Metaverse winds up VR/AR resurrection New revolution or old bubble?

Whether you like it or not, what should go forward will not go back. ——"Ready Player One"

When the wind of the metaverse blows, VR/AR comes alive again. In 2014, Meta (then called Facebook) acquired the two-year-old VR startup Oculus for US$3 billion, triggering a market boom; around 2018, due to technology bottlenecks and lack of high-quality content, VR/AR was delayed. I couldn't find a suitable commercial landing direction, and encountered a "fever". Now that Meta is once again leading the drama, VR/AR has taken the commercial imagination to a higher level under the background of the big narrative of the Metaverse.

Source: B&H

According to an IDC report, in 2021, the global VR/AR headset shipments will reach 11.2 million units, a year-on-year surge of 92.1%. It is predicted that this number will still increase by 46.9% in 2022; in the next few years, VR/AR shipments will maintain double-digit growth, and will exceed 50 million units in 2026. When Zuckerberg released the Oculus VR headset for payment, he said that when the active users cross the threshold of 10 million, VR/AR content and ecology will usher in explosive growth. It now appears that the time for a qualitative change has arrived.
The recovery is also reflected in the capital market. According to the statistics of Crunchbase , in the past year, nearly 3.9 billion US dollars of capital flowed into start-up companies in the field of VR/AR, setting a record for the second highest investment in history; in the fourth quarter of last year alone, global investment institutions invested 1.9 billion US dollars, which is record high.

Source: Crunchbase News

Looking back at the past, the emergence of smart phones has led to the arrival of the entire mobile Internet era. The richness of the content and interactive forms carried by smart phones exceeds that of PCs, TVs and other media in the past, which has caused a huge impact on traditional media and brought subversive impacts on all aspects of society.
Today, it has been 14 years since the release of the first-generation iPhone. Smartphones have fallen into bottlenecks in terms of functions and experience, shipments have continued to decline, and the market has become saturated. Many people believe that VR/AR will be the next generation of super media, and VR/AR devices will also become the next smart platform after smartphones. Therefore, it is understandable that big manufacturers will contribute powerfully, and those who have money will contribute money, quickly lay out the track, and launch their own hardware and software ecology.
At present, Meta has the highest market share. Its Oculus Quest 2 released in 2020 occupies about 78% of the market due to its superior performance and low price. According to media reports, Meta also plans to release two AR glasses as early as 2024. Among them, the AR glasses called "Project Nazare" do not need a smartphone, but need to be equipped with a wireless device to assist calculations; the other cheaper AR glasses Hypernova needs to be paired with a smartphone. According to Meta's plan, the company will successively launch AR glasses products in 2024, 2026, and 2028.

Source: TechSpot

Google belongs to the representative who got up early and caught up late. Google Glass ended in a fiasco in 2015, leaving valuable lessons for other companies as a pioneer in AR exploration. In the following years, Google has been on hold. Until the past two years, Google's parent company has successively acquired Canadian AR glasses manufacturer North and Micro LED company Raxium , showing that the big brother is making a comeback. At the beginning of 2022, the media exposed the AR headset project Project Iris, and the product is expected to be launched in 2024 at the earliest.
In the B-end market, Microsoft HoloLens has an advantage. Apple has also been rumored to release VR/AR headsets.
Taking a closer look at domestic manufacturers, ByteDance has gained a dominant position in the Asian market with Pico. Xiaomi smart glasses, OPPO ’s Air Glass, and iQiyi ’s Qiyu series of glasses currently occupy a relatively small market share. In addition, Alibaba , Tencent and other companies have entered the field of VR/AR hardware by investing in companies such as Nreal and Black Shark Technology (plan). Even Luo Yonghao fell in love with this track. When responding to the concerns of netizens on Weibo, he mentioned that in the future, entrepreneurship should be AR, not the VR metaverse defined by Zuckerberg.

In terms of landing scenarios, when we mentioned VR/AR in the past, it was nothing more than games, audio-visual, and entertainment. In fact, on the enterprise side, the application scenarios of VR/AR are constantly expanding.
Companies led by Meta and Microsoft regard virtual office space as an important layout for developing the metaverse. Especially in today's era of repeated epidemics and the rise of remote office, immersive virtual office experience has become a rigid need of many enterprises.
For example, Accenture and Microsoft jointly created a virtual space " Nth Floor ", where employees from all over the world can gather, give speeches and work. About 100,000 new employees join Accenture every year, and they can go through induction and training in the virtual space. Thousands of employees have participated in dozens of activities through VR/AR headsets. Accenture also recently purchased 60,000 Oculus Quest 2 for employee training, which is by far the largest purchase of an enterprise VR headset.

Accenture's virtual office space Nth Floor | Source: LinkedIn

The significance of using VR/AR in corporate training is not only cool or fun, some evidence shows that this novel method can indeed improve the training effect for enterprises. One of the important aspects is that VR/AR training provides a realistic atmosphere, especially for practitioners in medical and service fields, this sense of reality and seriousness cannot be satisfied by traditional "role-playing" training ——Role-playing can easily become embarrassing or funny, or become a big stage for actors and colleagues, and the training effect is often compromised.
A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the learning efficiency of subjects participating in VR training was 4 times higher than that of offline training, and 1.7 times higher than that of traditional online training; The offline training is 3.8 times higher than the traditional online training; after the training, the subjects participating in the VR training are also more willing to practice the training content at work than the other two training participants, and their confidence levels are respectively higher than 40% and 35%.

Source: Osso VR

In some specific industries, the value of VR/AR training is reflected in hard skills. Osso VR , a VR company that provides surgical training and assessment services for medical institutions, has calculated that the cost of holding an offline surgical training ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars, so many people have few opportunities to participate in the training. There are even fewer opportunities to learn rare disease surgery. With the help of VR equipment, medical staff can carry out training anytime and anywhere, save costs and at the same time conduct targeted exercises to help them improve their operating level

In this wave of VR/AR upsurge, there is no shortage of bad-mouthing voices. Some people believe that the current VR/AR technology has no essential breakthrough compared with a few years ago, and the technologies it relies on such as chips, sensors, and communications are far from meeting the requirements of "immersion". The leek cutting routine of putting old wine in new bottles. Is it true?
2018 was the last time that VR/AR technology was listed on Gartner's emerging technology maturity curve. Later, Gartner officially stated that because VR/AR related technologies are already very mature, they will no longer be included, giving way to more new ones that need attention. technology. Since then, although VR/AR has demonstrated technological progress visible to the naked eye, from the perspective of terminal experience, there is still room for improvement in terms of image quality, delay, and sensory interaction. The lack of killer applications at the content level still hinders VR/AR devices. popular problem. However, it will take time to break through these technical barriers and build a healthy and prosperous ecosystem of developers and creators.

Source: Daily Boyonet

Zuckerberg said in the Meta 2022 Q1 financial report that the current efforts in the field of VR/AR will not see results until 2030 and 2040.
Waiting for VR/AR to blossom, we need a little patience. not just patience

Author | Wang Wang

References:
1. VR/AR Investments Increase Just As Metaverse Talk Heats Up (Crunchbase)
2. AR/VR Headset Shipments Grew Dramatically in 2021 (IDC)
3. Osso VR
4. How Virtual Reality is Redefining Soft Skills Training (PwC)