Author 丨 Zhou Feng
Edited by 丨 Barry
Image source 丨Meta
At the Connect conference in the early morning of October 29, Facebook founder and CEO Zuckerberg announced in a keynote speech that the company officially changed its name to "Meta", which is the word "meta" in metaverse. The reason for the name change is simple: it reflects the strategic direction of the company's comprehensive transformation of the metacosm.
Internet tech companies changing their names is nothing new, and Google is one of Zuckerberg's predecessors in this regard. In 2015, Google announced that it would change its name to Alphabet, spinning off its search and Android businesses to become a juxtaposed subsidiary of Google. After the name change, Google not only streamlined the already bloated organizational structure, but also clarified the responsibilities of its various business lines.
Fundamentally, Xiao za's operation of renaming the company is similar to Google's: social media Facebook has since been reduced to an equal position with whatsApp, Instagram, Oculus and other subsidiaries, and the parent company Meta has become the head office that coordinates the overall business.
However, this time the name change came more thoroughly. After announcing the name change, Facebook not only replaced the headquarters campus with a new logo, but also changed the US stock trading code from "FB" to "MVRS" - which can be seen as an abbreviation for MetaVerse or interpreted as VR will become the core of the company's future business.
At least from the name, doing metaversal, Zuckerberg is sincere.
Change the surname "Yuan", it is closer to the metacosm?
Since roblox, a multiplayer online game creation platform, was listed on the New York Exchange in March this year, the "meta-universe" has become an indispensable topic in the technology industry this year. In simple terms, this concept goes one step further than the "cyberspace" that describes the early years of the Internet, which is a perceptible and interactive 3D Internet virtual environment based on abstract information.
If you don't have an idea of the above text, you can recall the scenes depicted in the Hollywood movies "Ready Player One" and "Runaway Player" for the past two years. The earlier "The Matrix" series can also be seen as a "blackened" version of the metaverse.
In fact, Facebook's vision of the metacosm is somewhat similar to that of the movie. In the keynote speech, the scene behind Xiao Za switched from the daily living room to the virtual villa and space capsule, like dealing with real people, communicating and interacting with other avatars of users who are connected to the "Future Internet", and projecting everything in the virtual world into reality.
Most of these scenarios are games, but unlike traditional games, the player's experience is no longer projecting themselves onto a fixed screen, but rather being physically involved. In addition, remote meetings, learning, and fitness have also erased geographical restrictions due to the existence of virtual worlds.
However, in order to achieve the same effect as in the display, it is inseparable from the support of real-time interaction, high-speed transmission and other technologies, and also needs rich content ecological support. However, at present, real-time interaction and high-speed transmission technology still need to be broken, and ecological content is also in a conceptual state. Even Horizon Workrooms, Facebook's previous teleconferencing app, is seen by Xiaoza as an exploratory application in the early metaverse.
You may also find that changing the surname "Yuan" does not mean that the metacosm can become a reality in a short period of time. As things stand, the metaverse is still a distant illusion.
Change the surname "Yuan", figure what?
While the goal is far away, it doesn't mean that the renamed Facebook is unprofitable under the big concept of a "metacosm."
At the 2021 DEMO CHINA Innovation China Summit in September this year, Yuan Wenda, founder and managing partner of Red Dot Venture Capital China, said that "the rise of the meta-universe concept stems from changes in technology and demand. From PCs to the Internet to smartphones, every new era in the past 20 years has been behind the changes in the way humans and machines interact. ”
The reason why Facebook is so radical under the concept of metaverse is inseparable from a revolution in the way humans and machines interact - VR.
Since Facebook acquired Oculus VR in 2014, it has been looking at virtual reality as the company's key research and development direction. And this year, the 7-year-long investment seems to really see hope.
According to the incomplete statistics of Chuangbang, since 2021, there have been 58 AR/VR-related financing events around the world, and the total scale of fundraising has reached about 14.4 billion yuan. In the same period of 2020, there were 49 related investment and financing incidents, but the total scale of fundraising was only one-third of the current one-third, about 4.9 billion yuan.
The main reason for the new round of investment is Facebook's Oculus Quest 2 released last year. While solving the problems of VR equipment in the early years such as computing power and display effects, this head-mounted VR all-in-one machine lowered the threshold for VR entry equipment to less than 300 US dollars (about 1917 yuan) for the first time.
Experience improvements and price drops have led to an explosion in device sales. Facebook disclosed in the third quarter of last year that Oculus Quest 2 shipments in the same period reached five times that of the previous generation. The company also expects global shipments of new equipment to exceed 10 million units in 2021. In the eyes of industry insiders, the shipment figure is likely to double.
