GoHundred, a media under Outing Club, focuses on the evolution of the automobile travel industry.

Author: Zheng Wen

This epidemic is still constantly exerting its influence, continuously eroding people’s connections in the physical world, but it has also stimulated new creative vitality. More and more offline activities have started to shift online. People’s retention and interaction time in the virtual space is increasing.

The problem is that online meetings and live broadcasts lack immersion and are easy to be distracted. So there are more participatory events such as online concerts and graduation ceremonies held in online games.

In April of last year, the famous American rapper Travis Scott collaborated with the game “Fortnite” and held an immersive virtual concert called “Astronomical” on major servers worldwide, attracting more than 27.7 million players.

In May, the University of California, Berkeley built a simulated 3D Berkeley campus in “Minecraft”. Graduates jointly participated in this virtual graduation ceremony in “Minecraft”, which includes speeches from the principal, degree awards, and tossing the hat. This projected virtual graduation ceremony is almost no different from the real world.

In July, the top AI summit AIAC2020 in the AI field was also held in Animal Crossing. The whole workshop was divided into four major themes, namely “Human and AI”, “Natural Language Understanding”, “Computer Vision” and “Game AI”, with a total of 17 speeches.

However, are these two-dimensional immersive experiences enough? Not enough! At the seemingly perfect time, with the fermentation of a series of events, a concept called “MetaVerse” suddenly became popular this year.

In March, Roblox successfully landed on the NYSE, becoming the first publicly traded company in the Metaverse. Roblox is an online game creation platform. This platform does not have specific game rules and storylines. Players can create, practice, and customize their own roles. Its low creative threshold greatly stimulates players’ imagination and creativity.

In June, Facebook became the first Internet giant to announce “All in Metaverse”. Zuckerberg promised that Facebook would spend five years transforming from a social media company to a Metaverse company.

“Metaverse” Completes Context Crossing

What exactly is “Metaverse”? Simply put, it is an artificial virtual space that runs parallel to the real world.The term “Metaverse” originated from Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash, published in 1992. The novel described a computer-generated world, depicted in the protagonist’s glasses and heard through his headphones, called the “Metaverse”. In this book, people in the information age have multiple digital personas made up of code for language, culture, genetics, and even consciousness. Time and space are no longer the basic measures of human consciousness, and humans live in the Metaverse, never logging off.

In fact, the Metaverse has been a classic theme and worldview of the cultural industry for many years, such as the matrix-simulated human world in the Matrix, and the virtual game world “Oasis” in Ready Player One.

Amidst the pandemic, the demand side of the cloud economy has undergone an explosive growth. The Metaverse has transcended its context and moved from the entertainment industry to a new arena. With the catalyst of capital, it has taken on a new form and entered the public’s vision.

Roblox attempted to summarize the eight key features that lead to the Metaverse:

• Identity: Having a virtual identity, regardless of its relevance to real-life identity;
• Friends: Having friends in this virtual space, engaging in social activities, regardless of whether they know each other in real life;
• Immersion: Being fully immersed in the scene and disregarding reality;
• Low latency: Everything in the Metaverse happens synchronously, without delays or asynchronies;
• Diversity: The Metaverse provides various content, including props, gameplay, artistic materials, etc.;
• Anytime, anywhere access: It’s possible to log into the Metaverse anytime and anywhere;
• Economic system: A stable and realistic economic system that operates within the Metaverse and can be exchanged for real currency for content creation and consumption;
• Civilization: A virtual civilization. Civilization is the ultimate development direction.

The only capital executive director, Shen Haifeng, had described Roblox as follows: “Many adults who have experienced products from Roblox feel terrible, but in fact, its target audience is younger users. From a demand perspective, neither a studio nor a developer can meet the needs of these young users. This is a typical open-source and decentralized product’s success.”Each user is allowed to produce content and world editing, and this decentralized structure has given rise to a vibrant ecosystem with rapid growth of developers and users, and strong social attributes. An interesting case worth noting is that under the highly artistic creation of players, even very excellent Three-Body animated films can be created based on Minecraft.

As Ma Huateng wrote in last year’s annual special issue “San Guan”: “Now, an exciting opportunity is coming. The development of the mobile Internet for ten years is about to usher in the next wave of upgrades, which we call the ‘True Internet’ …The door to the virtual world and the real world is already open.”

