The brain holes of science fiction are often misappropriated into technology, but no word can be as powerful and unstoppable as "metaverse". After all, no one has heard of "the first year of the wandering earth" or "the force universe" some type of.

From the listing of Roblox in March to the scramble for global capital and technology giants, the Metaverse, which has become famous all over the world, is a well-deserved "quake" in the technology horoscope in 2021. The shock is thunder, and the response is huge, which can eliminate the dullness.

How hot is the Metaverse? Let’s not talk about gossip such as real estate speculators, WeChat business classes, and so on. Let’s talk about PANTONE, a color research organization that has nothing to do with the pan-Internet field. Because of the rise of the Metaverse and the impact of the coronavirus blockade, it will become popular in 2022. The color is "Very Peri Periwinkle Blue" because this color represents creativity, imagination and vitality.

How can the Metaverse dare to have the same global influence as the "New Crown"?

Since it is a sudden and abnormal sound of "thunder", in this article, let's talk about the reasons behind the thunder and the chain reaction caused by the thunder.

The thunder is loud: an Ivanho bet

It seems that the metaverse "suddenly appeared", but just as the thunder came suddenly, it actually experienced a series of processes of friction, heating, expansion and vibration of two clouds behind it, and the metaverse also went through a long period of brewing.

In 1992, Neil Stephenson proposed the concept of "metaverse" in the science fiction "Avalanche"; in 2019, Kevin Kelly (Kevin Kelly) also described a digital twin in "Welcome to the Realm" of large technology platforms. These imaginations are all the same as people’s definition of the metaverse today—a virtual world that simulates the real world 1:1, and is always online and exists forever.

But why does the Metaverse feel like it was born out of thin air, and it has even been selected for multiple annual hot words and buzzwords lists?

Let's first briefly sort out the timeline.

1. Warming up period.

In March 2021, Roblox, the “first stock of the metaverse”, landed on Nasdaq, ushering in a skyrocketing rise. Global tech companies quickly followed, with Epic Games raising $1 billion from investors including Sony in April to create its own "metaverse"; in May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company was working to build An "enterprise metaverse"; In August, Nvidia launched the world's first metaverse simulation and collaboration platform, Omniverse, and ByteDance invested heavily in the acquisition of VR startup Pico.

2. Inflation period.

On October 28, 2021, the American technology giant Facebook (Facebook) announced that it would change its name to "Meta" and change the stock code to MVRS. Under the hype, "Metaverse" attracted the attention of the outside world and "out of the circle". In addition to the active follow-up of technology Internet companies, Baidu released the metaverse product "Xiyang", NetEase released two major metaverse solutions, and Ubisoft announced the Ubisoft Quartz project, officially entering the metaverse and NFT... At the same time, many companies in traditional fields also To participate, fashion brand Balenciaga announced the creation of a "Metaverse" department to explore virtual world marketing, meat products company Shuanghui registered the "Original Universe" trademark, and Zhangjiajie Scenic Spot established Zhangjiajie Metaverse Research Center.

3. Volatility period.

Under the craze, there will be undercurrents, and chaos such as "real estate speculators" and micro-business classes will appear. At the end of the year, the countries where the Metaverse industry gathers started the "difficult" action of accelerating and curbing chaos at the same time. In terms of policy, Seoul, the capital of South Korea, announced in November this year that it would become the first city government to join the Metaverse, encouraging companies such as Samsung, Hyundai Motor, and LG to form a "Metaverse Alliance"; China's Zhejiang Province invested 7.84 billion to build a Metaverse base in Keqiao. . Regarding the "hype" that has caused heated discussions, some subjects have also issued warnings constantly, in order to standardize development. On December 9, the People's Daily published a comment, reminding the public that the Metaverse "is a process of gradual development, and beware of the risk of being too hot to burn."

Since the metaverse is not a new term, why is it so crazy this year? It can be summed up in three types of psychology.

1. It is easy to fish in muddy waters.

The concept of the metaverse is grand and the trend is far away, leaving enough room for capital, media, and enterprises to play. To this day, there is no widely agreed upon exact definition of the metaverse. Tsinghua University's 2021 Metaverse Research Report simply defines the Metaverse as "Massively Multiplayer Online Games + Open Missions + Editable Worlds + XR Portal + AI Content Generation + Economic System + Social System + Avatar System + Decentralized Authentication System +Reality elements" a fusion of a series of technologies. There is no uniform standard, which means you can interpret it any way you want.

