Source: Hunting Cloud, Author: Han Wenjing

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

In 2023, the eyes of technology giants all over the world will be attracted by AIGC, and the Metaverse, which was still hot last year, seems to suddenly "extinguish".

But, is this the truth?

Throughout the past year, while Metaverse has gradually shed the label of "on the cusp of the storm", the industry is also showing a trend of returning to rationality. Rather than saying that the market's enthusiasm for the metaverse has diminished, it is better to say that the market has become calmer.

"The development of China's Metaverse has become more pragmatic." At the second "Hurun China Metaverse Summit Forum" held last month, Hoogewerf Hurun, Chairman of Hurun Report, expressed his views on Metaverse and AIGC .

Hoogewerf mentioned, "In the past year, another hot topic was ChatGPT. Once it merges with AIGC, the development of Metaverse will be greatly promoted."

"Father of metaverse business" Matthew Bauer has also publicly stated that there are several types of enterprises that are particularly suitable for development in the metaverse, including companies that focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

In fact, since the birth of the metaverse concept, artificial intelligence has been included in its territory. The "rising tide" of AIGC will not bring about the "death" of the metaverse. With the continuous development of AI technology, its relationship with the metaverse Fusion is also getting tighter.

metaverse "press the brakes"

In the past two years, whether in the technology circle or the capital circle, the Metaverse has once become a hot topic of discussion.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, blew the clarion call to enter the Metaverse with a high profile. Many well-known domestic companies such as Baidu, ByteDance, and NetEase are also continuously iterating their own Metaverse applications.

After the concept of the metaverse was implemented in 2021, related industries in the metaverse further exploded in 2022. Until 2023, the generative AI represented by ChatGPT detonated a new wave of artificial intelligence.

Almost overnight, AIGC stole the limelight from Metaverse and became the "absolute top player" in the technology industry.

Relevant metaverse players are also retreating one after another. Technology companies at home and abroad, such as Microsoft, Tencent, and Meta, collectively "reduce" the metaverse business, and begin to change their development paths or reduce their staffing.

In January of this year, Microsoft announced global layoffs. At the same time, it also disbanded the Industrial Metaverse team, which had just been established for four months. The team and its two leaders, about 100 employees, have all been dismissed.

In February, Tencent stated that the game XR business will change the hardware development path, and the relevant business teams will make adjustments. In April, Meta began its latest round of layoffs targeting employees in the tech sector.

Data can more intuitively illustrate changes in industry heat.

According to a recent report released by Dappradar, in the first half of 2023, the total financing of metaverse projects in the world is about 707 million U.S. dollars, while the total financing of metaverse projects in 2022 is about 7.6 billion U.S. dollars. The financing amount in the first half of this year is less than that of last year 10% of.

At the end of last month, Meta announced its second-quarter earnings, and its Reality Labs division lost $3.7 billion.

Reality Labs is working on the virtual and augmented reality technologies needed for the Metaverse. Since the beginning of last year, the sector has lost more than $20 billion in total.

From this point of view, whether it is at the level of capital or the performance of related companies, in 2023, Metaverse does not seem to bring too many surprises to the general public.

More and more industry experts and observers are starting to stand in the "Metaverse is dead" camp. However, it may be too early to say bad things about the Metaverse. Although the industry has stepped on the brakes, its long-term vision is still optimistic.

According to the Metaverse Investment and Financing Report jointly sponsored by Sina VR and Qichacha Big Data Research Institute, in the first half of 2023, there will be a total of 221 domestic Metaverse investment and financing events, an increase of 194% over the same period in 2022.

Meta executive Vishal Sha once said that the metaverse has not disappeared, what has really disappeared is only the hype surrounding it.

Regarding the company's losses this year, Meta's CEO Zuckerberg also said: "We need to take a long-term perspective on this situation." He said that while continuing to invest in the field of artificial intelligence, Meta will still be committed to realizing the metaverse Vision. While investors may be concerned in the short term, he's adamant it's a long-term bet.

Zhao Baohua, the founder of the digital city Metaverse Yanjicheng, mentioned that Yanjicheng already has rich experience in the support of the underlying chain and the modeling of the Metaverse. At present, the company has also begun to conduct research in the field of AIGC, hoping to build on the new generation of digital technology. Carry out a full chain layout.

The emergence of AIGC seems to squeeze a part of the "living space" of the metaverse, but in fact, AIGC's multi-modal content production capacity is exactly what is needed for the construction of the metaverse. Beyond the cusp, Metaverse is developing silently with the help of AIGC, and it has also begun to gain some enthusiasm at the level of venture capital.

In August of this year, Jingxin Fund completed its strategic investment in Chuangyi Technology, a Metaverse enterprise. It is reported that in terms of the layout of the AIGC track, Chuangyi Technology has established in-depth cooperation with domestic general-purpose AI technology companies, and will use China's first digital human IP as the core, combined with large models to output China's first digital human with consciousness. people.

AI "assistant" for the Metaverse

In fact, AIGC and Metaverse are not concepts of the same dimension. The former is a new type of content production method, while the latter is a new type of digital ecology. The relationship between the two is not a simple zero-sum game.

At the beginning of the metaverse, AI was the underlying technology that supported the experience of the metaverse and became an important part of its infrastructure.

"Without the key of artificial intelligence, it is difficult to open the door to the metaverse." Yuan Foyu, vice president of Baidu, once said that as the link connecting the virtual world and the real world, AI is one of the key basic technologies for building the metaverse.

