Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)

I am Mandy, the founder of Odaily. Recently, Odaily and 36Kr jointly produced a series of audio columns focusing on the development of the Metaverse.metaverse big bangmetaverse big bang

", every Tuesday and Thursday will appear on the official account and the recommendation of Himalaya. I will talk to relevant practitioners, investors, artists, etc. in the ecology, hoping to bring you fresh perspectives and inspirations.

We talked about what the metaverse is, what it is not, what are the interesting subdivision tracks and start-up companies, whether big companies can realize the metaverse, the opportunities and challenges faced by Web2.0 and Web3. What key technical components are required to mature on the road, the relationship between the game and the Metaverse, and so on.

Because I hope to share the wonderful views with more people, I have organized the audio into text for everyone to collect and read. Friends who are interested in the metaverse should also remember to subscribe to our audio column and pay attention to updates.

Enjoy～

Because I hope to share the wonderful views with more people, I have organized the audio into text for everyone to collect and read. Friends who are interested in the metaverse should also remember to subscribe to our audio column and pay attention to updates.

Mandy: Let Yuetian give us a brief self-introduction and why you are related to Metaverse.Chen Yuetian:

Thank you Odaily for giving me this opportunity to chat with you about the metaverse. I am Chen Yuetian, a partner of Huofeng Capital, a 100% self-owned investment company founded by me in 2011.

We have an equity fund, and the main investment of the equity fund has three important directions:

The first is youth culture, which is my original main battlefield, including original IP assets such as comics, animation, novels, variety shows, TV dramas, and movies, including content companies such as games, which mainly target audiences aged 15-25 , providing their favorite cultural and entertainment content, is the investment of content companies.

The second direction is called community consumer products: consumer products with cultural attributes and community attributes are different from the original branded consumer products, not beauty makeup, skin care, clothing, shoes, food, etc. in the general sense, mainly Invest in JK, Luo skirt, Hanfu, figure, trendy toys, star cards, and consumer products that may appear in the future with community cultural attributes, in line with the characteristics of the subcultural circle, and popular with young people.

The third is the next-generation social network. Using the discourse system of the Crypto circle, that is to say, the previous generation was Web2, and now we want to vote for Web3. There are many problems in Web2, such as too centralization, hijacking of user data, and monopoly issues. Long-term prosperity also brings many problems. In theory, Web3 should return to the essence of the Internet - interconnection, build by the people for the people's infrastructure, in order to look forward to the birth of the next social network based on this. These are the three main themes of Huofeng's investment.

Speaking of the metaverse mentioned above, it is actually very interesting. I invested in several companies in 2019 and 2020. These companies were not called Metaverse companies at the beginning of 2021. At that time, the concept market of Metaverse was called a pseudo-concept, a pure marketing concept. Many friends in the industry said that it was only mentioned by liars.

However, after half a year of fermentation and development, everyone’s perception of the “Metaverse” is very different now. Many of the underlying companies I invested in based on technology are companies that serve games. For example, I invested in Wei in 2019. Lingyun Games, as well as RCT.AI, which invested last year, do artificial intelligence-generated content. In the second half of 2021, these companies gradually began to be found to be very related to the Metaverse and were classified into the Metaverse field.I have another relationship with Metaverse, that is, if we want to build an immersive Internet network with Web3 as the bottom layer, and the goal is to let most people spend a lot of time living in online space and virtual space, then there will inevitably exist "digital assets need to be sure". rights”, so I personally have been paying attention to the development of the digital asset field since 2013.

In 2020, I invested in Mask Network. They are a relatively pioneering company in Web3, and I believe they are related to the development of the entire Metaverse.

The last thing is that I really like playing games. Many friends in the game circle I met in 2012 and 2013 have grown their companies to a great extent. I often have in-depth discussions with them, from the perspective of entering the Metaverse from games.

Mandy: It is true that with the popularity of the Metaverse concept, as long as you can get a little bit involved with the Metaverse, it will become a Metaverse concept startup overnight, especially after Facebook changed its name to Meta, everyone is talking about the Metaverse, What do you think the Metaverse is? Why do we need it and why is it an inevitable trend?

