2022 Metaverse Annual Report: Where is the next 100 billion market capitalization company?

Odaily资深作者

2022-12-30 03:02

This article is about 21403 words, reading the full article takes about 31 minutes

10 minutes to look back at 2022, when the Metaverse exploded out of the circle, what kind of development will the new year usher in?

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10 minutes to look back at 2022, when the Metaverse exploded out of the circle, what kind of development will the new year usher in?

overview

In China, after the word Metaverse reached the top of "Chinese Inventory 2021" and "Top Ten Internet Terms" in 2021, it gradually transitioned from the field of "eating melons" familiar to the public to the application stage in 2022. In the 2022 Oxford Annual Vocabulary Selection, Metaverse ranked second, and its usage has increased nearly four times compared to last year; and Metaverse is among the "2022 Annual Technology Hot Words" released by Baidu Boiling Point and Phoenix Technology.

On the one hand, it is the public’s curiosity about the Metaverse, and on the other hand, it is the crazily learning of the Metaverse by enterprises. These two phenomena are a good proof of the popularity of the Metaverse in the past year. "I don't know three questions" has transitioned to "a little understanding", but after this understanding, most people sighed "too far away".

We have to admit that after experiencing the ups and downs in 2022, the Metaverse does not seem to have brought too many surprises to the general public, and even because of the fall of Meta’s stock price, the Metaverse has been put on the cloak of a “scam” again, but these are more What is more important is the phenomenon shown in the early stage of the industry, which is not viewed from the perspective of development.

Therefore, as early participants and builders of the industry, we (MetaverseHub), the heart of the metaverse, have not only witnessed the transformation of the metaverse from no interest to discussion, but also seen the transition from fanfare to suspicion, but these good and bad are outlined. Outline the development context and future outline of the industry.

As observers of the industry, we have our own thinking and understanding. The coming year of 2022 will bring new vitality to the metaverse, whether it is the blessing of enterprises, the help of capital, or the encouragement of policies. The industry has quietly changed.

Standing at the end of the year, we have once again jointly focused on the technological development trend of the global blockchain industry and deeply cultivated the metaverse and Web3. The five sections of "Universe", "Metaverse Basic Theory", "2022 Metaverse Industry Chain", "Top Ten Key Words of the Year" and "2023 Outlook" sort out and review the development of the industry in the past year, both sorting out the past and looking forward to the future.

Metaverse under discussion

The Background of the Birth of the Metaverse

Philosopher Karl Theodor Jaspers said, "Modern science brings the world into the laboratory, and modern technology in turn brings the laboratory into the world. The 'eyes' of science and the 'hands' of technology are increasingly building the world into one artificial world of technology."

In the past ten years, the Internet has provided an accelerator for the development of human society, and provided a new form and foundation for economic development. The upgrading of storage, network, and computing has promoted the formation of experience economy. Human history has gradually transitioned from agricultural economy, industrial economy, and service economy to experience economy. Society is gradually moving from the Internet age to the digital age. Web3, cloud computing, big data, Networking, supercomputers, brain-computer interfaces... Many emerging technologies have moved from science fiction to reality and reshaped our lives.

Advanced technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence have disappeared from the Gartner technology maturity curve, and are replaced by subdivided tracks in related fields. This marks the gradual maturity of the new technology, followed by explosive application growth.

Technology and the development of the times are interdependent and interdependent. And as technology becomes digital, or once it can be programmed into computer code represented by 0s and 1s, it can break free from Moore's Law and begin to accelerate exponentially. We need a refined and highly generalized vocabulary to define this new era—the "metaverse" came into being.

History of the Metaverse

Metaverse is not a new term.

In 1981, American mathematician Vernor Vinge built a virtual world connected through a brain-computer interface in "True Names".

In 1990, academician Qian Xuesen proposed the concept of "spiritual realm", and believed that this technology would trigger some changes that would shake the world.

In 1992, Neal Stephenson first mentioned the two concepts of "Metaverse" and "Avatar" in "Avalanche", which provided a blueprint for the future development of technology.

In 2018, the movie "Ready Player One" was released simultaneously in China and North America, presenting the virtual world closely connected with the physical world to the world.

In March 2021, Roblox listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the concept of metaverse, and the concept of metaverse quickly became popular all over the Internet.

In April 2021, the U.S. military spent $21.9 billion to purchase MR headsets from Microsoft. In the same month, Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun used a 14-second digital avatar to attend the GTC keynote speech, but no one found it after 4 months.

In August 2021, Bytedance acquired Pico, a VR startup company, to lay out the consumer-grade virtual reality hardware market.

In October 2021, the social media giant Facebook announced that it would officially change its name to "Meta", and proposed a plan to invest approximately US$10 billion in research and development of Metaverse-related technologies in 2022.

In December 2021, Baidu launched the first domestic metaverse product "Xi Rang".

In January 2022, Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for US$68.7 billion, which was the first shot for the technology giant to seize the high ground of the metaverse track. In the same month, Qualcomm and Microsoft cooperated in a number of programs to expand and accelerate the application of AR in the consumer and enterprise markets.

In June 2022, the world's first Metaverse International Standards Alliance was announced, and 30 global technology giants including Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Huawei, and Alibaba Dharma Institute participated in it.

In August 2022, Canadian scientists achieved the first international two-way holographic transmission, transmitting human holographic images from the United States to Canada.

Metaverse has gradually become a new form and method of reform in all walks of life, and has become an important strategic direction for the development of many companies. At the same time, the metaverse has also been highly valued by governments around the world, and has become one of the vanes of national policies.

After two years of baptism, Metaverse has officially become a pillar industry in the digital economy era.

Bloomberg predicts that the metaverse market is expected to reach 800 billion US dollars in 2024; McKinsey, a well-known consulting firm, predicts in a report that by 2030, the metaverse is expected to create a new market with a scale of 5 trillion US dollars; and Meta commissioned the international economic consulting company Analysis Group The first metaverse white paper compiled believes that the potential market size of the metaverse may exceed 80 trillion US dollars, and perhaps a new blue ocean market is showing us.

