When will the door to the virtual world open? Will the Metaverse really come to fruition?

Liu Cixin said that human beings have two futures: outward to the stars and sea, and inward to virtual reality. The road of stars and oceans refers to the development of hard technology and the development of the universe, just like the road that Musk is currently exploring, and virtual reality refers to the hottest topic of the moment, the "metaverse".

The emergence of the metaverse is mainly due to the first, the new incremental active demand in various industries; second, the promotion of the development of the metaverse under the epidemic; Forming the next wave of technology, the Metaverse is a new format emerging from the accumulation of various technologies in the early stage; fourth, technology requires new scenarios , and the Metaverse has relatively strong capabilities for artificial intelligence, algorithms, Internet of Things, digital twins, and blockchains. There is a large space for demand, because demand is also conducive to promoting the development of various industries; fifth, users need new experiences , from surfing the Internet to chaining, from one-way absorption to two-way interaction, immersive experience has also become a new demand for users.

It is not difficult to understand the "Metaverse". The 2021 movie "Runaway Player" is popular all over the world. The core of this movie is that the protagonist is in a virtual world to embark on a series of fantasy adventures, similar to the virtual settings in the movie. It’s not uncommon, as we are familiar with “The Matrix”, “Western World”, “Ready Player One” and so on all use such a concept- virtual world, and its new identity is the “metaverse”.

Regarding the "Metaverse", what attracted the most attention was that last year, a game company in the United States, Roblox , was successfully listed with the halo of "the first stock in the Metaverse" on its head. value. After that, Zuckerberg announced that he would transform Facebook into a metaverse company within five years, and domestic Internet giants such as Tencent also began to make efforts to preempt the track, as if everyone was trying to find ways to join the wave of the metaverse , So, can the metaverse really come true?

Through the movie, we can simply understand that the metaverse is to build a 3D virtual space parallel to the real world in the virtual network world through various technical means. Players can socialize, work, and entertain in the virtual space. The various online games involved are actually the original form of the Metaverse.

The biggest difference between Metaverse and online games is that the former uses virtual reality technology, just like the protagonist in "Ready Player One" wears a helmet goggles and puts on an experience suit to enter the virtual world for entertainment and life. For game lovers, this completely The immersive experience will give the player a "new identity". However, the realization of the metaverse still faces three core problems: hardware, software, and order system.

Let’s talk about hardware first. The underlying technology of the Metaverse is VR/AR and cloud computing. Take VR/AR as an example. On the client side, VR/AR is the key and the entrance to the Metaverse. We know that the first thing to do when entering the metaverse is complete immersion, and current VR devices are far from meeting such requirements.

In terms of resolution, according to the research of AMD Semiconductor Corporation of the United States, only when the VR device reaches the resolution of the human eye "16K" can it achieve full immersion without grainy viewing with the naked eye, but the VR devices currently on the market can support The highest resolution is only 4K. Even 4K has been popularized for nearly ten years and the coverage rate is less than 40%. Therefore, there is still a long way to go to popularize smaller and more sophisticated 16K VR devices.

Let’s look at the software again. In real life, if you want to develop a 4K large-scale computer game like “Cyberpunk” and “Death Stranding”, it will take thousands of development engineers several years to complete it. The focus is on this type of game Players only need to spend more than 100 hours, and they can basically experience it completely. Therefore, in the world of metaverse, we want to design different life scripts for billions or even billions of men, women and children with completely different needs. Experience for one year or longer requires a larger number of development engineers to work together, and the process will only take longer.

Having said that, since the Metaverse is a virtual world that can simulate everything in real life, the so-called virtual world also needs order to maintain. The core of order in real life has two points, the first is social order, and the second is economic order. The core of social order is fairness and justice, which needs to be maintained by law and law enforcement agencies; the core of economic order is currency and finance, which are controlled by the central bank It is not difficult to find that the core of maintaining order is the government and the country. So, who decides the order of the metaverse?

If it is the company and enterprise that created the metaverse, I believe many people will not recognize it. Most people never have any illusions about companies that are purely profit-seeking and the capital behind them, because they build their own Everyone in the Metaverse wants to be an almighty god in their own Metaverse and make money for a long time. Otherwise, how can they make back their capital with huge investments? Therefore, in order to realize the metaverse, the most critical link is how to formulate the rules of the metaverse.

Nowadays, the emergence of the metaverse is always linked to games, and the metaverse gives users a fully immersive experience, which makes people a little worried: if you play too many games, people will be useless! If everyone is immersed in working, living, and socializing in the metaverse, and is unwilling to return to real life to face the life of the jungle, is everyone's life still normal? In fact, everyone has already encountered such concerns before the emergence of online games, so there is a time limit in the game, and there are processing methods for the purification of the online game environment, etc.

With the development of the times and the advancement of science and technology, there will always be new things appearing, and at the same time, various rules will be perfected, and these will require a long process. Regardless of whether the Metaverse appears or not, we must face it with a positive attitude. , if the metaverse is really the only way to the future, only by correcting our mentality can we better explore.

As for the future, is it a "high tech, low life" cyberpunk, or a digital utopia where reality and reality co-exist? It would be futile to talk about the consequences before the results have been implemented.