The metaverse that cannot run away, the virtual world is colder than reality

文|Banner Finance Mumu

There is no doubt that at this year’s WWDC (Apple’s Annual Developers Conference), Apple’s mixed reality headset Vision Pro is the absolute protagonist of the conference. However, the Metaverse, which has become popular in previous years, does not seem to have become the focus of this release. A hot word for meeting.

Not long ago, some media reported that Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu and head of the Yuanverse product "Xirang", had resigned. He has publicly stated that how to form a commercial closed loop in the metaverse remains to be further explored.

01. "Xi Rang" failed

As the first domestic company to launch Yuanverse products, Baidu may not have expected that this business, named "Xirang", which had high hopes, has now disappointed the company's hopes.

A multi-person interactive virtual world with identity recognition, economic prosperity, spanning virtuality and reality, and permanent existence is Baidu’s beautiful vision for the metaverse. In December 2021, Baidu announced the launch of the Metaverse product "Xi Yang". Users can use Baidu's independently developed 3D rendering engine and AI technology to create their own virtual image and space in Xi Yang, and communicate and interact with other users. Enjoy a variety of virtual services and entertainment.

In 2022, Xirang will launch more than 120 activities and spaces in the fields of culture, tourism, art, fashion, education, automobiles, technology, consumption and other fields. Just at the beginning of this year, Baidu also launched a new product based on Xi Yang - "Xi Yang Metaverse Base MetaStack", which can triple the development efficiency of the independent Metaverse and reduce operating costs by half, in as little as 40 days. Able to complete programming and construction of metaverse cities.

. The emergence of chatgpt instantly took away Xirang’s limelight. In the year since it was launched, users seem to have little interest in this product. Xiyang’s download volume and ranking in social applications are not ideal. Related topics are full of criticism of Xiyang’s single content and poor interactivity. Strong and all kinds of complaints.

02, Meta failed

Having the same fate as Baidu’s Yuanverse products, there are also a number of foreign industry giants.

If you want to say that there is a huge enthusiasm for the Metaverse, it is difficult for anyone to compare with Zuckerberg. In October 2021, Zuckerberg announced that he would invest US$10 billion every year to build the Metaverse platform. He also simply renamed Facebook Meta. It means that the entire company has begun to completely transform from online social networking in the real world to the virtual world.

In the past year, Zuckerberg spent up to 13.7 billion US dollars to build Metaverse products, but reality gave the Internet genius a head-on blow.

Although Meta’s metaverse platform has been released for one year, its user scale has not yet reached the 300,000 target envisioned by Zuckerberg, and is currently less than 200,000. According to the financial report, in the first quarter of this year, the company’s “Reality Laboratory” where the Metaverse is located suffered a loss of US$4 billion.

The stagnant number of users and soaring losses forced Meta to start a major layoff, which also attracted Zuckerberg’s employees’ doubts and investors’ criticism.

Like Baidu, Meta also began a 180-degree turn this spring and focused its attention on chatgpt.

03, HoleLen disbanded

In 2021, there is also a giant company that will also make a big move into the metaverse field-Microsoft.

In November 2021, Microsoft’s annual technology event Ignite 2021 opened online. CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft will explore metaverse technology. Microsoft has proposed two initiatives, the first of which is called "Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces", which will enable people to interact in any space, such as retail stores and factory floors, through artificial intelligence-driven models and observation data.

The second item is called "Mesh for Microsoft Teams", which allows people in different locations to join in collaboration through the productivity tool Teams, hold meetings, send information, process shared documents, etc., and share a holographic experience. This feature enables people to use personalized 3D avatars and experience an immersive space.

Microsoft is also focusing on hardware development, announcing that Xbox will be committed to integrating the Metaverse into games. Microsoft has developed mixed reality smart glasses HoloLens, which is related to AR/VR. Early last year, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion to "put players and creators first and make games safer, more inclusive, and accessible to everyone."

A year later, these projects had the same ending at Microsoft. There has been no news about HoleLen for a long time. In February this year, media reported that the Microsoft Industrial Metaverse team, which was only established for four months, was disbanded and more than 100 employees of the team were fired. As early as the end of January, Microsoft directly disbanded its HoloLens, AltSpaceVR, MRTK, MWR and other XR business units involved in the metaverse.

04, Disney turns

Like Internet companies, the entertainment industry giant Disney suffered a similar fate.

In March of this year, Disney announced a new round of layoffs, and about 50 members of the Metaverse strategy team left. A few months ago, Disney closed the Metaverse strategy department.