Metaverse Definition 2022

As the hottest emerging industry in the world, Metaverse has ushered in a new era of the Internet. Many well-known institutions, large enterprises, and authoritative organizations have entered the game one after another. The research on the industry segmentation track is emerging one after another. The Metaverse is popular. The views of many experts and scholars have not yet reached a consensus, and the definition of the Metaverse is also different. enough, we need to keep exploring.

In the past 30 years, people have been exploring this virtual world, which is similar to but different from the real world. The metaverse is seen as the ultimate form of the next-generation Internet. It not only has great potential to promote the adoption of Web3, but also has a profound impact on the future of business, games, entertainment, work and social media. So what is the metaverse?

In 2021, the Metaverse is still in its infancy, and different industries and leaders have different views on the concept of the Metaverse. For example, Roblox, the "first stock in the Metaverse", stated in its prospectus that the Metaverse should have eight elements: identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, anywhere, economy, and civilization.

And Meta CEO Zuckerberg, who has comprehensively laid out the metaverse, believes that the metaverse is a network composed of immersive 3D digital worlds, which will one day become the main way people live and spend time.

Matthew Bauer, the father of metaverse business, even used a book to provide a comprehensive definition of the metaverse. He believes that the metaverse is a large-scale, interoperable real-time rendering 3D virtual world network that can be created by an infinite number of Users are experienced synchronously and continuously, with a sense of personal presence and continuity of data such as identities, histories, rights, objects, communications and payments.

After experiencing the explosion, the Metaverse is now gradually returning to calmness. People realize that the Metaverse does not belong to any company, nor does it belong to any giant company. Defining the Metaverse of 2022 is like trying to define the Internet of 1992, no matter how you define the Metaverse, it will not be complete. Only with the passage of time will there be a general understanding of it.

Metaverse Infrastructure and Theory

Metaverse Theoretical Basis

With the development of the Metaverse industry, discussions on the theoretical basis of the Metaverse have emerged in an endless stream. We have sorted out the mainstream views, and based on the "Six Principles Framework", we have briefly explained the theoretical basis of the Metaverse.

The "Six Principles" framework was proposed by the New Media Research Center of the School of Journalism and Communication of Tsinghua University, including six dimensions: the development of mathematical thinking, the formulation of physical rules, the creation of geographical space, the adjustment of psychological states, the logical judgment of events, and the maintenance of ethical order.

The development of mathematical thinking is the absolute rule of metaverse operation and succession. In fact, the concrete "metaverse" that users can perceive is based on the abstract "metaverse" constructed by data elements. The abstract "metaverse" is first of all a "metaverse" in a mathematical sense, which is a homomorphic mapping established by abstract algebra and isomorphic models. Having a certain amount of mathematical thinking is crucial to understanding the Metaverse.

The formulation of physical rules is the mechanical rules and the logic of space-time interaction in the Metaverse. The birth of physics has changed our understanding of the universe. In a sense, the metaverse is a replica of the physical world. Although users can accomplish many fantastic things in the metaverse that do not conform to the rules of physics, However, certain physical specifications still need to be met.

Geospatial creation provides experiential space-time scenes for the Metaverse. The metaverse breaks the constraints of time, space and distance, and in a sense has infinite geographical space. The future metaverse is mainly divided into two directions. One is a virtual world that is completely consistent with the physical world generated by digital twins, and the other is an editable world that is not available in the real world generated by code. Users can buy and rent in the metaverse Land, construct buildings, and create your own virtual geographic space.

On the basis of the above three theories, the civilization and social organization structure in the metaverse are the main points of our further attention.

Mental state adjustment realizes the metaverse human-computer relationship and the communication environment to shape cognition and identity. The immersive sense of interaction and presence brings users a sense of the environment, which requires users to improve their recognition of virtual identities.

When it comes to virtual identities, logical judgments are particularly important in this dimension. Users need to cope with the changes in social organization and operation caused by the interaction of virtual people, robots, and real people, and adapt to the new lifestyle combining virtual and real.

The most important theoretical basis is the maintenance of ethical order, the mapping of the metaverse to the physical world, the protection of digital personality, the maintenance of social civilization order, and the construction of the metaverse economic governance system all need to conform to the basic ethical order.

Of course, although the description of this framework is difficult to understand at first glance, it has a taste of dialectical materialism, and it captures the essence of the metaverse, and its logic is more rigorous. Therefore, we can use it as a 2022 From the perspective of the "metaverse theoretical foundation" of the year.

Metaverse Hexagonal Principle

Metaverse is the product of multi-technology integration and development. The formulation of the current Metaverse one-stop solution is inseparable from the Metaverse hexagonal principles, namely computing power, algorithms, communication, interactive technology, property rights rules, and application scenarios.

Computing power:In the Metaverse, computing power chips such as GPU and CPU provide computing power support. For the metaverse with massive data, computing power is an important cornerstone of the metaverse.

algorithm:The algorithm defines the basic rules and presentation methods of the metaverse, and realizes functions such as physical model, AI, image, sound, and animation rendering. Smart algorithms can reduce the number of developments and lower the barriers to use.

communication:In order to ensure low latency and immersion in the Metaverse, network communication technologies such as 5G are essential. These technologies are the technical guarantee for Metaverse users to access the Metaverse anytime, anywhere.

Interactive technology:VR, AR, MR, brain-computer and other technologies serve as the interface between real people and the metaverse, which greatly promotes the immersion and sense of presence in the virtual space, and brings infinite possibilities for content creation in the virtual world.

Property Rights Rules:Based on the logical basis of the Metaverse, blockchain technology provides convenient and efficient ownership certification. Any digital assets will be owned by individuals, and no one can arbitrarily change other people's digital assets, let alone arbitrarily embezzle them.

Application scenario:Metaverse will greatly promote the process of social development towards digitalization, which is a long-term and lengthy process. Metaverse is the crystallization of digital development. It has built a virtual world integrating social entertainment, study and life, work and production, and is closely integrated with the real world.

Metaverse basic technology

The technologies involved in the metaverse are very complex. In fact, we can divide them into three categories: network and computing power technology, algorithm architecture technology, and immersion and interaction technology.

