From the perspective of investment or layout, giants such as Roblox, Meta, Microsoft, Unity, Nvidia, Tencent, ByteDance, etc. have all entered the game. In terms of subdivisions, they are mainly used in games, VR/AR, Metahuman, social networking, and regional Five major areas of

Recently, the concept of Metaverse (Metaverse) has become popular. From the perspective of investment or layout, giants such as Roblox, Meta, Microsoft, Unity, Nvidia, Tencent, and ByteDance have all entered the game. In terms of subdivisions, they are mainly used in games, VR/AR, Metahuman, and social networking. , five major areas of blockchain.

Application field one: Games

Core points:

1. Games are the first metaverse scenes to grow. Virtual social identity, openness, economic system, immersion, and world sustainability are the five major characteristics that Metaverse games need to pay attention to.

2. Metaverse games are still games, and those who participate in Metaverse games at this stage are mainly game enthusiasts. New concepts still need the support of good game products. Team experience and technical capabilities are the core points for investigating Metaverse games.

3. The architectural form of the metaverse should be diverse. Most domestic Metaverse games are followers of Roblox. Metaverse games give the creative control to players, that is, players produce maps and rules, and the architecture itself is king. This is different from the "Warcraft 3" map 20 years ago. The editors are not much different.

4. The long-term development value of the game engine category is greater, but what will detonate the platform in the short term must be good content itself. The core advantage of Roblox is its open player creation mechanism, thereby achieving a closed-loop ecosystem. At present, there is no obvious Roblox-like platform with high-quality and large-scale UGC content in China. Looking back at various domestic entertainment forms in the past, there has been no large-scale platform for UGC content. However, the core of the Metaverse requires a large amount of content accumulation, so AI-based content creation will be a direction to solve this bottleneck.

5. With the development and penetration of the metaverse concept, the degree of integration between games, social networking, and VR content will become higher and higher. At present, the market's boundaries and definitions of Metaverse games are still vague. Judging from the user data of Roblox, the first stock in the Metaverse, the DAU of

2021Q1 has reached 42 million, nearly doubling in the past year. The recently popular VRChat also has an average number of online users on Steam of nearly 200,000. In addition, the financing amount of blockchain games that are closer to the concept of the metaverse has reached the peak level of previous years in 2021H1 alone. It is expected that the blockchain game market will increase significantly this year.

Roblox is the game metaverse project with the largest market share, with 7 million map creators. It is currently the game closest to the concept of the metaverse (the user interface is shown above). The advantage lies in the rich content ecology, generous creative incentives, various playable themes, and the room can accommodate a large number of players, making it highly social. However, the Chinese version of Roblox does not have a voice communication function for the time being, and social interaction is limited. For the first time, Roblox's million-level creators have realized a closed-loop game content ecology and almost completely abandoned the PGC model, which is unimaginable by traditional game manufacturers. To achieve its closed-loop characteristics, Roblox has done three things right:

Stable economic system and excellent creator incentive mechanism: Roblox has a stable economic system based on the Robux currency, covering the creation and consumption of content. Nearly a quarter of the Robux recharged by players in the map will become the income of creators, which greatly stimulates the enthusiasm of users to convert from ordinary players to creators.

Low data volume lowers the hardware performance threshold and cloud game bandwidth threshold: Roblox’s simple screen ensures data transmission volume and hardware computing power are friendly. In this mode, the load carried by the user device is lighter, and the hardware standards of the game are lowered , increasing the number of potential players for the game. With the arrival of 5G networks and the advancement of audio and video technology, game creation platforms have begun to transition to cloud gaming models, while traditional game distribution platforms have gradually become the role of software stores.

Roblox Studio lowers the entry barrier for creation: Roblox tries to simplify the developer editor. For a teenager, its no-code development mode can be started in 20 minutes, while enhancing the educational attributes.

Even though Roblox has reached industry leadership in many aspects, it is still not necessarily the so-called metaverse. Roblox is essentially just a UGC game platform that has not yet fully met the conditions of immersion and virtual social identity in the Metaverse. In addition, Roblox's UGC gameplay may not necessarily be suitable for the Chinese market. The main reasons include the lack of growth genes for the UGC platform in the Chinese market, and the low willingness of users to pay for content, so the profit prospects of UGC are unclear. So we believe that in the short term, creating a large amount of consumable content based on AI will be an important part of game development.

Application field two: VR/AR

Core points:

1. Virtual reality technology is the bridge between the metaverse and the real world, and is the key to realizing the immersive system of the metaverse, and the journey of brain-computer interface to replace VR equipment There is still a long way to go. Therefore, VR is more likely to become the 1.0 form of the metaverse hardware carrier.

2.VR’s key word is “entertainment experience”, while AR’s is “efficiency improvement”. From the perspective of the outbreak cycle, VR will explode earlier than AR, because entertainment naturally has the attribute of rapid promotion and can quickly reach more people.