What we often use for textbook answers are the eight elements of the metaverse given by Roblox: identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, anytime, anywhere, civilization, and economic system. Do you agree with this "standard answer"?Chen Yuetian:

Indeed, since Facebook changed its name to Meta, the Metaverse began to be recognized by everyone in the true sense. Then as Microsoft, Nvidia, etc. announced follow-up, everyone saw that Metaverse was technically ready to enter an exploration stage.

I can't quite say what the Metaverse is, but I can start by saying something about what it isn't. Why do we need definitions and concepts, because people don’t know what it is, so we have room for discussion. If it is very clear, there is no need for science popularization and learning.

For example, if I mention the Internet now, everyone knows what the Internet is, and if I mention e-commerce now, everyone knows what e-commerce is. But we have to go back to the originality of these words. For example, when we went to see Bill Gates, around 1995, he was interviewed, and the host asked him: what is the internet? Bill Gates explained for a long time, and the host said that these things cannot be done by our current TV and newspapers?

What people don't understand is why there is such a thing as the Internet to transmit information based on computers, and where is the good thing about this thing.

Therefore, in the early stage of the original development of new things, everyone may not be able to explain clearly what it is, but the people who work in it probably know the direction to do it. He may not understand it clearly, but he should theoretically be better than bystanders and those who discuss it. People understand better.

So the first thing is, because a large number of users in the early days didn't enter the market and didn't use these applications, they didn't know what it was. These concepts are very new, so we are only discussing them now.

The second is the definition of this concept. It is definitely not the world described and criticized by science fiction authors. Their novels need to fabricate some plots and settings to make you resonate, but that is not what the future world looks like (the kind of cyberpunk ). The future world may have some similarities with imagination, and it may become a cultural meme that exists in everyone's subconscious, but it will definitely not be the way it is described in explicit novels.

When we talk about what the metaverse is, we may try to define it from some downward attribute levels.

For example, Ma Huateng would call that thing called the Quanzhen Internet. The Quanzhen Internet means that this thing is still the Internet, which is only complete and true. But the development of Metaverse may not be the Internet. Just like when we talk about mobile Internet, you think about the leading start-up companies in the mobile Internet era. Can Internet companies really do it back then? If it is really possible, the giants of the mobile Internet will not be born.

So the Metaverse seems to me that the mobile Internet is such a big opportunity compared to the Internet.

For the specific implementation, let’s talk about some technology stacks later. Let’s first talk about the goals that I think the Metaverse may eventually achieve. The question of the goal is this: what is the difference between metaverse, cyberspace and digital space? For example, if we turn on our mobile phone to see the usage time of our WeChat, it may be between six and eight hours. Can we think that the six to eight hours spent on WeChat are Metaverse?

Probably not, so there will still be differences. Let’s look at the APPs on our other mobile phones. In fact, most of our waking hours are inseparable from our mobile phones.

I think Metaverse is to make people immerse themselves in the online world. Immersion is very important, that is, to absorb a lot of information through vision. There is a very intuitive interaction with this virtual world, what is it like, a bit like the Internet before the invention of the mouse and the graphical interface and the Internet after the invention, the PC before the invention and the PC after the invention.

Metaverse may rely on some existing infrastructure, but what is its goal, is to let people live in the virtual space for a long enough time, and live in the virtual space immersively. I probably also thought about the breakthrough at the beginning Where, I think the initial breakthrough is not necessarily the game entertainment that everyone is talking about now, it should still be a productivity tool in theory.

When we think back, many of the changes in life that the mobile Internet has brought to everyone are actually changes in production relations. Before the implementation of the mobile Internet, food delivery, taxis, and e-commerce were not so convenient. It may exist on the original PC Internet. , but it's not as convenient.

For example, if you look at the small shopkeepers in Yiwu after WeChat and the small shopkeepers in Yiwu before WeChat, their behavior on QQ must have changed, so I think there is a lot of room for innovation, so we Speaking of what the goal is, the goal is to create a new production relationship in the new technical framework.

So in theory, the first wave of development should not be games and entertainment. The applications that can really achieve a large enough penetration are jobs, allowing you to make money in them, and then allowing you to use this immersive metaverse experience as a There are a variety of productivity tools available to everyone, so this is what I think of as the Metaverse.

As you mentioned about Roblox’s formulation of the concept, it has some descriptions, but it doesn’t talk about what the goal of the metaverse is. I think it is an efficiency tool to allow everyone to live in it for a long enough time, and it should not only satisfy entertainment needs. To describe it like this now, everyone is always discussing games and VR. I think we should take our eyes off it.

