new wind, the content ecology of VR is gradually improving, and it is trying to do deep integration with vertical application scenarios. VR is no longer the youthful appearance when it first debuted, and today's VR is not limited to games and film and television, but is used in more and more industries and fields, including education, medical care, car viewing, exhibition and conference.
Baidu, Google, Facebook and other well-known companies have successively held virtual conferences online through VR, using virtual image construction, real-time intelligent voice and even somatosensory interaction to create a richer and more diverse online meeting experience for participants.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="21" > immersed, but not yet fully immersed</h1>
The metaverse, described in 1992 by American science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson's snow crash, became a buzzword in 2021. The "oasis" in Spielberg's "Ready Player One" is even more talked about.
Compared to the "oasis" world in Spielberg's Ready Player One, our original VR can be called "desert".
2016 is the first year of the virtual reality (VR) industry, but until 2021 ,2021 "the first year of the meta-universe", VR has been ridiculed most by users is, "The ash dropped on VR equipment is already heavier than VR equipment." "Vr experiences in the past weren't good.
Clarity, fluidity, and interaction are the three major factors that affect the VR experience. But the early local VR devices, either the picture quality is paste, the slow response is easy to make people dizzy, or the device is too heavy, inconvenient to wear, and the cervical spine is tested. It is not at all three major elements, but three "fatal".
Clarity: The number of all pixels that the human eye can see in a one-degree viewing angle is called PPD (Pixels Per Degree). The industry believes that the limit of the resolution of the human eye's retina is less than 60 PPD, and the larger the PPD, the higher the clarity. Since VR panoramic video will first project the picture onto a spatial sphere, the PPD of the video content is equivalent to the flat video resolution /360, and the clarity is greatly reduced. Even if you were originally 4K, you have to be highly mushy on VR.
Fluency: The refresh rate refers to the vertical refresh rate of the display, that is, the number of screen refreshes per second, which is generally higher than 72Hz. When the refresh rate is lower than 60Hz, the screen will appear obvious flickering and shaking, and long-term viewing will also cause eye fatigue and soreness. The level of the refresh rate actually determines whether you are watching a movie or watching a PowerPoint.
Sense of interaction: MTP (Motion-to-photons) is the delay from motion to imaging, and the industry believes that MTP should be less than 20ms. If the delay is too long, it will cause the picture to fail to keep up with the rhythm of head movement. Brain: I moved. Body: No, not yet. The brain and body lose coordination, triggering a feeling of vertigo.
However, with the combination of virtual reality and new technologies such as cloud computing and 5G, VR can enter a new stage: from primary immersion to partial immersion.
In the "White Paper on Virtual (Augmented) Reality (2017)", the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology proposed that virtual reality is divided into four stages: primary immersion, partial immersion, deep immersion and full immersion.
The emergence of cloud computing has replaced the hardware functions of local VR devices in large quantities, promoting the lightweight and mobile of VR devices; at the same time, the reduction of device hardware has also effectively reduced the consumption threshold of users.
In terms of clarity, the VR device solves the problem of clarity by means of local decoding, where the user looks at where to solve, and reduces the 3D problem back to 2D. However, cloud VR codec and transmission delay lead to the overall delay increase, the need for high reliability and low latency network technology as a guarantee, 5G has solved this problem well.
As a result, the combination of cloud computing and 5G, coupled with the concept of metacosm catalysis, has made the VR industry a new wind.
Although it is still only partially immersive, and there is still a distance from Ready Player One, it feels closer to seeing the actions of VR users during the epidemic.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="122" > the epidemic is too idle at home? VR is played</h1>
In the past, when it came to VR, everyone basically thought of playing games and watching movies, pursuing an immersive sense of experience. However, under the influence of the epidemic, everyone began to "think wildly", and VR gradually began to "wrong".
In April 2020, the famous American singer Travis Scott held a virtual concert in the game "Fortnite", and 12.3 million gamers around the world became virtual concert audiences. In March this year, iQIYI also launched its own virtual online performance - THE9 "Virtual City" concert. During the pandemic last year, the Communication University of China held a graduation ceremony in Minecraft.
ACAI, the world's top AI academic conference, held a workshop at the Animal Crossing Society. Some people even took math classes in the VR game Half-Life: Alex, during which the live broadcast on YouTube attracted more than 430,000 people to watch.
VR is usually divided into strong interaction and weak interaction, strong interaction is an immersive game, the user can interact with the virtual environment, the user himself, and other users. Real-time rendering is required and the equipment requirements are extremely high. Weak interaction is VR video or live broadcast, the content is relatively fixed, can be prepared in advance, and the user's interaction is also passive.
There is a concept in VR called Dof:degree of freedom, which is the degree of freedom.