Network and Computing Technology

The development of network and computing technology provides the possibility of high synchronization and low latency for the Metaverse. Technologies such as cloud computing provide the computing power foundation for Metaverse, and are responsible for big data analysis of long-period data. Edge computing is responsible for the analysis of real-time and short-period data, which can better support the timely processing of data. The advancement of ubiquitous computing and artificial intelligence has promoted the development of ubiquitous intelligence in the Metaverse. Semantic computing makes Internet data into machine-readable language by adding a large number of semantic modifiers to content, and ultimately makes the Internet more and more intelligent, gradually moving towards the Web3 era.

Algorithm Architecture Technology

Algorithm architecture technology is the foundation of metaverse construction, including artificial intelligence, 3D engine, blockchain, big data, digital twin and digital simulation technology. Artificial intelligence provides efficient and beneficial tools for the massive data processing of the metaverse, and has become the technical basis for important components of the metaverse, such as digital assistants and AIGC.

The 3D engine provides the necessary incubator for the landing and application of the metaverse world, and provides the possibility for users to create the world. The blockchain has the characteristics of decentralization, transparency, and non-tampering, and it has built a necessary handle for the capitalization of data elements. Big data, digital twins, and digital simulation technologies analyze and recreate the physical world, making it possible for Metaverse to reproduce all production and lifestyles in the physical world.

Immersive and Interactive Technology

Immersion and interaction technology is mainly based on extended reality, naked eye 3D, PC/mobile phone, Internet of Things, sensor technology and brain-computer interface. With the promotion of 5G technology and the advancement of technologies such as ultra-high-definition reality and cloud rendering, voice interaction, tactile interaction, and mobile interaction are gradually upgraded. The fully immersive user experience in the metaverse era may still be far away, but the upgrade of relevant technologies provides the basis for related software and hardware iterations, and is an essential key technology for the metaverse.

2022 Metaverse Industry Chain

Industry Penetration Chart

With the continuous extension of the connotation and extension of the metaverse, the metaverse industry chain has gradually formed, and has provided strong support for the theory of the metaverse. The current metaverse is mainly divided into hardware layer, technology layer, software layer, service layer and application layer.

The hardware layer is mainly based on Internet infrastructure, computing power hardware, and perception and interaction equipment, with cloud servers, wearable devices, GPU and other chips as the core, which is the cornerstone of the Metaverse industry and provides the necessary carrier for the development of the Metaverse.

The technical layer is divided into development technology, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence technology, interactive technology, network and computing technology, and Internet of Things technology, which provides prerequisites for the implementation of metaverse application scenarios.

The software layer is divided into system software and application software, which jointly shape the soil for the co-construction of the metaverse, create an "oasis" for the metaverse, and provide handy tools for the construction of the service layer and application layer.

The service layer is mainly composed of digital payment, distribution platform, content operation and channel sales. It is the starting point for the content creation of the metaverse and the economic development of the metaverse. Through the upgrade of the service layer, the infrastructure of the metaverse era will be improved.

The application layer is an important part that users can perceive, including digital medical care, intelligent industry, education and training, digital office, etc., breaking the barriers between the physical world and the virtual world, and allowing the Metaverse to shine into reality.

Development of Overseas Metaverse Giants

The development of Metaverse is inseparable from the help of relevant companies. Taking Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Roblox, Apple, Amazon, Epic Games, and Unity as examples, we will take stock of the development of overseas Metaverse giants to gain a preliminary understanding of the current development pattern of the Metaverse industry.

Meta

Last October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was renaming the company Meta and set his sights on the Metaverse, which he dubs "the successor to the mobile internet." But 12 months later, after losing $15 billion on the Metaverse business, the company is barely making waves.

Meta's market cap is down 57% in 2022, roughly double that of Amazon and Alphabet, and more than four times that of Apple. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal in October, Meta has less than 200,000 monthly active users on its Horizon Worlds platform, which is not satisfactory.

Meta entered 2022 with strong momentum, but the turbulent economy forced the company to stagnate its strategic approach to massively deploy the Metaverse. In early October, Zuckerberg launched the Meta Quest Pro VR headset. Most users were surprised, especially since the "Pro" headset didn't improve the VR experience much.

Microsoft

At Microsoft Build 2022, Microsoft convened a panel of experts to discuss the company's metaverse strategy, which focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on Microsoft's Teams collaboration platform.

Most people associate the Metaverse with games, Facebook parent company Meta, and its Quest VR headset, but Microsoft’s CVP Alysa Taylor noted that there are “dozens” of definitions for the Metaverse, and Microsoft’s take on the Metaverse is that it involves "The ability to connect the digital and physical worlds". In Microsoft's view, the Metaverse's digital representations of people, places, things, and processes must be persistent.

It's worth noting that Microsoft's vision for the Metaverse is not just about recreating physical spaces in digital spaces, it also wants to apply artificial intelligence in the Metaverse to gain insights based on the data it generates.

Nvidia

As early as last year's NVIDIA GTC 2021 conference, NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun simulated Huang Renxun himself in a virtual environment through its 3D collaboration platform Omniverse. To move closer to the digital space network and take full advantage of artificial intelligence, NVIDIA announced in August 2022 a broader plan to develop a Universal Scene Description (USD), making it the foundation of the Open Metaverse and 3D Internet.

"USD will enable 3D artists, designers, developers, and others to collaborate across different workflows and applications when building virtual worlds," said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of omniverse and simulation technologies at NVIDIA.

Roblox

Roblox is also known as "the first stock in the Metaverse". It went public with the concept of the Metaverse, which not only detonated the technology industry, but also attracted capital and Internet giants to enter the market one after another.

Roblox is currently one of the most influential game creation platform companies in the world. In Roblox, everyone has their own digital identity to socialize. Unlike most platforms, the economic system built by Roblox connects content creators and consumers without being separated. It is precisely this kind of business model reform that makes Roblox a creation with metaverse characteristics. type platform.

In fact, Roblox is not only a gaming platform, but also an educational platform. It goes deep into the field of education to create digital classrooms and breaks the shackles of traditional education models. Perhaps in the future, Roblox is likely to become a standardized learning tool in the Metaverse.

