Today, the 6th World Intelligence Conference (WIC) was held in the cloud. The conference conducted in-depth discussions around the progress, empowerment, ecology, ethics and many other aspects of the intelligent technology industry. At the
forum, Xu Li, co-founder, chairman and CEO of SenseTime , delivered a wonderful speech titled "Digital Natives Determine the Future of the Metaverse", sharing the concept of the Metaverse that has attracted much attention in recent years from a new perspective. , and provide insights into the future of business in the Metaverse.
Xu Li said, "Many people are asking whether the Metaverse has such a large commercial space. In fact, the key lies in whether the Metaverse can truly bring about the evolution of productivity tools and interactive experience tools."
The following is the full text of the speech:
When discussing a new thing, we always want to find a suitable definition or final explanation for it. The same is true when facing the new thing of the Metaverse.
Just like what was shown in the classic science fiction movie "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", an advanced civilization used supercomputers to calculate for 7.5 million years in order to seek the ultimate answer to the universe, but in the end only got a very simple answer: 42. 42 in Representation in binary is 101010.
But in fact, from Aristotle , to Newton's laws, to the theory of relativity, the complexity of the universe always increases by an order of magnitude just when humans think they have discovered the ultimate law. Therefore, it is actually very difficult to find a truly unified law of the universe (Grand Unification Theory).
Then, in the metaverse, it is more difficult for us to find the so-called answer.
The cognition of digital natives determines the future of the metaverse.
Living in the present, the cognition of digital natives, that is, growing up in the metaverse. , These aborigines who grew up , determine the future of business in the metaverse. .
The dialogue between two generations of product managers may be able to help us get a glimpse. The young product manager told his parents that the design of current instant messaging software is very inhumane, and all kinds of advertisements are always displayed. The product manager of his father's generation said that because sending a text message used to cost money, now that the switch from a paid scenario to a free scenario, spending time watching ads is a relatively normal product design.
In other words, if there is no past knowledge, the two generations will have huge differences in their understanding of the same new thing.
In fact, the Internet has been subverted by the new cognition of this type of people. There is a classic case. In 2020, rapper Travis Scott held a concert in the "Fortnite" game, earning US$20 million in revenue, with 12.3 million people watching online, and the number of views reaching 100 million times.
Everyone finds it strange that the concert should be offline, but how could it be moved online, and even the traffic of its derivatives can reach such a high level. But the new generation of digital natives has already accepted this model .
This is actually a change in the cognition of the new generation of digital natives.
Breaking the binary opposition between virtuality and reality Cognition
So, what cognitions are decisive factors for similar things?
First of all, in the traditional Internet era, the virtual world and the real world have always been binary opposites. In the past, you had to use Modem dial-up to connect to the Internet, and the whole process was very ritualistic. But in the era of digital mobile Internet, we are connected to the Internet all the time.
The metaverse can also be analogized in this way. The Internet was not that real and was very different from the real world, so it was not considered a universe. However, since its development, the vividness of digital presentation and interactive experience of the Internet have reached a new level, and the boundary between the digital world and the real world has become increasingly blurred.
The new generation of natives of the digital world will feel that there is no difference in experience between the two.
And the core elements needed to enter the new generation of digital world, we boil it down to people , things , fields .
First of all, people. The core point of entering the digital world is how to form natural interactions between humans and digital humans. In reality, we can drive virtual avatars in the digital world; and virtual people in the digital world can also be projected into reality with the help of augmented reality technology to complete a complete interaction. So virtual avatar technology helps us find the entrance to the metaverse .
Second, things. Various objects in the real world do not necessarily have additional intelligent attributes. But when you enter the metaverse - a digital society, every object can be designed as an intelligent agent .
For example, SenseTime uses AI technology to drive the intelligent agent behind the game " StarCraft ", which can produce the ability to make independent decisions. This type of decision-making intelligence has now surpassed the level of real people on many open problems.
For example, the decision-making complexity of "StarCraft" is 10 to the 1685th power, which is much higher than 10 to the 170th power of Go. The current decision-making intelligence can already reach the level of 6200 points of human masters in the game matching mechanism of Zerg single race in games such as "StarCraft".
In the future, various objects in the virtual world, even tables, chairs, benches, stones, and trees, will have the ability to make intelligent decisions.
Third, field. At present, the digital metaverse can realize three-dimensional digital reconstruction of things in the real world. Nowadays, digital capabilities are getting stronger and stronger. After full digitalization, entering the metaverse will feel more real and interactive.
Value narratives that connect the real and virtual worlds
After the channel into the digital world is opened, the integration of reality and virtuality can bring about two major types of value narratives .
In terms of productivity, , the integration of virtual and real brings stronger productivity tools, making original production and social collaboration more natural.
For example, in some real-world industrial scenarios, when this connection is stronger, remote collaboration can be achieved, and augmented reality can be used to guide a series of actions such as maintenance, making the entire workflow simpler and more efficient.
Another common scenario is that in the digital metaverse, meetings, collaborations, and interviews have all redefined "distance".
Therefore, the new changes in social collaboration will bring about an explosion of productivity.
In terms of interactive experience , the information density brought by the entire metaverse is much higher than that of the traditional Internet. Because it reflects the real world, the interactive experience is better.
Entering the open world, people can explore the world according to their own ideas; in the real world, virtual content can also be projected into real scenes through mixed reality technology.