Mandy: The paragraph just now is very interesting. In fact, when the predecessors tried to understand the future world, they often used things they were familiar with to make analogies. Has Yue Tian watched a 2002 science fiction movie, "Minority Report" starring Tom Cruise, which thought of Now that everyone uses a mobile terminal to read content, one person walks to the subway and reads information with a virtual newspaper on the e-newspaper shelf, but it cannot imagine that everyone will have their own smart terminal in the future. The protagonist watches the holographic video of his family. The image quality is already so good, but it is still stored in the round disc. He never imagined that these can be stored on the cloud.

So I think for sure we can't describe the ultimate form, but can only use some existing things and make some analogies. So everyone may be analyzing the metaverse from the perspective of their own cognition.

Yesterday I saw the CEO of Disney, in a conversation, he said that the metaverse is the future of Disney. The offline park + online Disney+ digital platform makes them the most suitable people to build the metaverse. In the future, children can play in the Disney metaverse. Have dinner with the princess in the universe, and have adventures with Marvel superheroes.

Recently, I have also seen various articles in many technology media. The titles are XX is the metaverse, AR is the real metaverse, VR is the real metaverse, and even Discord is the metaverse. Those who work in games, virtual idols, and theme parks are all Metaverse entrepreneurs.

But just like Yuetian said, if you say that immersive experience + identity authentication is the metaverse, this is too the same. QQ is also a metaverse, with Q coins, digital identities, and QQ shows as appearances.

I just want to ask, first, do you think we need such a multiverse? Everyone creates their own metaverse, and how do they integrate in the end? The second is who is the pivotal leading role here? Which are fundamentally pseudo-concepts? Yuetian has been looking at projects. Have you seen some projects worth sharing with new perspectives, very creative, or too ridiculous and completely pseudo-concepts?Chen Yuetian:

Yes, the Metaverse is a basket, and everyone puts everything in it.

It is because everyone has no way to clearly define it, and it is a hot word. If you post it, there will be traffic and attention. Many companies will post it out of the perspective of traffic and attention. Then I will talk about it step by step along the steps you just described.

The example of Disney is very interesting. I have a Metaverse online, and the offline park is still in operation, but this matter is actually contradictory, because in the end, human time is limited, and a day is 24 hours. You have to spend 6 to 8 hours of sleep, and the remaining ten hours of entertainment and work. Even if you take a day off, you will be exhausted after spending 10 hours with your children in Disneyland.

So if there is a Metaverse online, its logical Metaverse ultimately allows us to spend enough time immersively living in this virtual space, and it conflicts with our offline scene to some extent. There is no offline park that can operate well, and the online Metaverse can also operate well, because time is limited, and everyone is ultimately robbing this very limited time.

I happened to attend an immersive global summit last week, and the vice president of Shui On Land came out to share. He said that one time was very interesting, because Shui On Land also operates Xintiandi in Shanghai, and they found that there were suddenly many more people in their Xintiandi Inexplicably, I took my mobile phone and scanned around, and then found that a company loaded a lot of virtual scenes and items in Xintiandi without their permission for everyone to find. This incident made the people of Shui On Land suddenly realize that although they own the property rights and management rights of this place, the rights and interests in the virtual space do not belong to him, but he does not know how to take these rights and interests over .

So when it comes to Metaverse, even if you use AR technology, you must at least have a wall or a building there, so that you can make advertisements, installations or attractive things on it. But these two rights are now separated, because the online world is now uncontrollable. In everyone’s device, everyone’s AR glasses, assuming that according to the recommendation logic we have seen, the information may not be correct. The same, so the definition of the rights of AR in virtual space is actually very vague, so I don't believe that a theme park can be made into a Metaverse.

Continue to talk about the metaverse I met with me, I don’t believe it, and the non-immersive social software says they want to do the metaverse, I don’t believe it.

If it is still a 2D plane or a PC screen, what is the difference from our original Internet? So it’s important to immerse yourself in the space in some way. It doesn’t matter whether it’s called Quanzhen Internet or not, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Internet or not, but immersion is very important, the sense of space is very important, you have to go in.

In the Metaverse, in that virtual space, your consciousness is there, that is to say, you think you are there, but it cannot be as troublesome as the real world, because it is still a cyberspace, and its sense of control should be theoretically Even better, the real world has a lot of constraints, so I think better control means that I can do a lot of things more efficiently than in the physical world.