As this young audience grows, Roblox hopes to take its world experience to the next level, offering new ad types and branded content experiences, as well as improved visual elements.

apple

Apple's metaverse strategy has been a mystery since the metaverse craze started. But Apple's interest in the AR space is nothing new, and they had an early AR prototype back in the late 80s.

In 2015, Apple clearly formed a small team to work on augmented reality, but Apple said they were going to do something very different from Google, and they started the process by hiring new experts and acquiring companies with mature innovative technologies .

Apple has developed a series of patents, including the recently popular finger gesture VR interaction detection input system, which makes gesture-based control simple and natural when using VR/AR displays. While the lidar sensor is already present in all iPhone Pros, this advanced technology is invaluable for mapping areas for augmented reality.

Apple has also made strides in creating custom ARM processors that are powerful enough for laptops but portable enough for mobile devices. Apple has essentially made Metaverse-related hardware available to the common man without even needing explicit marketing or announcements, and over time, this could lead to a passive development of the Apple Metaverse.

In addition, Apple's mobile devices have a 70% market share among young Americans, which is an important part of corporate product promotion and provides a prerequisite for Apple's entry into the Metaverse market in the future.

amazon

Like Apple, Amazon's metaverse strategy has not been made public. However, in 2022, Amazon has launched recruitment in related fields, seeking senior product managers related to the game technology department with metaverse experience. Aside from that, little is known about Amazon's recent release of a Metaverse game called Cloud Quest.

Technically speaking, Cloud Quest is a small Amazon metaverse itself, and the game uses various advanced technologies and utilizes Amazon's AWS cloud computing infrastructure.

Separately, Amazon recently launched an augmented reality tool called the Amazon AR Room Decorator. AR Room Decorator is a massive upgrade to an old Amazon tool called Amazon VR View, which allows users to place furniture Amazon wants in their homes in augmented reality to better decide whether to buy it.

Epic Games

Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, is one of many companies exploring the metaverse of gaming, and its metaverse platform predates the advent of the metaverse era. Unlike the metaverse based on blockchain technology, which was popular around the world some time ago due to the sale of NFT plots, but is relatively barren, "Fortnite" has a thriving ecosystem and a large user base to participate in virtual activities.

In April 2022, Kirkbi, the owner of Sony and the Lego Group, invested $2 billion in Epic Games to develop its metaverse, and Epic Games' valuation rose to $31.5 billion. These partnerships, Sony and LEGO, will increase Epic Games' ability to reach different age groups and integrate experiences into its virtual worlds.

In December 2022, Epic Games revealed in a speech that they are developing a programming language Verse dedicated to the construction of the metaverse, in order to become a platform for developers and creatives that supports real-time social 3D interaction and does not have a dominant company in the digital economy. An open platform to realize Epic Games' ultimate vision for the Metaverse.

Epic Games is a big advocate of the Metaverse and a trailblazer on this theme. It organized successful virtual concerts and film screenings within Fortnite to prove that such events can reach millions of people looking for new forms of entertainment. While many of these events are marketing moves to demonstrate the prowess of Epic's technology, they also signal consumer interest in using virtual worlds. Epic's large user base enables it to test new experiences and develop compelling Metaverse products in the future.

Unity

Founded in 2004 as Over the Edge Entertainment, Unity aims to sell game engines and design tools to small customers, allowing creators to access their own game development tools and libraries. Unity then embedded a monetization tool for creators, and over time, became an end-to-end creator-centric platform.

Unity has rapidly expanded its metaverse program through acquisition strategies, and Unity has acquired more than 20 startups at a price of more than 25 billion US dollars. These acquisitions not only helped them build a modern stack to develop virtual platforms, but also helped them integrate evolving technologies such as AI/ML, Datafication, smart photogrammetry, and AR/VR/MR into game engines. Unity has greatly influenced the presentation layer of the Metaverse, and maintains strong strategic partnerships with tech companies and startups powering the underlying layers of Metaverse applications.

Unity has a strong foothold in the game and entertainment industry. With the arrival of the metaverse, the creator economy has a new way of development. The interactive real-time 3D/2D content market in industries other than games is still in its infancy. The authors will play a key role in furthering this technology. Unity may become a leader in the development of related fields in the next 10 years.

Metaverse Application Scenarios

After more than a year of development, the Metaverse is no longer a castle in the air, and has many practical application scenarios. We sorted it out, roughly divided into the following aspects.

smart transportation

As a large-scale, all-round transportation and management system, the intelligent transportation system is a transportation management system integrating multiple technologies. Through digital twins, augmented reality, virtual reality and many other technologies, Metaverse reproduces the physical world in the virtual world and realizes overall planning. It can provide vehicle-road integration solutions for smart transportation, build a visualized smart road network, and promote smart roads and smart roads. Applications such as navigation, smart traffic management, and smart networking have been implemented. It effectively alleviates traffic congestion, improves the passing capacity of the road network, reduces traffic accidents, reduces energy consumption, and reduces environmental pollution.

smart energy

Smart energy refers to a new form of energy use that realizes source-network-load-storage interaction, multi-energy coordination and complementarity, and intelligent regulation of energy demand through extensive collection of energy use information and online analysis of energy efficiency. Smart energy has realized the intelligent upgrade of energy, and established and improved energy technology and energy systems that meet the requirements of ecological civilization and sustainable development. Metaverse provides the necessary infrastructure such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, network and computing technology, and digitalizes the entire process of energy transmission and utilization, laying the foundation for the upgrade of smart energy.

smart manufacturing

Metaverse empowers industrial manufacturing, bringing a new experience, efficiency and operation model, and providing a one-stop rational solution for smart manufacturing. Smart manufacturing includes smart manufacturing technology and smart manufacturing systems. Cooperate and work together to expand, extend and partially replace human mental work in the manufacturing process, and expand the concept of manufacturing automation to flexibility, intelligence and high integration. In the process, the overall optimization of production process, management decision-making, management and service has been realized.

Smart Agriculture and Water Conservancy

Agriculture and water conservancy are the foundation of people's livelihood. Smart agriculture and water conservancy fully apply the achievements of modern information technology to realize intelligent management such as agricultural visual remote diagnosis, remote control, and disaster warning, as well as globalization of water conservancy space, time serialization, process automation, and application intelligence. integration, management integration, and scientific decision-making. Metaverse can provide one-stop solutions for smart agriculture and water conservancy. Through the integration of various technologies such as Internet of Things technology, VR/AR, and wireless communication, the intelligent management of smart agriculture and water conservancy can be realized.