Launching the Metaverse Project, using Disney's extensive IP to tell interactive stories in the form of new technologies, was once the hope of Disney, which had encountered development bottlenecks, to seek a breakthrough.

In 2021, Chapek made a bold statement: "The Metaverse will be the future of Disney. Disney envisions that consumers in the future can experience its products no matter where they are.

After that, Disney took a series of initiatives and established the Metaverse business unit in February last year. Soon after, it announced the recruitment of corporate lawyers to explore transactions related to emerging technologies including NFT, blockchain, metaverse, decentralized finance (DeFi) and other emerging technologies.

There is no doubt that in the entertainment field, Disney’s Metaverse business has inherent advantages.

Disney plans to develop strategies based on usage data from theme park visitors and streaming platform users. Disney also has a "virtual world simulator in a real-world scene", which uses technology to present 3D stereoscopic effects and interactive classic IP to theme park visitors. This technology can track the visitor's mobile phone and generate a personalized 3D effect where it arrives, projected onto the three-dimensional space, walls and objects around the visitor.

Last September, Disney said that Disney would transform from a movie streaming service to an "experiential lifestyle platform" so that people who don't have the opportunity to enter the Disney parks can also immerse themselves in the parks, or even more, such as with Disney Princess Dinner.

This sounds like a very tempting plan, but in the face of reality, Disney’s path of exploration seems to have to be postponed.

05. The Metaverse failed to cross the conceptual stage

Statistics from the venture capital platform PitchBook show that the total financing of Metaverse-related startups in the United States in the first five months of this year was only US$664 million, less than a quarter of the US$2.93 billion in the same period last year.

Looking at the metaverse exploration journey of these technology and entertainment giants, although there are objective factors such as the gradual fading of Internet dividends in the general environment, the contraction of the virtual economy after over-expansion, and the return of offline life in the post-epidemic era, the metaverse is The concept itself also exposed various problems during its development.

First, unlike chatgpt, which continues to “implement” applications, Metaverse not only failed to find a stable business model, but also accidentally became a platform for crazy hype.

Soon after the concept came out, familiar hype players smelled the smell of money. Land sales in this virtual world are instantly more popular than in the real world.

MetaverseGroup, the world's largest virtual real estate developer, offered US$2.43 million to purchase virtual land in Decentraland. Singer JJ Lin also spent US$123,000 to purchase virtual real estate. Just over a year later, the real estate market collapsed, and many people made fun of JJ Lin online for losing 91% of his investment.

Since then, some people in the industry have pointed out that the Metaverse has not yet matured and is likely to become a channel for fraud and money laundering by some institutions and individuals. The lack of legal supervision has also made the world full of chaos. There are too many people who want to make quick money, the industry lacks a pragmatic spirit of being steady and steady, and shoddy products are constantly on the market. This is undoubtedly a fatal blow to the healthy and long-term development of the Metaverse.

Some insiders believe that judging from the existing Metaverse products, its needs can also be realized on the current Internet. In other words, the Metaverse does not provide incremental value. This may be the root cause of the coldness of the Metaverse.

Second, the technical barriers faced by the Metaverse are difficult to fully break through in the short term.

Previously, in Horizon Worlds and Microsoft Mesh for Teams, the user's avatar only had the upper body, which was criticized and ridiculed by players around the world because the current AR/VR headset cannot fully track the movements of the lower body and has to track the legs. Modeling motion requires additional sensors. Currently in the metaverse world, people's body shapes look very strange. This is due to the dual limitations of technology and cost. In addition, users complained about rough picture quality and poor interactive experience.

Analysis believes that the technical issues and hardware equipment faced by Yuanverse are common, that is, it is not a single product or technology that is stuck, but the entire upstream and downstream industry chain needs to develop simultaneously.

As Ma Jie said frankly, the current Metaverse still needs to overcome the challenges of the three mountains of visual, auditory and interactive technologies, and is still far away from Spielberg's "Ready Player One"-style imagination.

An open, free, and diverse virtual world, a dream utopia, is the common sustenance of all mankind. This is why the concept of the metaverse became popular around the world as soon as it was proposed, attracting many investors and technology giants.

Nowadays, whether in the field of technology or capital, the setbacks in the Metaverse may be temporary. There are countless challenges that need to be dealt with one by one, and there are countless levels that need to be broken through, but this does not mean that the human race will be the best in the Metaverse. The dream is completely shattered. For example, the emergence of the Apple headset has made many people say that we may be one step closer to the true metaverse. Perhaps in the near future, mankind can enter that beautiful utopia with the help of the rapid development of technology and the improvement of systems.

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