The brokerage has drawn another big pie. It is predicted that by 2025, the domestic market space of Metaverse will be about 340 billion-640 billion yuan in social, games, short video, mobile office and other fields. Putting the metaverse label can attract a wave of attention, as if the value has increased, why not do it.

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2. Save the child.

In the face of repeated global epidemics, economic pressures in various countries, anti-monopoly review and strict privacy laws, and peak traffic dividends, technology giants also need to break the situation. Facebook's name change is also not unrelated to the increasingly strict supervision and the rapid decline of user reputation.

After the metaverse concept became popular, the promising entrance and supporting equipment VR and AR finally became active again after a few years of silence, ushering in a new wave of investment after 2014 and 2015. NOLO VR completed a $20 million B Round of financing, iQiyi Smart completed hundreds of millions of financing, Feidi VR Technology completed tens of millions of financing...

Although only OculusQuest 2 has really shaken the consumer market of VR headsets at present, it only attracts some game enthusiasts, and there is still a debate on whether VR is the entrance to the metaverse (the brain-computer interface player is also waiting), at least by the VR/AR, which has been neglected for a long time, has a new story to tell, which is enough for a wave of blood. Therefore, some foreign media believe that the popularity of the "metaverse" is an investment aid for some companies' failed technologies.

3. Getting bored.

After the epidemic, the digital life with the integration of virtual and real has accelerated, and everyone cannot move freely around the world. Many work and life have to be completed in the virtual world, which makes many people begin to believe and accept that the "metaverse" may really exist.

Zuckerberg himself also mentioned in the interview that the epidemic has proved that people can work in front of the computer for 8 hours, and TV/streaming media/video games are also virtual worlds, so the immersive virtual experience provided by the Metaverse is real. existing.

Maybe you will say, isn't surfing the Internet enough, why do you need to come up with a new concept? Let's think about it carefully. In the past two years, the digital world constructed by the Internet has become more and more substantive, and social networks have become a reflection of the real relationship network. The short video you just posted may be recommended by the algorithm to your second aunt in your hometown; The Internet has become the infrastructure supporting the development of the real industry, and it has begun to "turn from the virtual to the real". There has been no disruptive innovation in the consumer Internet field for a long time. The top apps in the application market are almost all inventions in the last decade.

Everyone's spiritual life in the digital world is getting more and more boring. The large virtual "playground" described by the Metaverse is indeed attractive to many netizens.

Although the current level of technology has determined that the real metaverse cannot be realized at all, it is still in the "imagination stage"; the content and details disclosed by various companies are very limited, either VR meetings or virtual parties, and no disruptive products have appeared. and business model, but under the impetus of various people and psychology, the Metaverse was like a thunder, which shocked countless people: "What happened?!"

Little rain: a long drought rarely comes with a good rain

In the context of our pragmatic Chinese people, everyone looks forward to the sound of thunder. In essence, they hope that the rain will fall after the thunder, nourishing the growth of various crops. "Dry thunder without rain" is somewhat derogatory.

So, did the thunder of the metaverse bring precious spring rain? Regrettably, aside from the flickering ingredients, only two or three drops of light rain really landed.

On the one hand, the progressive development of the prior art. In addition to the aforementioned VR/AR, other artificial intelligence, digital twin, blockchain, cloud computing, robotics, brain-computer interface, 5G, etc., which are considered to be the underlying support of the Metaverse, the technological evolution must be adapted to the stage of industrial development , iteratively driven by real needs such as games, applications, and industries.

At the same time, many Metaverses are secondary packaging of traditional applications and services, and do not bring about incremental demand. For example, the so-called "Medical Metaverse", through virtual reality wearable devices and AI imaging, doctors can see the patient's physiological structure for remote consultation, and give pathology and treatment plans. As early as 2019, the new crown epidemic prevention work was implemented. "Marketing Metaverse", a virtual idol endorsement brand and game IP implantation marketing plan, used to be called "Secondary Dimensional Linkage" and "Breaking the Dimensional Wall", but now it is "became by the Metaverse". Meta, the most powerful, recently launched the metaverse application Horizon Worlds, where users can use their half-body avatars to socialize casually, but the experience is not good; Horizon Workrooms uses VR devices to place whiteboards on virtual desktops in meetings to write, efficient Not ideal.