For example, for meetings, why is Workroom a good application? Some friends are in Canada, some are in Japan, and some are in Europe. If you want to be in a meeting room, you can only use an immersive Metaverse. comminicate. But if it is still a PC screen, where is the immersion?Another example is that some A-share companies made a so-called metaverse game and became a Metaverse concept stock company. But do games have anything to do with your business?

The time occupied by entertainment is not an incremental market, but the 8 hours of life entertainment time that you have already been fiercely contested by mobile APP and PC Internet.

What should the Metaverse actually be? It should be like I just said, why does WeChat open so much time every day? In addition to chatting with family and friends, many of you are chatting with work partners. In fact, it is half of life and half of work. It is the efficiency tool I just mentioned.

Why is Microsoft entering this market? Relying on the user habits developed over the years of windows and office, it is very influential on the end user side. If my work scene is subverted because of conferencing software, because of Metaverse, the cornerstone of Microsoft will be gone. So seeing the rise of Horizon and Workroom, Microsoft has to follow up quickly, because that is the real main battlefield.

So I think everyone has some misunderstandings, so we only focus on talking about games and VR. In fact, you need efficiency tools now, you need to improve everyone's productivity, and then have more collaboration space on it.

Moreover, selling VR equipment is not like mobile phones. When smartphones were born, everyone had a mobile phone. The upgraded version of mobile phones is called a smartphone. Therefore, the conversion rate of its potential market size is very high, and the number of potential conversions is large. But VR is not. VR is very similar to selling computers back then. Jobs sold computers. Not everyone already has a computer. I just want to create this market that doesn’t exist.

What did he do at that time, he made improvements, improved products, improved user experience, made UI interfaces, made mice, made calculators, made editing tools, made drawing software, and then everyone found that computers can improve efficiency.

Therefore, we should enter the work scene, not the entertainment life scene. The work scene is an incremental market, and the incremental market is worth doing and easy to do. Now the competition is not so fierce.

Mandy: When it comes to product iteration and improvement, we just talked about that many major Internet companies have also entered the Metaverse track one after another. In addition to Facebook, the CEO of Microsoft also said that he is building a corporate metaverse, Tencent continues to develop open world games, ByteDance acquires VR manufacturer Pico at a high price, and invests in launching the metaverse game "Restart the World"...

However, many voices will think that Internet giants are the biggest obstacle to entering the metaverse era, because they are actually on the opposite side of the ownership economy. In the metaverse world of big factories, you will never be able to obtain the ownership of all digital assets. For example, if we benchmark the eight elements in front of us, identity, social relationship, and immersion are definitely the advantages that giants have accumulated, but digital civilization and economic systems are what companies in the Web3 era are committed to doing.

You are on the platform, you have to pay heavy taxes to the platform, and the data also belongs to the platform. This is not a "metaverse", so having said that, do you think giants can create a metaverse? In other words, what opportunities and challenges do Web 2.0 companies and Web 3.0 companies face on the way to realize the Metaverse?Chen Yuetian:

People in the blockchain industry are very keen to discuss Web3, but the Internet circle does not talk much about this matter, and it may not have entered the bottom layer of this thinking logic.

I think so, when we discuss who will build the Metaverse, I think there will be three forces.

The first is PGC. PGC is a big company, and it wants to do very low-level things. For example, when we look at the mobile Internet, they may be working on the Android operating system to define equipment and interaction standards. Another example is that iOS defines the entire graphics standard, and big companies want to do these, PGC, high-quality, and standard-setting things.

The second is UGC, because it is impossible for big manufacturers to do everything. After all, the entire market is very large. If so many users enter the Metaverse, they will not be able to do it. Therefore, they should be able to develop the ecology. After the development of the ecology, there will be A lot of UGC comes out, and we don't know what form these UGC will be made in. It may be a very good work made by a single user, or it may be a tool software that is not easy to use by a single user.

This process has also happened in the mobile Internet. Startup companies use VC money to make some promising and innovative things. This is how many mobile Internet giants were born. In the world of Web3, maybe it is DAO, a group of particularly ideal young people spontaneously update things based on the Internet collaborative relationship, and then make a product, which is what I define as UGC.

