The buzzed-about Metaverse, the overlooked status quo, major opportunities and hidden risks

The Metaverse first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, and with Roblox going public this year and Epic Games claiming to have received $1 billion in investment to make the Metaverse a reality, it has ignited the capital markets and then spread to the Chinese market as well.

As in the past with various concepts that suddenly exploded in popularity, there is so much noise that we need to think hard about its essence. So what is the essence of the Metaverse? What is the next evolutionary path of the Metaverse, and what is the Metaverse breakthrough application?

Below is the judgment and thoughts on the development of Metaverse by Yuheng Chen, CEO of rct AI.

Why is the Metaverse being hotly debated right now?

The essence of Metaverse’s breakthrough is that this node is no longer driven by a single industry, but rather multiple industry booms collide at the same time, creating a “singularity” effect.

First, the game industry has been in a rapid growth phase in recent years due to the popularity of game engines and handheld games. The outbreak of the epidemic served as a catalyst to directly drive the frenzy in the game capital market, and the maturity and heat of the game industry is the fundamental basis for this wave of Metaverse singularity outbreak.

Second, online social has also seen an unprecedented explosion due to the epidemic. The massive social needs brought about by remote working and the inability to gather offline can only be carried by real-time online social networking.

Then again, the AI industry in 2020 ushered in what is probably the most important turn in the future retrospect. By OpenAI and Google’s bold investment and innovative breakthroughs in the direction of large models, the industry has seen new hope in the direction of achieving AGI, and major domestic manufacturers have achieved good results in their attempts.

Therefore, as an important technology to realize the “self-growing” feature in Metaverse, the general direction of application and implementation behind AI-generated content has been illuminated, and all that is left is the engineering efforts and investment in data and computing power.

On top of that, the blockchain industry is seeing a new wave of industry boom in 2020 with NFT, which happens to be closely related to digital assets and economic systems in the Metaverse, so for the first time ever, the Internet industry and Crypto industry are peaking at the same time.

Finally, the VR industry’s turnaround in 2020 has also been the backbone behind this singularity explosion of the Metaverse. For example, the Oculus Quest 2 exceeded expectations in terms of shipments and user base.

Taken together, when so many industries are experiencing a huge historical turnaround at the same time, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a worldwide capital market frenzy over the Metaverse at this time.

What is the essence of Metaverse?

The Metaverse is the next generation of the Internet. Because it allows all human social activities in the real world to be mapped into one virtual world after another, in a more natural and efficient way to interact.

At the same time, Metaverse has several distinctive and unique features. One of the most important features is Identity, which can be built in a variety of ways — social chains, economic systems, or immersion on screen. Because there’s more than one way to build identity, we can see prototypes of the Metaverse like Roblox, Honor of Kings, Cryptovoxels, or Oasis VR.

Another very important feature is the more natural interaction, Metaverse not only allows users to have another identity in the virtual world, but also breaks the information cage dilemma that all users cannot escape from in today’s mobile Internet through more spatial game graphics and experience. With the natural sense of space in the virtual world, users’ access to information is greatly expanded, and they are no longer limited by the “list” way of accessing information in the mobile Internet era.

There are also three elements at the bottom of the Metaverse that are key to supporting the characteristics of the surface layer: perpetuity, self-growth, and scale.

“Perpetuity” is mainly expressed in the economic system and the governance system. If the system is strongly centralized, it is difficult to see a governance system that can be theoretically sustainable, because it is the nature of centralized business to maximize commercial interests, and decentralization can fundamentally solve this problem.

“Self-growth” corresponds to the problem of content generation in the virtual world that we are addressing. Virtual worlds need to be able to generate more content supply from the system in an emergent manner than human beings can create, in order to truly surpass the current mobile Internet and real world in scale.

“ Large-scale” is more in the cloud service, and there are many cloud game vendors or traditional cloud service vendors that are solving the large-scale problem. Another angle to achieve large scale is in the part of game engine rendering, to achieve support for large scale content.

How do you interpret the practice of the Metaverse?

I think the Metaverse practice has to have three components: AIGC (AI generated content), DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), and the cloud.

AIGC (AI Generated Content)

For virtual worlds, AI is involved in the construction and development of the Metaverse in the role of infrastructure. AIGC is divided into two major parts: one is the image side of AI, including technologies such as skeletal animation generation, facial expression generation, and motion capture around character roles, and technologies such as image recognition, scene generation, and asset import around spatial scenes, as well as technologies around infrastructure construction of rendering, modeling, rendering, particle systems and other technologies.

The other is AI on the logic side, including technologies such as semantic understanding, language models, and conversational bots around language conversations, as well as general AI, scenario-based decision models (multi-intelligence single-goal, multi-intelligence multi-goal), etc. around decision logic.

DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)

The centralized autonomous organization is another important feature of the Metaverse that builds on the AIGC and can make it different from the current Internet and virtual world.

After the emergence of recommendation algorithms, machines have gradually replaced people in the selection process. At this stage, although we have seen the increase in the volume of content to meet the needs of the granularity has been gradually reduced, but because the vast majority of the content is still produced by human output, so it is impossible for every detail of each content to be generated in real time according to the needs of different people, the user’s right to choose has become increasingly vulnerable.

Therefore, blockchain technology is the best technical path to realize decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and the developer ecology built based on blockchain technology itself will develop at a rapid pace.

Cloud

Only with the development of communication technology, algorithm and cloud technology, the ability of AI can be fully released, and the current focus of cloud game and cloud experience should be on “game” or “experience”, while the meaning of “cloud” is: all-round in the interaction mechanism, mechanism, play, setting and other aspects, are based on the characteristics of the cloud to reconsider and realize, give full play to the advantages of the cloud, while trying to avoid the disadvantages of the traditional process, to create richer digital content faster;

At the same time, a personalized content experience is quickly generated and iterated based on user preferences in the interaction between the user and the virtual world. Only such an experience can be called a true cloud experience because it brings new needs to users that are different from the past, rather than pushing the stream to achieve established needs that can be achieved without the cloud.

Since Metaverse is an experience and lifestyle that spans multiple fields such as AI, blockchain, gaming, and social, and the source power that can inspire new user demand lies in the native virtual creatures created by AI, companies in the AI field will be the most successful one in the long run, but there are so many factors that can affect the performance of specific products in the short term that companies in each field actually have the opportunity to establish certain advantages and then go on to complement AI capabilities, and such a path is also feasible.

What will Metaverse’s breakthrough app look like?

In terms of the attributes of the Metaverse, it places more emphasis on the interactive experience in the native virtual world. Roblox is only an intermediate product between the digital virtual world and the native virtual world, the first stage of the Metaverse.

And AI will be the next must-have element of Metaverse’s breakout application. From the perspective of end users, consumer experience and demand, AI can bring new social relationships to users by creating native virtual species with intelligence.

This kind of social relationship is a kind of connection that does not exist in the real world, before people fully grasp and accept it, when users try to understand the social relationship between virtual species and between people and virtual species, they can only make associations and analogies by referring to the social relationship between people in the real world, which may lead to inaccurate understanding such as cognitive errors and biases.

In this kind of social relationship around virtual species, for virtual species born from algorithms and codes, their growth logic is probably different from that of real people, thus from their point of view, the necessary input they need, such as arithmetic power, corpus and scene knowledge, is an output for us, while our relationship with them will change from pure digital content consumption to a supply and demand relationship.

They will return the favor by giving us the monetary or other resources we need to survive and grow, etc. Thus, it is a different kind of relationship than what we now understand can satisfy people in scenarios such as interests, careers, games, hormones, etc.

Of course, any nascent application and product will encounter various kinds of resistance in its early development, and this resistance often comes from users’ over-reliance on established needs and the interval of cognitive progress. In the long run only products that truly generate new user needs and satisfy them will gain more user support in the new era, thus building the Metaverse together with companies, organizations and users around the world.

What will the Metaverse look like in a decade?

Just as Bill Gates suffered from the incomprehension and ridicule of most people when he imagined the future of the Internet on his talk show in 1995, many people will not be able to personally feel and understand what the Metaverse will look like in ten years from today.

Therefore, to imagine the Metaverse in ten years, we must leave behind the default way of thinking that “the present is the best” and use a new logical way to deduce how our lives will change in ten years because of the Metaverse.

I think that in the future, human beings will create intelligent creatures in the virtual world in another dimension. This intelligent creature is not a replica of human beings, his way of thinking is based on predefined data, and he needs to understand different virtual worlds based on different data structures, but the birth of this intelligent creature means that the civilization boundary of human society is once again expanded. We may no longer need to go to space to look for alien civilizations to broaden the boundaries of civilization.

Ten years may seem short, but in the very short history of the past, we have seen that ten years can mean a huge change for modern human civilization.

The mobile Internet in the past decade has gradually seen the emergence of closed and inefficient information flow, the explosion of information, the flow of information firmly controlled by large centralized nodes, that is, commercial giants, and the complexity of interaction, which are some of the problems shown by the traditional Internet in the last era of its transformation into the mobile Internet. This also shows that humanity will eventually move toward and embrace digital civilization, and the Metaverse is the next stage of the complete digitization of human civilization that we see.