3.VR’s technology accumulation has reached a stage where it can be applied on a large scale. At present, the core components mainly rely on mature large manufacturers, and the differentiation is not high. The core competitiveness of the hardware lies in interactive algorithms + engineering capabilities.

4.VR hardware equipment has a typical intelligent hardware development path. It focuses on game scenarios in the short term and is closer to smartphones in the long term. The core mechanism driving the growth of the entire VR industry in the future will be the content ecosystem.

5.VR has a natural correlation with the Yuanverse. Headline content will increase the market penetration rate of 2C stand-alone products. In the short term, VR offline experience stores will still be the most direct way for ordinary consumers to accept VR experiences.

consumer VR equipment will be the user's door to the metaverse. Just like the movie "ready player ", you will enter another world when you put on the headset, and AR, MR equipment and technology will be the most efficient tools for building metaverse scenes. . In 2020, global VR headset shipments reached 6.7 million units, a year-on-year growth rate of over 70%. According to IDC predictions, shipments will reach 15 million units in 2022, and the market turning point of "smart hardware reaching 10 million units" as Mark Zuckerberg calls it is about to come.

The lack of VR/AR content is currently the biggest factor constraining the industry. As more game manufacturers turn to VR content production, the market coverage of hardware equipment will show exponential growth. We judge that the hardware-content industry growth flywheel drives industry growth, and the core factor includes cost-effectiveness. Looking back on the success of Oculus in 2020, its extremely high cost performance is the primary reason why it triggered a fire in the VR consumer equipment industry. With the massive growth in market demand for VR content, hardware manufacturers will also accelerate the construction of content ecology.

Oculus Quest2 is an all-in-one mobile VR device launched by Facebook in October 2020. It currently ranks first in the global market share. In terms of hardware, it is cost-effective, and the wearing comfort and noise issues have been well solved. It also has a rich content ecosystem. Its exclusive VR games such as Asgard's Wrath and Orphan are close to 3A quality. In the future, based on The quality of game content on the Oculus platform is even expected to surpass Valve’s “Half-Life: Alyx”. Leading players in the domestic VR hardware market have emerged, including Pico, iQiyi VR, Dapeng, etc. In the future, players who can take the lead in building a complete content ecosystem are expected to break through and achieve rapid growth.

Application area three: Metahuman

Core points:

1. Character ID is the first asset of the Metaverse, so Metahuman is the guarantee for realizing the virtual identity and immersion of users in the Metaverse. There is no absolute technical threshold in this field and there are rich business scenarios. At present, the profit model of high-fidelity digital people has completed the initial commercial closed loop through social account operation, traffic monetization and other methods.

2. Metahuman provides more inspiration and impressionistic publicity to the construction of the Metaverse. In the future, in the later stages of Metaverse deployment, the integration of Metahuman and AI technology will be more obvious, providing a more immersive virtual social identity.

3. At this stage, Metahuman still serves consumption scenarios such as social platform influencers and star chasers. In the future, Metahuman’s breakthrough points will lie in brand cooperation, celebrity cooperation, and online original drama series to break the traffic circle.

4. Virtual idols and digital people have natural IP security advantages. Compared with artists who frequently have "personality collapse", virtual characters that are completely managed by a team are never afraid of overturning as idols. Compared with traditional idols, Metahuman's core competitiveness lies in its purely market-oriented character design, which theoretically perfectly fits various business scenarios, but it still needs to wait for the market's consumer education.

According to calculations by iResearch , the virtual idol market size in 2021 may exceed 100 billion. Miku Hatsune Miku is the representative of the first generation of virtual idols. As the predecessor of high-fidelity digital humans, virtual humans in this period only had simple modeling and less-than-realistic movements and textures, and were mainly characterized by synthesized sounds. Moreover, Hatsune Miku can almost only adapt to online scenes, and offline is limited to performance scenes such as stages, concerts, and comic exhibitions. With the improvement of technological level, virtual characters have gradually separated from the two-dimensional field and moved offline. The conceptual upgrade from virtual idols to Metahuman began in 2015. Virtual characters are moving towards high fidelity, and the trend of publicity focusing on offline scenes is also increasing. It is more and more obvious that Shuharami is a representative figure in this stage. In her promotional short films and pictures, the main characters and real-life scenes are integrated. Thanks to the advancement of motion capture technology, the real-time interactivity of virtual idols has significantly improved, and their monetization methods have also expanded from virtual performances to show live broadcasts and game live broadcasts. One of the most popular virtual anchors on Station B, "Leng Yuan", has With over 3 million followers, A-Soul, a virtual idol group under Lehua Entertainment , has more than 4 million fans on the entire Internet.