The third part I think is the AIGC developed in the past 10 years, because if it is immersive content consumption, it cannot be produced by human productivity, because the speed at which people experience and consume content may be more efficient than that of production, so It will definitely rely on a lot of AIGC.

In fact, PGC, UGC, and AIGC should be done together. It is not certain whether AIGC will be at the end. AIGC may happen simultaneously in the process of PGC and UGC from the very beginning. But in theory, UGC should be later than PGC, because at the beginning, the technical hardware, software, and underlying standards were defined by large companies. Ordinary people can’t afford these things, and they can’t do them. Therefore, at the equipment level, they are still big companies. lead.

So we can't be very hostile and say that big factories don't enter the metaverse, we don't play the metaverse you make. Because the truth is, if you don't recognize what they do, if you don't want to go in, you may not even use the hardware. What do you use? Use an open source VR glasses? Even if you open source, no one is willing to produce it. Do you produce it spontaneously? 3D printing? So from the perspective of technology realization, you don't have to be so against big companies.

Mandy: I ​​think domestic practitioners generally don’t have such a big resistance. It’s mainly the overseas core Web3 entrepreneurial community, which is still relatively hostile to Facebook. Maybe the Chinese Internet people have not discussed the matter of ownership economy. It's too deep, but it must be a hot topic in the overseas encryption community in recent years. Does Yuetian have a deep belief in data ownership and digital asset ownership?Chen Yuetian:

I think there must be something wrong in the whole development process of Web2. For example, before Facebook, Google could index all the things on the Internet, but because Web2 built a wall, all the data was used by itself, and it was still done. A business model called "recommended advertising" was developed.

Your fuel is user data. When you ask him for user data, the company says that you can’t produce data without my product, so whether this data belongs to the user or part of it belongs to the company is unclear. In fact, Even in terms of legal principles, it is not clear. You can say that it was made by everyone, because what the company said makes sense. Without my software, do you have this data? So there must be something wrong in Web2.

For example, I think there are a lot of bad things about the advertising-driven Internet, because it is about traffic-driven, what is the most traffic-driven thing? It is pornography, gambling, drugs, disputes, hostility, and quarrels. Weibo is already considered very good, but if you look at Twitter, you can see that the public opinion targeting each other among various small groups will definitely damage the harmony of human society, so the traffic driven by the advertising model and the Internet driven should be Knocked out from the ground up.

So in Web3, we often discuss the creator economy, and you should make some native protocols. Creators and developers will naturally receive money based on these native protocols. Because I created good things, everyone pays me. It's like if I sell you a really good burger, it's worth ten dollars. Another thing that doesn't taste good is worth a dollar, and information that is particularly rubbish is worthless. Valuable model, based on these agreements, consumers are able to pay for high-quality content, not just entertainment.

I think the creator economy should indeed replace the advertising economy, but the ownership of user data belongs entirely to the user, which is a bit extreme.

Mandy: Indeed, I feel that everyone seems to have talked less about such a low-level vision in the past two years. I remember that there were a lot of discussions like this in 2018 and 2019, which means that the vision of the blockchain itself is to reshape the vision of the original open Internet. Everyone will discuss whether the mobile Internet is a wrong path in the history of the Internet, because seizing the time and mind of users, playing around in a closed space, collecting user data, etc., all run counter to the original vision of the Internet.

So I think that the realization path of overseas encryption entrepreneurs may be quite extreme, that is, from being in their hands to not letting them touch it at all, and keeping it in the hands of each of us, right?Chen Yuetian:

Yes, I think this matter will change the entire Internet architecture a lot. For example, where does user data exist? In theory, according to the idea of ​​Web3, it should be distributed storage, and then achieve distributed storage, distributed computing, and distributed transmission at the same time. On this basis, another layer of protocol is built, which is a bit like the OS layer and the application layer. If the current Facebook and Google are all decentralized, it will take a lot of subversion and a long time.

The actual situation is that everyone is still dealing with the first step, the data storage, calculation and transmission just talked about, and then the gradual rise of the creator economy, the creation of new models, and then look at what applications will be born on it.

Mandy: Although the game may not be the final metaverse, it is the first stop and the closest prototype we discussed after all.

From Minecraft to Roblox, to Decentraland, The Sandbox, and then to P2E blockchain games such as Axie Infinity, which is popular this year, open world games have always been the most vivid form for people to understand digital identities and the prototype of the Metaverse. outbreak period.