The True Internet is also another term for the Metaverse.

However, it is difficult to say that the “Metaverse Concept Stock” currently rising under capital drive has any relationship with the technological accumulation of the “Metaverse”. Like a pre-announced bubble feast, the attendees know it in their hearts.

Some obvious experience gaps are: although interactive technologies such as AR have been developed for many years, there is still a long way to go before fully achieving an immersive experience; synchronizing real-world information in real-time to the virtual space requires a huge amount of information transmission and network infrastructure is an obvious shackle.

Therefore, the Metaverse is still only in the concept stage. But discussions about the Metaverse are still meaningful. Just as the singularity was the beginning of the Big Bang, the birth of the Metaverse may mean the singularity of a technological explosion.

According to GameLook, the Metaverse is the intersection of different technologies and cultures that have developed to a certain extent. It is also the singularity of a technological explosion, integrating emerging technologies such as the Internet, social media, AI, VR, 3D graphics, cloud computing, blockchain, digital twins, brain-computer science, and others.

Fortunately, there are already companies silently cultivating in this field. In August of this year, Nvidia revealed that during CEO Huang Renxun’s speech at a press conference held in April, there were 14 seconds of a digitally synthesized “fake person” representing him. Virtual Huang Renxun fooled all the audience, demonstrating the charm of “augmented reality” technology that can make things look real.

Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used his virtual persona to talk about the work and future of the Metaverse with a CBS journalist in a virtual conference room. This is the virtual conference room function of the VR meeting software officially launched by Facebook.

Building a “test field” for user co-creation

Of course, the Metaverse is also closely related to virtual currency and blockchain technology that Musk is fond of.
It is a natural soil for applying virtual currency and blockchain. The blockchain provides the technical architecture necessary for the organizational, governance, and economic models of the metaverse. The decentralized values of blockchain are consistent with the “Co-creation, Sharing, and Governance” values of the metaverse, making blockchain like the air of the metaverse.

Currently, the automotive industry seems to have little association with the metaverse, but there have been some attempts. This is due to the decentralized characteristics of the metaverse, as well as the values ​​of co-creation and sharing.

In order to explore the value of data in depth, car companies are trying to combine NFTs (digitized assets issued on blockchain) to ensure data security while returning the data value to the producers themselves. Key elements required in their envisioned system are an economic system, decentralization, and co-creation and sharing, which are consistent with the values ​​of the metaverse.

On August 27, the IM Auto “YuanShiGu” officially launched on the “IM IM” app. This case has a clear shadow of the metaverse, where IM Auto users can gather here to develop primitive stones, accumulate points, upgrade equipment, and evolve their vehicles.

From this virtual system, we can see that “YuanShiGu” continuously aggregates user data, creates data value, and has a transaction system based on “YuanShi” as currency. Users can generate data value to obtain primitive stones and exchange them for various hardware or software upgrades.

According to official introductions, in the future, car owners can also have a virtual car, which will have a digital twin with a corresponding real-world vehicle. Virtual and real vehicles will be interrelated and mutually influential.

Some specific data generated by the real vehicle during driving will affect the characteristics of the virtual car. This means that your virtual car can gradually develop. Conversely, the virtual car’s development capabilities can also support real cars, providing the opportunity to upgrade some hardware or software services.

As the operation system of “YuanShiGu” gradually improves, “YuanShi” will have more rich application scenarios, creating more convenience and fun for travel and life.

As IM Auto’s Director of Digital Innovation, Qian Gang, said, “For young people in the Z era, there’s no more real or virtual world, mixed reality, and the metaverse is definitely the trend of the future.”The following is the English Markdown text, with HTML tags preserved:

Of course, currently it only has a very rudimentary outline. For example, "Yuan Shi Valley" only serves to produce data value and is lacking in immersion. Its social attributes are also difficult to expand. Nevertheless, despite its lack of substance, the case of Zhi Ji is still worthy of mention.

Sometimes, perhaps we need to believe in those seemingly impossible things, which will eventually benefit us. It is because we are still at the very beginning, the first hour of the first day.

This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.