According to the latest "White Paper on the Ecological Development of Metaverse Industrial Chain (2023)" released by CCID Research Institute, by 2025 China will form a metaverse industrial scale of nearly one trillion yuan. In terms of the new technology infrastructure of the metaverse industry chain, the generative artificial intelligence represented by ChatGPT has become an important trend in the current and future AI development.

In fact, there have been many practical cases of AIGC's empowerment of the Metaverse. On the one hand, AIGC has helped the cost reduction and efficiency increase of the Metaverse. On the other hand, the application of AI will also inject more experience into the Metaverse.

First of all, at the level of cost reduction and efficiency increase, AI began to empower the Metaverse. Fangtang Planet, a virtual space scene solution service provider, has greatly improved the production efficiency of metaverse content with the help of AIGC.

Liao Qinghui, the founding partner of Fangtang Planet, told Lieyun.com that in the past, when the company was doing virtual scene design, it needed professionals to do the line draft and then draw the original painting. This process took as little as half a month and as long as a month. But now with the application of AIGC, the process of making original paintings has been greatly shortened, giving business departments more choices in the creative and original painting stages.

However, Liao Qinghui also said that at present, AIGC's 3D generation is still immature, but the industry generally believes that with the further development of artificial intelligence technology in the future, 3D generation will also be deeply applied to the Metaverse. In terms of content cost, AI helps the virtual space become better.

"In terms of popularity, people do pay more attention to AI in 2023, and the metaverse seems to be less popular; but in terms of the actual progress of the industry, the metaverse is currently in the stage from concept to implementation," Liao Qinghui said frankly. From March to now, in terms of actual implementation, the company's customers are still gradually increasing. In May of this year, Fangtang Planet also completed the angel round and angel+ round financing of tens of millions of yuan.

"Currently, the cost of 3D modeling in Metaverse is still relatively high, but as artificial intelligence modeling becomes more mature, this cost will be greatly reduced." Zhao Baohua, founder of Yanji City, said that the construction of Metaverse Modeling is essentially a kind of content production. The application of AI can reduce the production cost of modeling and accelerate the arrival of the Metaverse.

He said frankly that if online space modeling can reduce the cost from millions to hundreds of thousands, then a large number of brands will flood into the Metaverse without hesitation.

Secondly, AI has also played a significant role in enriching the metaverse experience. Zhao Baohua said that in the future, in the digital city of Yanji City, some small vertical models trained by AI will also be used, which can act as an "entertainment assistant" in the Metaverse, giving users a more realistic and lifelike virtual experience.

After the initial conceptual hype, the metaverse industry is gradually becoming clear. And those real investors in the metaverse after the bubble fades will also benefit from it.

Metaverse industry, the inflection point is approaching

This year is a year for the metaverse to continue to settle. Since 2023, domestic metaverse policies have continued to be introduced, bringing strong support for the development of the industry.

In March, the "Three-Year Action Plan for Internet 3.0 Innovation and Development in Chaoyang District" was released, launching a series of powerful measures to support the development of the Internet 3.0 industry. One horizontal multi-engine" Internet 3.0 regional industrial layout.

In June, the "Shanghai "Metaverse" Key Technology Research Action Plan (2023-2025)" was released, which proposed that immersive technology and Web3 technology should be the two main directions of attack, and independent innovation and open collaboration should be the promotion path , focusing on improving the self-reliance and self-improvement ability of science and technology in the field of "Metaverse".

In August, "Several Policies for Zhengzhou Metaverse Industrial Development" was officially released. Zhengzhou will set up a special fund for the development of Metaverse Industry with a total scale of 10 billion yuan. The fund is used to support the development of Zhengzhou Metaverse industry.

The capital market still has hope for the story of the Metaverse. Many people in the industry believe that in 2024, the metaverse industry will have a breakthrough state.

In June this year, Apple officially released the MR headset Vision Pro, which once again changed the way of human-computer interaction and gave a shot in the arm to the metaverse industry. This is a device worn in the form of glasses that can navigate with the eyes, tap and scroll the screen with the hand, and issue orders with the voice.

In early 2024, Apple Vision Pro will be launched. Whether it can disrupt the industry is still unknown, but what is certain is that Apple MR has become another key entrance to the metaverse.

Xu Bin, an international academician of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an academician of the European Academy of Sciences, said that although the discussion on Metaverse is not as hot as last year, on the one hand, it is because the public has a new hot topic of discussion, generative AI, on the other hand, it also means that the industry has returned to a more rational In the current state, more products such as Vision Pro will be launched one after another, and various applications will continue to land. "I think this is a very healthy performance. Such a precipitation cycle is needed for the healthy development of the industry."

"Basic hardware is the key to the development of the metaverse industry. When the hardware reaches the stage where consumers can afford it, a large number of consumers will pour in." Zhao Baohua believes that when 4k-level MR equipment can reach the price of a mobile phone level, the user increment of Metaverse Track will be very impressive.

However, at present, the infrastructure of the Metaverse is not rich enough, and there is no way for everyone to have a consumer-grade headset, which also leads to the short-term liquidity of the Metaverse. Zhao Baohua mentioned that Yanji City currently serves merchants in metaverse modeling, helps brands model and implement at the TOB level, and empowers merchants' digital city space to create a hyper-realistic metaverse.

Liao Qinghui also believes that only under the dual effects of the maturity of the underlying technology and the acceptance of the public can Metaverse show economic utility and value. With the improvement of hardware, especially after the output of Apple headsets in 2024, the industry will make further breakthroughs.

Strategy Analytics published a report titled "Metaverse Device Forecast 2014-2027", showing that by 2024, the market stock of Metaverse devices will double from the current 50 million to 100 million. With the dual support of technology and hardware, the metaverse industry may further create incremental value and give the market more surprises.