What game are you playing? Are there any genres you are particularly interested in? What is your ultimate vision for metaverse games?Chen Yuetian:

I've been playing games for a long time, I have been playing with my first Game Boy since 1989, so I must be a long time gamer. From PC to PlayStation, Switch and other host games, everything is played.

When it comes to games, people sometimes confuse games with the concept of Metaverse, because they use similar technologies, and they all want to make things in the device or on the screen realistic enough to deceive your eyes. People receive information from their eyes, so it tries to trick your eyes.

Then let's review the status of the entire game industry in China, which is very interesting. The game industry is actually extremely important to the Chinese Internet, but no one dares to mention it. In the public perception, everyone thinks that the Internet is the Internet and games are games, but they are not.

In 2000, the bubble burst once. Many Chinese NASDAQ-listed companies could no longer hold on. NetEase was about to delist. What kind of business model came out at that time? The first one was the SP business, and the SP business is for you Sending spam text messages and asking you to force deductions, this business model has saved the first batch of cash flow.

The second most important business model is games. In 2002, Chen Tianqiao introduced "Legend" from South Korea. How good is Sheng Da after the introduction of "Legend"? Shanda was the largest Internet company in China at that time, Chen Tianqiao was the richest man in the Internet circle at that time, and Yan Yan was a god in the Chinese investment circle because of this investment project. But later Chen Tianqiao fell ill, Shanda was forced to disband to some extent.

Otherwise, in theory, there is no such thing as Tencent. In the Chinese Internet before 2010, Chen Tianqiao made many industrial layouts and forward-looking very strong. Many old Shanda people are still active in the front line of Chinese games. Games are An excellent business model, especially suited to the Internet.

Because people are willing to pay for game products, if there is no publisher or channel provider in the middle, the money goes directly to the pocket of the development company, that is a very good business model, so MiHoYo can grow so big, this is a gross profit A model with extremely high net profit.

Why are game companies important? Game companies lead the innovation of hardware devices. Let’s see how the graphics engine came out in the 1990s. It was John Carmack, a genius programmer in Silicon Valley, who did "Doom" to "Thor's Hammer". During the process of "Hammer", he thought that the pseudo-3D effect of my 2D scroll animation was no good, and I must create a real 3D space, so at that time he came up with a thing called Graphic Engine, which is the name he named Graphic Engine.

And this genius programmer is really special Silicon Valley, especially open source. Every time he makes a new generation of engines, he will open source all the code of the old engines and put them on the Internet, so the entire graphics engine industry will evolve so fast.

So it is precisely because there are a large number of people who want to run real 3D that there is the concept of real 3D games, the industry of graphics cards, and the earliest "voodoo graphics cards" that we used, followed by NVIDIA, and then iteratively. So you can think that NVIDIA's sales are all supported by the game industry.

It’s just that NVIDIA’s graphics cards can later be used in deep learning of AI, and can also be used in computer vision recognition, energy vehicles, parallel computing for mining, etc., but the computing power requirements of primary computer hardware are actually the most powerful. Graphics engine, the biggest industry served by graphics engine is games, so the game industry is really leading the trend.

So why did I invest in that cloud gaming company in 2019? I thought that if local computing can get rid of independent graphics cards, game products can be placed in cloud computing. In theory, everything that is locally calculated can be placed in the cloud. So this is the beginning of the cloudification of local computing power in the true sense, so I will invest in that cloud game company, and it turns out that the status is also good.

So the game industry is very important. Tencent never mentions that it is the world's largest game company, but in fact it is the world's largest game company. NetEase's publicity is very low-key. It is actually the third largest game company in the world. Now Mihayou will become the third, even surpassing NetEase.

Games are very important to the Internet, whether it is in terms of business model, development architecture, or hardware leadership, it is very important. In the field of blockchain this year, a clear topic of discussion is GameFi. There are three waves this year. The first wave is DeFi, the second wave discusses NFT, and the third wave discusses GameFi. I am also watching some GameFi projects intensively.

Why look at GameFi, because when I look back at the history of the industry, I feel that the game industry is to the Chinese Internet, which is equivalent to GameFi to the blockchain.

