Metaverse is a virtual world constructed by human beings using digital technology, which corresponds to or surpasses the real world, and can interact with the real world. It is a digital living space with a new social system. The essence of the metaverse is a highly developed virtual world that exists parallel to the real world but reacts to the real world.
The Metaverse allows people to have immersive experiences. Just like the scene described in the movie “Ready Player One”, when you wear a VR device, it seems to travel to another time and space, making it difficult for people to distinguish the boundary between the virtual world and the real world, and the fusion of virtual and real.
The Metaverse can elevate people from flat contact with the Internet to a 3D or even higher level. With the development of various technologies such as interactive technology, network and algorithm technology, and communication network technology, an ideal metaverse can integrate people’s vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and belief, so that players can immerse themselves in it and get infinitely close. realistic feeling.
The digital world constructed by Metaverse is a highly developed cognitive world, which is extremely open, complex and huge. The virtual world of the metaverse will have all the elements of the real world, and even its development laws are very similar to the real world. The virtual world of Metaverse will have virtual natural environment, virtual people, virtual items, virtual environment, virtual social system, virtual economy, virtual enterprise production system, virtual personal production system, virtual civilization system and virtual governance system, etc.
2022 has passed, and in this year, the “Metaverse” is still hot.
For example, on the last day of the year, in the New Year’s Eve galas broadcast by various David TVs, it is very common for virtual people to appear on stage, or to perform on the same stage with entertainers and stars, and satellite TV uses AR technology to create scenes that are both real and illusory. From this perspective, it can be seen that the concept of “Metaverse” has gradually become popular with the public, and has become the focus of many enterprises.
The “Global Metaverse Investment and Financing Report 2022” released by IT Juzi shows that in 2022, there will be a total of 704 financings in the global Metaverse industry, with a total amount of 86.867 billion yuan, of which Metaverse industry applications, underlying technologies and games account for the main aspects.
Domestically, according to the report, China (including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) has completed 125 financings, with a total financing of 12.782 billion yuan.
From the perspective of financing amount (only the financing amount publicly disclosed), about 12 companies completed financing of hundreds of millions of yuan last year; about 70 companies received investment of tens of millions of yuan last year, accounting for more than 60%; 16 companies have completed million-yuan financing, and 1 company has been listed and 2 companies have been acquired.
It can be seen from the number of financing and the amount of financing that capital is still full of enthusiasm for the “Metaverse”, and other related industries have also received enough attention.
metaverse fire
The concept of the metaverse first came from the science fiction novel “Avalanche” published by American science fiction writer Neal Stevenson, which described it as “using terminal devices to link to a virtual space parallel to the real world”. The advancement of modern science and the development of core technologies such as blockchain and XR have provided the soil for the virtual space described in science fiction.
First of all, it needs to be clear that, as a grand concept like “universe”, metaverse does not refer to a technology or an industry, but a huge socio-economic system or a virtual world.
Tim Sweeney, CEO of the well-known game developer Epic Games, believes that the metaverse will be an unprecedented large-scale participatory medium, and all users can participate, create, share and profit from it. Metaverse is not the same as virtual space, virtual games, and virtual platforms. It will not be controlled by only one company. Users’ digital avatars can freely shuttle between different platforms. Everyone will have their own universal identity and universal wallet.
To realize the “Metaverse” requires the blessing of many technologies. Shen Yang, a professor at the School of Journalism of Tsinghua University and executive director of the New Media Research Center of Tsinghua University, believes that there are three main paths to realize the Metaverse, namely immersion and superposition, radical and gradual, and open and closed. In the future, technologies including virtual reality, blockchain, AI+artificial intelligence and other technologies will all become part of the metaverse.
Metaverse is a virtual world built by human beings using digital technology, which mirrors or surpasses the real world and can interact with the real world [58] , a digital living space with a new social system.
“Metaverse” itself is not a new technology, but integrates a large number of existing technologies, including 5G, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, blockchain, digital currency, Internet of Things, human-computer interaction, etc.
For the term “Metaverse”, different scholars have different definitions——
Professor Chen Gang and Dr. Dong Haoyu of Peking University: “Metaverse is a virtual world that is linked and created by means of technology, mapped and interacted with the real world, and a digital living space with a new social system.” [9] [61]
Professor Shen Yang, School of Journalism, Tsinghua University: “Metaverse is a new type of Internet application and social form that integrates a variety of new technologies and integrates virtual reality. It provides immersive experience based on extended reality technology, and digital twin technology generates a mirror image of the real world. Build an economic system through blockchain technology, closely integrate the virtual world with the real world in terms of economic system, social system, and identity system, and allow each user to produce and edit content.” [10] “Metaverse is still a continuous The concept of development, of evolution, which is constantly enriched by different actors in their own ways.” [29]
Some scholars can also cross-define the metaverse from the four aspects of time and space, authenticity, independence, and connectivity through the “archaeology” of the concept and concept of the metaverse: From the perspective of time and space, the metaverse is a virtual space in a spatial dimension. And the real digital world in the time dimension; From the perspective of authenticity, there are both digital replicas of the real world and creations of the virtual world in the Metaverse; Connected and highly independent parallel spaces; From the perspective of connectivity, Metaverse is a sustainable and wide-coverage virtual reality system that includes the network, hardware terminals and users.
“In the long run, Metaverse is not an independent industry, but the ultimate product of multi-industry and multi-format integration based on the concept of new digital civilization.” On January 13, Chen Duan, director of the Digital Economy Integration Innovation Development Center of the Central University of Finance and Economics, was in Chongqing. It was stated at the Metaverse Digital Economy Industry Development Summit held that, but judging from the current situation, the integration of Metaverse with specific application scenarios and subdivided industries still needs time. .
2022 has passed, and in this year, the “Metaverse” is still hot
2022 is the year of metaverse policy dividends. Relevant ministries and commissions and cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, and Chengdu have introduced special policies to increase investment attraction. Internet technology companies continue to add code to the metaverse track, which indicates that this field, as a high-level form of digital economy supported by a variety of cutting-edge technologies, is irreversible in breaking the boundaries of traditional industries and driving the integration and innovation of business formats.
In Chen Duan’s view, although the relevant theories of industrial economics still have certain guiding significance for the industry to grasp the internal laws of metaverse development, they are restricted by the internal laws of the evolution of the industrial ecology, restricted by the bottleneck of computing power, the degree of synergy between software and hardware, and the maturity of the industrial ecology. Influenced by factors such as speed, the basic conditions for independently launching a large-scale metaverse industrialization practice are not yet available. “It may be a more realistic choice to choose some industrial chassis whose business models have already worked well, to intervene in a light-weight way, and to cultivate and incubate their own industrial ecology.”
Chen Duan reminded that in the early stage of industrial development, the overall scale of the market is limited, the potential energy of the industrial ecology is insufficient, and the coupling degree of industrial elements is insufficient. A realistic path for limited resources to bring about more effective socialized output in the short term.