Where 3Dof refers to the degrees of freedom with 3 rotation angles. That is, after wearing VR glasses (devices), it is possible to detect the rotation of the head in different directions.
6Dof adds three degrees of freedom in three positions: up and down, front and back, left and right. In other words, 6Dof VR glasses (devices) can detect the displacement changes brought about by body movement in addition to detecting the rotation of the head.
Therefore, it is actually easier to use VR to achieve exhibition meetings than to implement games. Unlike games, which require a lot of effort to build and render the environment, the location of the exhibition and conference is relatively fixed, and the requirements for the surrounding environment are not high. Technically easier to implement.
Moreover, traditional conferences and exhibitions are limited by time and space. Factors such as venue location, venue size, meeting time, meeting duration, venue and layout costs will affect the holding of a convention and exhibition conference. Coupled with the impact of the epidemic, the safety and experience of offline exhibitions are also difficult to guarantee.
The VR virtual world can break through the limitations of time and space.
In March last year, the HTC V2EC Developer Conference was launched on the VR collaboration platform Engage, and more than 1,000 people used HTC Vive virtual reality headsets to participate in the conference. In the meantime, the train on the screen really rushed into the scene, which can be called the "train station" of the 21st century.
The Lumiere brothers' "Train In" in 1895 marked the birth of the dynamic visual art of cinema. This "train entry" is the beginning of the next visual era.
In the near future, there may be such a scene. You're playing VR games, singing songs, and suddenly you're pulled into a VR meeting by your boss.
The experience of VR applications and terminal sales are mutually reinforcing. The advancement of technology has made VR have a better experience of use, and the richness of experience has also opened up the sales of VR.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="123" > the future is far away and close at hand</h1>
According to the China Internet Information Center, as of December 2020, the number of remote work users in China reached 346 million, accounting for 34.9% of the total Internet users.
According to KPMG Technology Innovation 2020, the pandemic has driven online office and consumption, and companies have increased their investment in virtual reality. 71% of companies have increased their investment in virtual reality, of which more than 40% of companies account for 14%.
As more companies increase their investment in virtual reality and the continuous integration of virtual reality with cutting-edge technology, the virtual reality industry will grow at a high speed. According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the global shipment of virtual reality (VR) terminals will be about 5.67 million units in 2020, and will reach 33.75 million units by 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 56%; In 2020, the global virtual reality (VR) industry market size is about 62 billion yuan, and by 2024 it will reach 240 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 45%.
Although remote meetings have now become the standard, they still have a clear "sense of distance" compared with offline meetings. This stems primarily from the lack of "interaction". Turn on the video and voice, employees feel stared at by so many people, insecure; turn off the video and voice, do not know what everyone is doing, the boss is insecure. VR can really achieve "far in the sky, close at hand" to break through the limitations of time and space, when there was no difference between online meetings and offline meetings.
However, VR conventions and exhibitions still have a long way to go. But the commercialization of VR car viewing and VR house viewing has been realized.
In 2018, Baidu VR and Uxin used cars jointly developed VR panoramic viewing cars. Including the closing door appearance, opening the door appearance, interior of the three parts of the three parts of the 360 ° panoramic view, the picture resolution of 8.6K, you can clearly see the vehicle scratches, engine model, wheel hubs and other details.
Through VR, the time transaction cost of used cars is shortened by 30%, and the cost of users is saved by 20%, which not only saves transaction time, but also improves transaction efficiency.
According to data from the Shell Research Institute, in the first quarter of 2020, brokers and consumers on the Shell housing platform jointly launched more than 18 million VR belt viewings, and the call length of VR belt viewing reached 507,000 hours, an increase of 80 times compared with the fourth quarter of 2019. In the second quarter of 2020, Shell launched an average of about 159,000 VR band looks per day, compared to just 11,000 in the same period of 2019.
The VR/AR industry has been listed as one of the key industries of the digital economy in the next five years in China's "14th Five-Year Plan". At the same time, the National Development and Reform Commission also proposed to build a virtual reality/augmented reality technology and application innovation platform in the "Internet +" field innovation capacity building project to promote the application of virtual reality in the field of Internet medical treatment and other fields.
In the industrial sector, there are many cases where employees are disconnected from functional information, and many companies are actively engaged in digital transformation and seeking solutions. VR is an innovative way to effectively connect employees and meet the needs of high-cost, high-practice, and high-risk fields such as medicine, military, aerospace, and deep-sea drilling.
Now, VR is no longer limited to games, but indispensable productivity. In the virtual world of the future 6Dof, games, meetings, car viewing, and skills training may be just one of them. In the "metaverse" of the virtual network world parallel to reality, we are far away and close at hand.