GameFi gamers are willing to pay. This market is very good. Because blockchain players bought the NFT in the game, they think the NFT I bought is very useful. I bought a piece of land and built my city. Bought a particularly good elf to fight, this NFT is very useful. If it is useful, it will generate more consumption, and at the same time, the experience level of the game itself is also doing well.

Looking back at the history of the industry, the current game is like Axie Infinity. Many people say that this thing is the unemployed people in Southeast Asia who work to earn money and support their families? But Axie is not a fun game.

But let's look back, was "Legend" introduced by Chen Tianqiao fun at the time? When "Legend" was introduced, all of our stand-alone gamers were playing "Diablo II". Regardless of whether "Diablo II" is better than Legend in terms of gameplay, storytelling, system design, graphics, and fluency .

But why was Legend able to raise such a large company as Shanda in the end? It is because new technology online games are used in such an industry, which is actually a breakthrough experience. Then he also raised a Dajin studio ecology. There are countless gold-making studios in China, and everyone is willing to spend time with the rich big brother. Isn't this similar to Axie now? And this is still a working economic model, not to mention the large number of chain game products developed on the market, the chain game products are actually constantly iterating.

Now everyone feels that many chain games are very rustic products like the web games back then. But there are actually some triple-A games planned. Let's look back at the introduction of "Legend" in 2002 to "World of Warcraft" in 2007. What has become of online games in five years? You can think about the field of mobile games. It just started to explode in 2013. Five years later, in 2018, " Collapse 3".

So don’t say that the gameplay and visual experience of a new game industry are not good enough, because the quality of products in this industry has always been improved very fast. This thing is coupled with blockchain, NFT, and a complete economic ecology. It will make the entire blockchain economy more prosperous.

History can give you all the answers, but it will not tell you the answers clearly.

Mandy: I ​​just mentioned that the improvement of game experience drives the iteration of hardware, so let’s talk about technology at the end.

It is often discussed now. One is that many metaverse startups are doing consumer-grade hardware, VR headsets, tactile gloves, wearables, etc., and the other is enterprise-grade hardware. In the past, photogrammetry cameras allowed us to see real-time on the map. Will it be possible to realize virtualization, real-time rendering and synchronous update in real-world scenes in the future, so that we can go to theme parks and shopping malls at home?

In Yuetian's view, what hardware infrastructure or components, or the maturity of other key technologies, are needed on the way to realize the Metaverse? What kind of team do you think have a chance to take the lead? How important are they in this realization of this metaverse?Chen Yuetian:

Everyone mentioned more about the client side and the consumer side, but in fact, the technology stack defined by the entire Metaverse must exceed VR and AR devices. It should be a complete technology stack from server to consumer, Server to Client.

What will happen on the server side? Cloud storage, cloud computing, cloud transmission. And what companies are there? For example, for data center companies, there will be some CDN companies, graphics card companies and display chip companies. These things are the foundation.

From the perspective of architecture, it is necessary to realize a computing network that combines the centralized computer room and edge computing, and then complete the storage computing and transmission process-cloud rendering needs to be greatly improved, because theoretically, immersive Entering the Metaverse, the world has to show lifelike. Just like the cloud rendering I just mentioned was originally used for 3D animation and visual effects companies. But now it can be used directly by game companies.

There are some middleware between the Server end and the Client end. What is the middleware—rendering engine? Some foreign and domestic companies are doing it.

There is also AI. I just mentioned that AI is very helpful for content generation in Metaverse. You need to do AI NPC, learn user behavior, and then use it to imitate your behavior. In the future, even if you are sleeping, your Metaverse Being may be working, so it is also very important for AI companies to be in it.

Then there is the confirmation of rights, so blockchain companies are very important.

There is also holographic display technology, which will be later than AR. Because it has to have such a projection of the real world, and all property rights issues and display technologies have been resolved before it can start to have holographic display. Why holographic? To display a virtual object in a real physical scene, holography is required. But that wouldn't be necessary if it was all a VR world to begin with.

So it has a sequence, first there are VR terminal devices, then there are AR terminal devices, and finally there are holographic devices.

Of course, in addition to display, VR also has other technologies, such as gloves and force sensing.

Then when it comes to terminal hardware devices, VR and AR ecology will have such an ecological establishment from OS to tools to software to content end, which is basically equivalent to everything on the Internet. It will be repeated on VR, and I I believe the speed will be very fast, because the giants have done it before, and they will be able to finish all the components soon.

metaverse big bang

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