Hu Lin, executive director of Augmented World Expo Asia Pacific, said at the RTE 2021 Real-time Internet Conference that Facebook has verified the viability of the market in vr devices, and this year's shipments are likely to exceed 20 million units.
The investment community has a similar view. In the view of Chen Cangran, vice president of investment at Zhilin Capital, the growth curve of Oculus Quest has many similarities with the early iPhone, and Facebook's shipment expectations have exceeded the market performance of the iPhone 3G. He believes that the form of this product has truly reached the critical point of the outbreak of consumer-grade products.
However, the transformation of interactive technology and the surge in equipment shipments can only be regarded as time and place at best. "Whether the metaverse can really explode depends on whether users can get new experiences and whether needs can be truly met." Yuan Wenda thinks.
For the renamed Meta, the tipping point for profiting from VR has not yet arrived, and the company still needs more investment.
Earlier in the release of the third quarter earnings, Zuckerberg revealed at the earnings conference that the VR research and development department alone may lead to a reduction of $10 billion in the company's annual operating profit, and the company will recruit 10,000 engineers in Europe next year.
In addition, the company will also disclose the financial data of Facebook Reality Labs and the advertising business unit of VR/AR research and development separately from the fourth quarter. Similar to Google's name change that year, this move can reassure the company to continue to invest in VR technology and avoid affecting core business data.
Investing in VR = Exploring Space?
From 2015 to 2016, the VR field experienced a boom, starting from Oculus. The company, which had not yet been acquired by Facebook at the time, launched a consumer-grade product called Rift, which was brought to market as an interactive peripheral for desktop computers. However, at that time, the mainstream PC performance could not drive related equipment and content, and the imperfection of display technology also made users dizzy, fatigue and other bad experiences, and the vent period of VR was only one year, and then disappeared into the trough.
"In the last round of the boom, the industry did not realize that the technology at that time could not meet the imagination of VR." Yu Xiaoyi, investment manager of Matrix Partners China, once told Chuangbang that a large number of underlying modules and consumer product manufacturers had financing difficulties at that time, which hit the expectations of investors.
However, these problems are being gradually solved. Compared with the last boom, 3D modeling, spatial perception and cutting-edge display technology have been greatly improved, so that the vr device experience has entered an acceptable range.
Judging by Zuckerberg's presentation at Connect, most of the apps are still games. To some extent, this also exposes the lack of diversity in the VR content ecosystem.
According to industry insiders, the most abundant VR content at present is the game sales platform Steam. There are 8,000 exclusive VR games on the platform, and as many as 25,000 games that support VR. Of the VR hardware of the link platform, 50% of the devices are Oculus Quests — which means that most of Facebook's devices are shipped and have been married to the Steam platform.
Outside of the game scene, the application of VR is still difficult to have a breakthrough, and some insiders have observed that Facebook's return on investment in VR content construction is seriously unbalanced: "Invested $750 million, but the revenue is less than $1." ”
But on another level, the advancement of VR technology, like space exploration, is no longer limited to the benefit of the industry. Outside the narrow VR industry, the development of technology is bringing spillover effects.
"A lot of the technology today has evolved from VR technology, such as virtual production, preview, real-time scene reconstruction." Yuan Dong, Director of Developer Relations at HTC Vive Asia Pacific, introduced that related technologies have been widely used in the film and television drama industry today. Take the science fiction Drama "The Mandalorian" broadcast in 2019 as an example, 50% of the pictures are realized through virtual shooting.
In addition, medical care may also benefit from VR technology, and Hu Lin comes from this industry. After delving into telemedicine diagnostics- related technologies, he realized that VR could be the ultimate form of the industry.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the integration of telemedicine and VR technology. For example, in June, U.S. VR/AR telemedicine provider XRHealth announced a $9 million round of funding. The company, which combines VR headsets and immersive technology to allow patients to see patients at home, saw 1,000 percent growth last March alone. After the epidemic in the United States was brought under control, the company's business data only declined slightly.
Domestic Internet giants have also begun to bet on VR, the most recent case is ByteDance's acquisition of domestic VR equipment company Pico for 9 billion yuan.
"Now not only the big factories have entered the market, but the entire industry has also injected new resources and developed." After vr technology matures, it can access many industries, and the value of commercial applications is very high. Hu Lin said. From this perspective, Zuckerberg's ambitions in the direction of the metaverse may be far more than VR itself.