Smart education

As an innovative educational model and means, smart education optimizes and reforms educational ideas, ideas, forms, content and methods through technology, improving the quality and efficiency of education. Metaverse provides education with more interactive strategies, more realistic simulation scenarios, allows scholars to study anywhere, and interacts with learners around the world, reducing the price and cost of school rooms and science laboratories, and at the same time allowing Teachers use technology to better understand individual differences and different needs, providing a cornerstone for smart education.

Smart medical

With the gradual upgrading of new technologies such as big data and intelligent hardware, new technologies such as digital medical care and surgical robots are widely used in clinical practice, and have become an important means to improve medical efficiency, promoting medical refinement, digitization, personalization, and smart medical care Thus was born. Metaverse breaks through the barriers between the real world and the virtual world, realizes the integration of high technology, promotes the development of digital therapy, AI imaging, AI pharmaceuticals, Internet medical care and many other directions, and makes medical services move towards digitalization in the true sense.

Wisdom Cultural Tourism

Smart cultural tourism enriches the expression forms of cultural tourism, deepens the cultural value of IP, and provides a good starting point for "creating tourism with culture and promoting culture with tourism". It benefits from the promotion of cultural digitalization strategy and cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain Development, on the basis of traditional digital content and cultural products, a new digital consumer industry formed through continuous transformation and upgrading. Metaverse empowers smart cultural tourism, revitalizes existing cultural resources, and forms a copyright database, cultural private network, and cultural big data system, which provides a basic guarantee for the digital confirmation of cultural resources and the development of digital cultural products. Great convenience.

Smart community

The smart community integrates various service resources in the community through intelligent technology and methods, and upgrades and builds around many scenarios such as architecture, neighborhood, service, transportation, education, medical care, governance and entrepreneurship. It is an important development direction of the community in the future. Smart communities are characterized by technological, ecological, and humanized services, shaping and improving residents' sense of happiness, improving efficiency with smart government affairs, improving people's lives with smart people's livelihood, building smart life with smart families, and improving community quality with smart communities. The digital twin, Internet of Things, cloud computing, information communication, RFID and other related technologies provided by Metaverse provide effective solutions for the smart community.

smart home

Smart home is a hot word that has attracted public attention in recent years, and it is also an integral part of the "14th Five-Year Plan". The development and popularization of monitoring, smart speakers, new wearable devices, service robots and other products have played a positive role in promoting. It provides users with the convenience of life and uses technology to change life.

Smart government

Smart government is a new stage of e-government development. Through detection, integration, analysis, and intelligent response, it can achieve a high degree of integration of resources in various functional departments, improve the government's business handling and management efficiency, strengthen functional supervision, and make the government more clean, diligent, and efficient. Pragmatic, improve the transparency of the government. Metaverse can break the boundary between offline and online governance, provide an effective way to create a new type of government that is efficient, agile, and convenient for the people, build a livable urban environment for enterprises and the public, and ensure the sustainable development of cities.

Top Ten Key Words of the Year

Policy bonus

As a new track of the digital economy, the Metaverse is attracting more and more regions to plan around the Metaverse. If it is said that the technology giants headed by Meta will participate in the Metaverse in 2021, then starting from 2022, all walks of life will be deployed one after another, and there are too many companies that use the Metaverse as their future development strategy.

More and more local governments have begun to issue support opinions related to the Metaverse. From the provincial level to the municipal level, from broad concepts to specific measures, the intensive release of new industrial policies reflects that the understanding of the concept of the Metaverse is becoming clearer in various places. In a sense, the Metaverse and digitalization complement each other and are the exterior and interior of each other.

Judging from the digitization-related development plan before the "13th Five-Year Plan", my country mainly focused on infrastructure technology at that time, and carried out technology research and development such as digital warrants, cloud computing, virtual reality, and augmented reality. During the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" period, the policy accelerated the research and development of key technologies on the one hand, and on the other hand accelerated the development of the digital economy, providing favorable conditions for the germination of the metaverse in the later stage.

During the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, Metaverse was included in the "14th Five-Year Plan" industrial planning by many provinces and cities in China. According to incomplete statistics, as of now, more than 30 regions in China have promulgated supporting policy documents related to the Metaverse, and more than 20 special policy documents for the Metaverse.

Among them, more than ten provincial administrative regions including Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Chengdu released local support for the development and implementation of Metaverse through industrial policies and action plans. As supporting industrial planning, these policy documents are of great significance in actively promoting the construction of the metaverse industrial ecology.

Since this year, the gaps in the Metaverse standard specification and regulatory system have been supplemented one after another. With the comprehensive support of a number of policies, technologies related to virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and blockchain have made great progress. Metaverse applications It is also being accelerated.

It can be said that for the Metaverse, whose industrialization is still in its infancy, policy is undoubtedly the most important and powerful driving force at the moment. Industry prospects are superimposed with policy dividends, and major industry leaders and investment funds have let go of their hands and rushed into the market.

Industrial Metaverse

The industrial metaverse takes industrial products as the core and is based on the industrial Internet support system. It is a new application model and industrial ecology that deeply integrates metaverse related technologies and application models with the industrial economy. It is the landing and expansion of metaverse in the industrial field and a new type of industrial Digital space, new industrial smart Internet system, new carrier for the integrated development of digital economy and real economy.

To put it simply, the Industrial Metaverse is a product production system that revolves around the combination of virtuality and reality. The Industrial Metaverse adopts core technologies such as digital twins, 3D engines, spatial computing, AI technology, blockchain, edge computing, and the Internet of Things. It has the characteristics of multi-party participation, interaction, openness, and collaboration. layer, communication layer, edge layer, cloud layer, and application layer.

In the scenario of the industrial metaverse, each participating enterprise can invent and create based on mature technologies and tools and obtain corresponding rights and interests. The development and design groups can participate together and carry out the interaction of ideas, regardless of the distance of time and place. The combination of virtual production and real production helps to realize business collaboration and synchronous production, and enables immersive experience of product function, performance and quality in the factory. The upstream, midstream and downstream industrial chains realize seamless collaboration in the industrial metaverse, forming an integrated supply chain.