Epic's Metahuman Creator is a cloud-based service application that can help anyone create a photorealistic digital human Metahuman in a few minutes. It can be used to create animations in Unreal Engine projects, almost completely replicating a real life. human appearance in . High-fidelity digital people have a wider range of business scenarios. They can open their own social accounts, compete with teammates, ride bicycles on the streets, visit trendy brand stores, etc. They can even have real social interactions. Miquela from California broke up with her then boyfriend in 19 years. Education in the domestic market has just started. When AYAYI first appeared, many fans thought she was a real person. After learning about the "real person" of her avatar, her social account traffic declined. The domestic Metahuman market needs to mature, and since it relies entirely on human design to serve business scenarios, the market has higher requirements for the IP operation capabilities of the virtual human team.

Application area four: Social

Core points:

1. Social products under the concept of the metaverse focus most on the establishment of virtual identities and social relationships. At this stage, it is still difficult to bring a sense of offline identity.

2. The key to quickly opening up the chain of social relationships and improving social efficiency is to establish a platform with a large enough user base. Therefore, opportunities in the social field of the Metaverse are concentrated in large companies.

3. Interest-Based Social, Many-to-Many and Virtual Dating (Avatar) are the innovations of Metaverse social products.

4. Yuanverse social products are more of a renovation of previous product functions, gameplay, etc., or a certain degree of micro-innovation or partial innovation, without any essential change.

The current social interaction under the concept of the metaverse can be divided into three types of models:

Many-to-many link By increasing the number of members of the minimum social unit or the way of teaming, more than 1 person is used as the most basic social unit to carry out relationships between small groups. Match and build.The innovations of Clubhouse, Zoom, Discord are more based on quantitative changes (number of people that can be accommodated) based on technological progress rather than qualitative changes.

Interest social networking is mainly carried out between semi-acquaintances or strangers in interest circles. For example, different theme rooms in VRChat, road stores and interest tags in Soul are all media for signal transmission between non-acquaintances.

Virtual dating uses VR/AR to generate virtual images to create virtual characters and simulated stars (simulated images and voices). Software represented by VRChat can import and share player-made personalized avatars (Avatar), so it is widely used by ACG enthusiasts With good reviews, the most popular avatars are often related to famous animation and game IPs. Virtual dating software represented by "Zai Zai" relies on rich clothing and accessories to attract young people who are interested in dressing up and character development. At present, the application of digital people in the social field is still far from a new user immersive experience (the technical threshold is high and the hardware carrying capacity is insufficient), and it has not yet been able to achieve large-scale commercialization.

Application area five: Blockchain

Core points:

1. NFT and Defi are the main applications of blockchain in the metaverse world, and both can effectively support the economic system of the metaverse. Represented by Tencent’s “ magic core ”, the domestic NFT project is emerging, but its functions are relatively conservative. In the field of digital collectibles and games, the market size of NFT is unlimited. The current total market value of global crypto assets has exceeded US$2 trillion.

2. The Defi market continues to be sluggish, but due to the natural encryption properties of the blockchain, there is still a long-term development trend.

blockchain is the underlying protocol that supports the ultimate form of the metaverse, and NFT encrypts assets with unique value (non-homogeneous value) and is endorsed by blockchain technology , making it 100% non-counterfeiting or piracy. This ensures the security of digital artwork. The only factor that affects the price of assets made into NFTs is the supply and demand relationship in the market. Defi is built on blockchain and can be assembled like Lego blocks. Blockchain technology is used to replace all "intermediary" roles in traditional financial services with codes, thereby maximizing the efficiency of financial services and minimizing costs.

NFT The market size is unlimited, and the pan-digitization of the real world has begun to take shape. The OpenSea platform continued to receive large amounts of financing in 2021. The CryptoKitties platform gave birth to Dragon, the most expensive encrypted cat in history, with a transaction price of approximately US$170,000. In the NFT art world Cryptovoxels, crypto land is nearly sold out. The project is favored by crypto artists, and by creating a gallery, users can directly purchase the displayed NFT works. Every crypto artist wants better exposure for their work, so the location of the gallery is important, and the lands themselves are NFTs.

In addition, the domestic NFT project "Huan Core" launched by Tencent currently encrypts the release of the "Thirteen Invitation Quotes Record" collection, Alibaba has also launched a trading market dedicated to NFT art, which has been demonstrated There are many NFTs, such as Star Wars illustrations and paintings of the West Pearl Tower. Although the two do not meet the attributes of decentralization and secondary trading, and only provide collection value, they can be regarded as active attempts by major domestic manufacturers in the direction of NFT.

Due to cryptocurrency market fluctuations and policy influences, the current total locked-up volume of Defi projects has stabilized at around US$1 billion. Liquidity conversion and smart contracts based on blockchain technology will more efficiently empower the Metaverse economic system in the future. , will make great achievements in the mid- to long-term stage of the development of the Metaverse.

(Content excerpted from: "2021 Metaverse In-Depth Report")