So, what can really drive the growth of all things and accelerate the arrival of the Metaverse?

1. The establishment of standards. The existing digital pillars such as communication networks, Internet technologies, storage technologies, and computing centers are not designed for the Metaverse, and the iteration and adaptation of infrastructure will take a long time. For example, transactions in the Metaverse rely on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, which are under controversy and regulation, and how the future will develop is still unknown.

2. The popularity of headsets. So far, VR headsets are still the key carrier for most people to contact and imagine the Metaverse. At present, VR headsets still have problems such as supply and demand mismatch, price not enough for the people, and insufficient penetration. Not everyone has a VR headset, and it is naturally difficult to form a large-scale ecosystem like desktop PCs and mobile Internet.

(Global VR headset device forecast)

3. Involvement of developers. The rich and colorful metaverse experience requires a wide range of creative software and application support. At present, developers can only develop through platforms or operating systems built by VR manufacturers, and almost none of them support the Internet of Things, smart devices, Internet of Vehicles, etc. With collaborative interaction and synchronous development, a perfect metaverse experience will naturally cease to exist.

At least for now, the Metaverse will face drying up of its growing soil for a long time to come.

Hide and Seek: The Ultimate Human Game

Of course, we're not trying to sing the metaverse. In fact, from a logical deduction, the picture drawn by the metaverse should be the fate of all mankind.

First, the integration of virtual and real has begun, and humans have begun to migrate from the offline to the digital world on a large scale.

According to CNNIC data, there are already more than 1 billion netizens in China. After the epidemic, the time spent online has increased significantly, and digital life has become the norm, which means that once the virtual world of the Metaverse is opened, it is easy to attract "new residents". Let's imagine that after "Animal Crossing" became popular, everyone called friends to "go to the island".

Second, intelligent technology creates idlers, who do not need or cannot participate in production, and whose spiritual needs are met through the virtual world.

The World Economic Forum's "The Future of Work" mentioned that the reduction of manpower caused by technology will lead to the loss of 7.1 million jobs in developed countries in the next five years, but in the fields of technology, professional services and media, 2.1 million will be created. jobs. Under the offset of the two, in the next five years, there will be a net loss of 5 million jobs, mainly administrative work and white-collar workers.

In general, more and more people will become "outcasts" of technology. Yuval Harari believes that in the future, there will be a huge group of people without jobs and goals who spend their time wearing VR headsets all day. And they are the "demographic dividend" of the Metaverse. The "Oasis" game in "Ready Player One" has always been the metaverse of choice for the metaverse, and it is precisely the protagonist who is a low-level person who uses the game to escape from reality.

Of course, don't think this is a very tragic thing.

Liu Cixin once described a completely virtual "invisible world" in "Time Migration", where people can really do whatever they want and create everything they want. "You can create an empire of a hundred billion people, where you are king; you can experience a thousand different romances and die a hundred thousand times in a thousand wars; where everyone is a world Master, more powerful than God. You can even create a universe for yourself, there are hundreds of millions of galaxies, each galaxy has hundreds of millions of planets, and each planet is different. You desire or dare not desire The world!" Once you have experienced such a life, the real world full of troubles is like hell.

"Entertainment to death" mentioned that in the age of television and the Internet, people have become more and more like to browse information, full of ideas without any action. The world of high-speed flow of information without continuity is a world that neither requires nor allows us to do anything, a world of complete isolation like hide-and-seek. Of course, like peekaboo, it's a lot of fun.

This is also the future the Metaverse could bring us, the ultimate hide-and-seek game. If you don’t believe me, think about how many people like to comment on Moments, post short videos, and give pointers on social media, or ask friends to have dinner or talk about a hand-in-hand romance?

Perhaps for the "metaverse natives", everything is optional. But for you and me who grew up in the physical world, in the future, whether to choose to enter the virtual metaverse and find solace in the digital world; or to open up more real space and keep the real encounter between people as much as possible, it has never been so confusing .

In 2021, dubbed "Metaverse Year One," we're hearing thunder rolls. As science fiction writer William Gibson said: The future has come, but it is unevenly distributed.