At the same time, the consensus mechanism and smart contract mechanism can also realize production standardization and business autonomy. And under this system, industrial technologies such as industrial digital twins, industrial intelligence, industrial spiritual world, industrial blockchain, industrial network, industrial metaverse platform and advanced computing were born.

Industrial Metaverse deploys the R&D process, production process, marketing process, after-sales process and other links in the real environment to the virtual space, and realizes the optimization and improvement of production and service through activities in the virtual space and real space, forming a new manufacturing and service system , to achieve the effect of cost reduction, efficiency increase and collaborative operation.

In the future, the technology based on the industrial metaverse will carry out all-round and full-chain transformation of traditional industries, improve total factor production, and promote the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries. Production will be more intelligent, key points will continue to be optimized, park clusters will accelerate transformation and upgrading, and multi-party collaborative platform operations will empower the three major value chains of "products, production, and distribution" to form a new industrial ecology. Build industrial applications in the four directions of "strengthening the chain and replenishing the chain" to achieve the five-point goal of "improving quality, reducing costs, increasing efficiency, seeking safety, and innovating".

Giant early adopters

In 2021, Nvidia spent more than 30 million to build the "Metaverse Christmas World" as a model for the implementation of the Metaverse, and also pushed the concept of the Metaverse to the top of the wave. Entering 2022, although the market is gradually returning to rationality towards the Metaverse, investment and financing activities in the capital market around the Metaverse are still active.

In addition to Roblox, Decentraland, The Sandbox and other metaverse natives, international Internet giants including Meta, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc., as well as domestic giants such as BAT and ByteDance, have begun to accelerate the layout of the metaverse track.

According to statistics from McKinsey & Company, in the first five months of 2022 alone, the entire metaverse market has received more than US$120 billion in investment funds from companies and venture capital firms. Citi also predicts in its analysis of the metaverse report that by 2030, the global metaverse market will likely reach $13 trillion in annual revenue.

When the Metaverse becomes an outlet, capital will naturally not miss it. The world's leading technology companies that have suffered from long-term sluggish growth regard the concept of the metaverse as a development opportunity, and use their own platforms and capital advantages to gather together to deploy the metaverse.

Taking my country as an example, according to incomplete statistics, since October alone, 15 domestic listed companies have announced the development of metaverse business, including Zhongke Jincai, Jihong, Guomai Culture, China Mobile, Lingyunguang, etc. Not long ago, Ake Technology, the first metaverse brand service company in China, received tens of millions of angel round financing; Xingfan Technology, a metaverse intelligent technology company, completed angel round financing of nearly ten million yuan; $10,000 angel round financing...

Of course, as Luo Qi, a senior researcher at the Ouyi Research Institute, currently uses the concept of metaverse as a social application in the market, the essence is still social, but some virtual experience scenes have been created for users. Perhaps in the future, driven by the entry of giants, there will inevitably be more small and medium-sized enterprises, and even some cross-industry giants are willing to promote the research and development of the Metaverse, product landing, etc., and the ecology of the Metaverse will continue to be filled.

consumer hardware

Although we can currently use some software on computers or mobile phones to experience the three-dimensional world presented by the Metaverse, VR/AR headsets are essential if we want to experience the Metaverse more immersively like the movie "Ready Player One". of.

2016 can be described as the first year of consumer-grade VR headsets. Oculus acquired by Facebook (renamed Meta) launched the world's first consumer-grade VR headset Oculus Rift, followed by the official launch of HTC Vive jointly developed by Valve and HTC. , Sony Interactive Entertainment SIE's PS VR was also launched in the same year. However, this type of headset needs to be connected to a computer with a data cable, and its usage scenarios are limited. Therefore, the sales volume of VR headsets at this stage is still in a sluggish stage.

It wasn't until 2019 that Oculus launched Quest 1, a new all-in-one VR machine, that it broke this deadlock. By integrating the computing unit into the head-mounted display, the all-in-one machine gets rid of the shackles of data cables and computers, quickly opening up the user market, and the more mature version Quest 2 launched in 2020 will further amplify this advantage.

Since 2020, due to the impact of the new crown, many online applications have grown significantly. The metaverse boom that started in 2021 has further boosted the growth of the VR consumer hardware market. Under the influence of various factors, 2022 will become a year of rapid growth for VR consumer headsets.

Quest 2 will achieve a total global sales volume of over 15 million in 2022, becoming the most successful VR consumer hardware so far. It also pushes Meta's scale in the VR hardware market to an astonishing 90% or more in one fell swoop, and has an absolute right to speak in the market .

Many domestic VR brands such as Pico, Qiyu VR, and Dapeng VR have launched VR all-in-one headsets to compete for the domestic VR consumer market.

In contrast, AR consumer hardware is a blue ocean. AR headsets need to project virtual content in the real environment and blend the virtual content with the real world. This requires that it must have hardware such as cameras and optical sensors to capture information about the surrounding environment and perform real-time processing and projection. Its technical requirements are much higher than those of VR headsets.

At present, the most mature AR headset is the Hololens series launched by Microsoft. Its price is close to 20,000 RMB, which is obviously not a consumer-oriented product. With the popularization of the metaverse concept in 2021, major technology companies have begun to target the blank market of consumer-grade AR hardware.

Traditional mobile phone giants such as Apple and Samsung have announced some news about their AR glasses in 2022, and other brands of AR glasses have also launched projects one after another. Nreal, Thunderbird Technology, etc. have taken the lead in launching AR glasses, starting the competition for the AR consumer market. The first shot of the battle.

digital economy

With the continuous development of emerging technologies such as big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and 5G communications, digital technologies, goods, and services are rapidly penetrating traditional industries from multiple directions, layers, and chains. . As a new economic form, the digital economy is simply "digital industrialization" + "industrial digitalization".

Digital industrialization means that data, as an important factor of production, has formed a new kinetic energy, spawned a more inclusive, shared and open-source economic form, and reshaped the economic development structure, thus becoming an important factor in the social economy. component.