The metaverse has spawned new productivity and new consumption
With the improvement of the two core capabilities of productivity and interactive experience, new phenomena are emerging.
The first phenomenon is new productivity .
The metaverse has brought new productivity , new production model and the explosion of the supply side . The confirmation of metaverse elements through digital chains stimulates people's desire for production, thereby promoting a large-scale explosion of overall productivity.
Under this trend, UGC (user-generated content) can be quickly transformed into UGA (user-generated assets), because once the content is confirmed, it becomes an asset and can be traded and transferred.
For example, an artistic creation that combines 5,000 works - "The First 5,000 Days", sold for a sky-high price of more than 60 million US dollars at the Christie's auction. This is also the first traditional work in the world. Purely digital works sold at auction houses.
With the breakthrough of this type of capabilities, some traditional expression techniques can also be attached to inherent objects through XR, AR and other modes to obtain a new presentation of digital assets.
The digital cultural creation "Millennium Moment - Dunhuang Nine-Colored Deer Limited Digital Mural" jointly launched by SenseTime and Dunhuang was completely sold out 30 seconds after it went online. This also shows that , a new generation of digital natives, , highly recognizes for the digital assets produced by users.
After productivity exploded and the supply side became abundant, it also inspired many people's desire to create. For example, on OpenSea (NFT trading platform), the annual transaction volume reaches 20 billion US dollars. When the rights to the works of many authors are confirmed, they are traded again, and the creators can receive "commissions" from them each time, so their desire for production also increases.
When artificial intelligence develops to a certain extent, AIGC (artificial intelligence generated content) will bring new production tools, that is, using artificial intelligence to produce what you want. As long as you are creative, you can do it in the true sense. of digitization.
Google Imagen, which was quite popular a while ago, is a tool that can use text to generate creative content. Someone entered a famous painting from the Song Dynasty and requested that the Oriental Tiger from the Song Dynasty wear a VR, and Imagen generated a picture.
Its creation is highly personal and completely consistent with human cognition and perception. The birth of such tools has greatly accelerated the overall production process.
SenseTime Computer vision MMEditing in the open source algorithm system OpenMMLab can adjust and produce the shape of the cat in various dimensions, as well as details such as eyes, ears, and tail. By inputting the desired variables, you can generate a completely different pet cat and share it with your friends.
It can be seen that NFT technology’s confirmation of creativity has stimulated people’s desire for production, and AI technology has promoted the improvement of production efficiency and production capacity.
It can be said that productivity tools and interactive experience tools have truly improved our productivity in the digital world.
The second phenomenon is that newly consumes .
In the metaverse , our consumption philosophy has changed . The natives of the Metaverse do not just consume the "things" they see, but seek identity by consuming "virtual tags".
The OpenSea platform mentioned earlier achieved an overall transaction volume from 0 to 20 billion US dollars in one year. Its representative is the NFT monkey's avatar, which basketball player Curry spent US$180,000 on. As of today, the price of such a simple monkey head is about 3 million yuan. Many people buy it as an identity tag in the Metaverse and use it as an avatar. shows that they are a Metaverse player and an aborigine of this open world..
In addition, in some game virtual scenes, people can generate their own virtual images with one click. As the saying goes, thousands of people have different faces, and people hope to have their own characteristics in the virtual world.
For the outward expression of personal personality and attributes, will become the core of new consumption in the metaverse..
Another example is that at a large-scale AI exhibition, SenseTime used original digital humans to drive Gongsunli in " King of Glory " to interact with the audience. In fact, behind the scenes, as long as someone makes an action or speaks, Gongsun Li at the front desk can reproduce it in real time and communicate with the audience. It was completely unexpected that behind such a female figure as Gongsunli, there was actually a big man.
The future business concept of the Metaverse
Many people are asking, does the Metaverse have such a big commercial space? In fact, the key lies in whether can truly bring about the evolution of productivity tools and interactive experience tools in the metaverse. Such evolution will subvert the core models of the Internet, mobile Internet or traditional business.
In the real world, there are many Internet platforms for social networking, search, advertising, e-commerce, and games. If productivity tools and experience tools can be improved, you can imagine that in the metaverse, these platforms will become open world , will be redefined .
The original business model of the Internet will be perfectly replicated in the metaverse. In the next stage, as long as the business model is redefined with the cognition of true metaverse natives, there will be huge room for imagination.
In Gartner’s 2021 Emerging Technology Maturity Cycle (Hype Cycle), NFT, decentralized identity, generative artificial intelligence, digital people, artificial intelligence based on physical information, AI enhancement engines, and multiple experiences have all become popular technologies. , most of which are related to the Metaverse.
Many people may think that the Metaverse is already around the corner, but judging from this curve, although the Metaverse has huge possibilities and potential, the current technological maturity has yet to be perfected, and it will take longer to build. Build huge infrastructure.
Just like the "3W" of the Internet was born in 1989, its real commercialization may be 10 years later. So many things seem to be close at hand, but it takes a long time to build and mature.
Of course, we cannot belittle ourselves. The ability to iterate technology is actually very fast. For example, for the best artificial intelligence algorithms, the demand for computing power and has increased more than 1 million times in the past ten years. It has exceeded most people's imagination of the original technology development.
Here, the only thing that can limit you is your imagination. Let us embrace the digitization of the metaverse together, thank you all!