Among them, NFT and digital collections, as representatives of digital industrialization, will also become the focus of public discussion in 2021 and 2022. Digital collections based on blockchain technology are the only digital certificates generated for works and artworks, bringing transformative new forms to many fields such as sports, culture, and marketing, and helping brands quickly enter the immersive digital assets of the Metaverse. According to incomplete statistics, there are currently more than 3,000 domestic digital storage platforms, and there are quite a lot of contention.

At the same time, virtual conferences have also become a highlight of this year. For example, NetEase Yaotai, an online event platform launched by NetEase, has held more than 200 online events in the past year, including 2022 China International Big Data Industry Expo, 2022 TEDx Bund Women's Conference , Peking University Guanghua Carbon Neutral and Frontier Salon were all successfully held in Yaotaizhong. With its excellent technology and practical applications, it has become one of the representatives of the digital economy.

Industrial digitalization refers to the value increment achieved by the digital economy promoting industrial integration, through the integration of production methods, products, services, competition rules, and industries. The digital economy has brought transformative power to all walks of life, changed the structure of the real economy, and significantly improved production efficiency.

In the metaverse era, new technology clusters and the real economy are constantly and deeply integrated, and social and economic life is gradually moving from the "production explosion" of the industrial economy to the "transaction explosion" of the digital economy. Data has become the fuel for the innovation and development of the digital economy and the key production factor for the transformation of human society into a "digital civilization". Metaverse is the handle and engine to further promote the development of the digital economy, and the two are closely related and inseparable.

At present, the digital economy has become an important engine to promote the high-quality development of my country's economy and society, and it is an important development direction during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. Metaverse boosts the high-quality development of the digital economy, and the future can be expected.

digital human

In recent years, digital humans are becoming the focus of people's discussions on metaverse topics. Digital humans are also called virtual digital humans and virtual humans. They are a digital form of human beings, which is what people often call digital AI.

Fundamentally speaking, a digital human is an artificial intelligence entity system composed of programmable chips, network and other hardware devices and program codes, which is equivalent to a digital robot with a brain, eyes, hands and mouth.

Since the rise of the DID digital identity concept in 2021, digital humans have continued this enthusiasm and upgraded it to a more figurative research level. Thanks to breakthroughs in deep learning algorithms, along with the rapid development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality, the digital human industry has begun to enter the right track.

At present, digital humans have been applied in many industries, and many technology giants are vying to deploy them. With the gradual maturity of the digital human industry chain, its commercialization process began to accelerate, and digital human began to enter people's lives.

From the perspective of overall development, my country's digital human field has passed the embryonic stage and entered a stage of rapid growth, which will show a high-speed growth trend in the next five years.

According to QuestMobile data, the overall digital human market in my country will be 61.28 billion yuan in 2022, and the overall digital human industry scale is expected to be 86 billion yuan. Under the background of AIGC's empowerment and favorable policies, the scale of the domestic digital human industry will continue to grow. According to qubit predictions, by 2030, the overall market size of digital human in my country will reach 270 billion yuan.

On the basis of the rapid iteration of technology, the form of digital humans in the future will definitely undergo greater changes. However, how far digital humans can go depends on industrial applications. From virtual to the combination of virtual and real, the digital human industry has long stopped at the original single direction, but is moving towards more dimensions.

Metaverse Marketing

Marketing is not just a sales behavior, but also a process for companies to discover and tap consumer needs, so that consumers can understand the product and then purchase the product. At the same time, marketing is also a way to create, disseminate, and deliver customer value and manage customer relationships in the context of the times. The emergence of any new form and technology will attract the attention of many people, which will naturally bring new value to marketing.

Metaverse brings users a new immersive experience, which means more scalable and novel marketing methods. Metaverse marketing came into being. The series of reports launched by Yuanchuang Shengjing pointed out that it only takes 1-3 years for Metaverse to mature in the field of marketing. In other words, the current Metaverse has changed the rules of the game in traditional marketing with a powerful attitude.

Metaverse has reconstructed the marketing content scene. Through the digitization of all production and lifestyles in the real world, the relationship between "people", "goods" and "fields" has undergone qualitative changes. More and more brands use virtual idols and brand IP to shape their own brand "personality" and narrative. Gucci, Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Jacob&Co and many other fashion industry leaders have laid out their layouts in multi-field layout metaverse branding framework.

At the same time, Metaverse Marketing has reshaped the concept of "what you see is what you get". Through credible asset value and trustless identity authentication, content beyond the real world is created in the virtual space, breaking the barriers between the physical world and the real world, and providing Users bring an extraordinary immersive scene experience, providing users with more imagination and fun about the brand.

For example, the Ouyi NFT market includes the digital works of many well-known artists, game developers and celebrities from all walks of life. It also includes the world's first high-level 3D full-length animated drama "Ling Cage" NFT, antique enamel gold pheasant amphora NFT , the dynamic card NFT of Anderson Silva, the world's best MMA athlete, demonstrates the charm of metaverse marketing through the combination of technology and art.

As a multi-chain aggregation trading platform, Ouyi NFT Market supports NFT transactions on 8 public chains such as OKC, Ethereum, and BSC. It also supports one-click ordering on other trading platforms. It has the order depth of multiple platforms such as OpenSea and Magic Eden. Coupled with the perfect NFT distribution plan, it has attracted many celebrities and well-known IPs to join, and has also become a representative platform in the metaverse marketing field.

In addition, metaverse marketing also endows users with the possibility of creating value with the brand, optimizes the customer loyalty system, and makes users no longer passive recipients of brand culture, but also the shapers of brand culture.

Web3

On December 9, 2021, at a high-profile hearing in the U.S. Congress, Brian Brook, former acting director of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, shared the concept of Web3 under the spotlight. Web1 is a readable Internet, where users can only read the content provided by the website; Web2 is an interactive Internet, where users can upload and share content; and Web3 is a decentralized network, where everyone can control their own (digital) identity and assets And data, and then control your own destiny.

The concept of Web3 has brought new development opportunities, and even Patrick McHenry, the congressman who presided over the meeting, said that it is necessary to "ensure that the Web3 revolution happens in the United States." This move made the concept of Web3 popular all over the world, and also attracted the favor of many capitals and institutions.

The key element of Metaverse is digital products. The Web3 concept with blockchain technology as the underlying infrastructure can endow digital products with the attribute of "assets", and has become one of the main development directions of Metaverse. This is also the reason why digital collections and NFT products in the Metaverse industry continue to be hot this year.

Both Web3 and Metaverse have been known to everyone since 2021, but the two different concepts have gradually come together this year. In fact, both are concepts of the future Internet, but with different focuses.

Web3 focuses on changes in ownership relations. People can break the control of the existing Internet oligarchs, truly own their own data and digital asset ownership, and control their own destiny in the virtual network; while Metaverse focuses more on experience. Build a rich virtual world and allow users to perceive it in a new way, so as to obtain an unprecedented sense of immersion.

But the metaverse will never exist in only one company. The movie "Runaway Player" fully demonstrates what happens when a virtual world is held hostage by a company. Therefore, the decentralized metaverse will definitely be more popular, which coincides with the idea of Web3.

The relationship between Web3 and Metaverse is not an either-or relationship. In fact, the two are naturally compatible. Web3 is like the skeleton of the future Internet, and Metaverse is the body of the future Internet. The combination of the two may be more likely to form the future Internet. .

As Ouyi OKX CEO Jay Hao commented earlier, "Web3.0 represents the next stage of the Internet, which is characterized by openness, sharing and decentralization, emphasizing that users have more control over their identities and data The realization of Web3.0 requires the help of blockchain, AI, AR, VR and other technologies, and Metaverse is the transit station of Web3.0. On the one hand, users can reconstruct social life, business activities, and entertainment on this land On the other hand, it allows users to perceive Web3.0 in advance, creating convenience for the end of Web3.0.”

Users who know about Web3 will probably know that at present, digital wallets are digital identities that enter the Web3 world. On the one hand, they log in by mastering their own private keys, but this method is not friendly enough, so some applications like Ouyi. The MPC private key-free login method will be launched, which reduces the barriers to entry for users and achieves the effect of "perceiving Web3.0 in advance".

Of course, starting from 2022, we can see many Internet giants marching into the Metaverse and Web3 at the same time, and the Web3 Metaverse projects are also emerging in an endless stream. The two words describing the future Internet almost go hand in hand and appear at the same frequency this year.

There is no doubt that this year is not only the year that Web3 inspires everyone, but also the starting point for the integration of Web3 and the Metaverse. There is no turning back, and the important role of Web3 in the metaverse also means that from now on, it will grow with the development of the metaverse, and the two will complement each other and eventually achieve each other.

AIGC

On September 23, 2022, Sequoia America's official website published an article titled "Generative AI: A Creative New World", which stated that AIGC will represent the beginning of a new round of paradigm shift. On November 30, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a new chat robot model based on AI technology, which exceeded 5 million users within a week of its launch.

The popularity of ChatGPT has also refreshed people's understanding of AI production capabilities, and the continued enthusiasm of netizens at home and abroad can not help but make people wonder, what is AIGC?

AIGC (AI-Generated Content) is a new production method that automatically generates content through artificial intelligence technology after PGC (Professional Generated Content) and UGC (User Generated Content).

The immersive and diverse metaverse ecology requires a lot of content for users to explore continuously, but the previous methods of UGC and PGC obviously cannot meet the needs of building the metaverse, and with the help of artificial intelligence tools, everyone can become a creator. At present, AIGC technology has been widely used in text, image, audio, and games.

Diversified AIGC platforms have sprung up all over the world, triggering rounds of storms. Jasper is an AI content platform that allows individuals and teams to use AI to create content. It has become a unicorn company with a valuation of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars less than two years after its establishment; Stability AI, which is also among the latest unicorns, can Generates images based on keywords in just seconds, and unlike other platforms, it democratizes technology through open source, giving developers maximum freedom.

In addition to text and image creation, AIGC technology is also used in video creation. Previously, Google also released two text-to-video tools, namely Imagen Video, which emphasizes video quality, and Phenaki, which focuses on video length.

As an important production tool for building virtual worlds, AIGC provides creators with unlimited imagination. As AI technologies continue to be deployed, AI-generated content will unleash the true potential of the Metaverse.

Educational Metaverse

2021 is the first year of the Metaverse, which not only allows more people to learn about this promising emerging industry, but also inspires all walks of life to make more attempts in related fields. This year, Metaverse Education has gradually emerged in the exploration of many schools, enterprises and institutions.

Metaverse, as a virtual world parallel to the real world, brings a new way of display and interaction, and education requires a large number of displays and effective interactions such as information presentation, explanation, and practical operations, which naturally fits with Metaverse.

Compared with static graphic teaching methods, Metaverse can present more three-dimensional and dynamic knowledge information. For example, when we study the structure of the human body, it is difficult to actually feel how the human body works by only looking at pictures and texts. However, if it is a three-dimensional, simulated and dynamic image, it is easier for people to understand the mechanism of its operation.

At the same time, the metaverse adds a richer interaction dimension to information, and we can further interact in virtual scenes. Learning in operation is often the fastest, and the virtual scene provided by Metaverse is very suitable for experiments or operation scenes that require repeated practice. It is widely used in many aspects such as medicine, industrial design, physics, biology, and chemical experiments, and gets rid of many restrictions such as scenes and materials.

For example, the complete surgical process can be simulated in a virtual scene, so that medical students can quickly become familiar with the operation process. You can learn the operation of driving and master the traffic rules in the metaverse, so that people can quickly master the driving skills without the help of a coach, and without having to think about driving school buses and practice venues.

In addition, Metaverse Education has well implemented the policy of "teaching through entertainment", perfectly combining games and education. In the Metaverse, a lot of learning content is digitized, and corresponding feedback mechanisms are designed to make education gamification, so as to improve students' enthusiasm for learning, provide positive motivation, and better discover students' problems from data analysis. Timely correction.

Therefore, from multiple perspectives, the metaverse as a new technology will trigger new thinking for education, and will also force educators to accept new technologies with an inclusive and open mind, and explore new ways of metaverse + education from them. educational methods and innovations. Metaverse education may become an important development direction of future educational reform.