Metaverse, fire caught off guard.
In just a few months, Minecraft and Roblox have become more popular. GREE, Nvidia, Microsoft, and others have launched their own solutions. Korea and Japan have also announced plans for a meta-universe racetrack at the national level. Ready Player One paints a scenario that could become a reality tomorrow.
(Source: New Media Research Center of Tsinghua University – research Report on the Development of the Meta-universe 2020-2021)
A Bloomberg industry research report predicts the metasurverse will reach $800 billion by 2024, and PWC expects the metasurverse market to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. The market potential is unlimited.
What is the meta-universe, anyway? In simple terms, the metadverse can be understood as an always-on virtual world parallel to the real world. In this world, in addition to eating and sleeping need to be completed in the real world, the rest including work, social contact, entertainment, etc., can be achieved in the virtual world.
It’s exciting to think that a vision that was once only possible in a dream might be realized in the near future.
However, we have to admit that the virtual world of high fidelity has not been built, the image of people in the virtual world has not been set up, the terminal cannot support the amount of data calculation, and the interactive experience is not good enough… A series of problems are waiting to be solved, and the door to the meta-universe is not yet open.
Two core technologies of the metasverse: virtual and real-time interaction
As mentioned above, the metasomes, the ultimate goal of the Internet, can break down the spatial and temporal boundaries of human social activities. In a created virtual space, people from all over the world conduct real social activities, social, business, entertainment… Among them, “virtual man” and “real-time interaction” are two essential core technologies.
Virtual person represents an individual’s recognizable image and identity. Real-time interaction ability can realize immersive real social activities, and finally blur the boundary between virtual and reality.
In the meta-universe, virtual man refers to a virtual character with digital appearance. Different from a physical robot, virtual man relies on display devices to exist. Generally speaking, we divide virtual human into two categories: one is the virtual human driven by real people, and the other is the artificial intelligence virtual human with artificial intelligence.
The meta-universe is another infinite space of real human social activities, so the realization of virtual human driven by real people technically is the first step into the “new world”, of course, such as “Out of Control Players” with self-conscious NPC virtual characters can also be realized in the meta-universe, it is more people infinite imagination.
Therefore, the virtual human of the meta-universe should have the following three characteristics:
The first is the virtual human external image, the owner’s appearance or cartoon and other interesting and vivid appearance, with a specific appearance, gender and personality and other characteristics;
Second, virtual human expression ability, owner’s behavior, with language, facial expressions and body movements to express the ability;
The third is the virtual human perception and interaction ability, the owner of people’s thoughts, has the ability to identify the external environment, and can communicate with people.
Extrinsic, expressive, perceptive abilities that almost every real human has, require a lot of technology and equipment.
First of all, everyone has the heart of beauty, I in real life from the “beauty” there is so a small distance, maybe in the new world, I can have the opportunity of “life if again”, the whole country toward the peak of life. But creating a beautiful and good avatar is not an easy task. The technical threshold of AI and graphics is very high, such as 3D modeling, high computing power and equipment performance requirements for rendering are a challenge in the industry.
Secondly, after having the beauty of the golden age of “sinking fish and falling geese, full moon and beautiful flowers, beautiful country”, light is a static image, no expression, no physical expression, the world of the meta-universe suddenly becomes the world of “walking dead”. Here involves voice interaction (TTS, ASR, NLP, etc.), animation synthesis (drive, rendering) and other AI-related technologies, the threshold of technical requirements can be imagined.
Finally, yuan the mapping of the universe is a real human world, so the basic elements of human social activity “interaction” build yuan is a key link of the universe, in order to restore the real offline without acosmia the interactive experience of feeling, need low latency and high quality of real-time communication service, but the current complicated and changeable factors such as public environment, terminal equipment is a big challenge for communication and transport.
In order to be able to “fly freely” in the “new world”, virtual image should be “beautiful”, expression should be “clear”, communication and interaction should be “smooth”… Many problems need to be solved, but the majority of Internet users are still based on mobile phones, and the types of models are also complex and diverse. Therefore, there is no need to wear equipment, but also can solve the performance problems caused by the powerful computing power required to realize virtual human interaction, and at the same time can guarantee the real-time interaction effect in the complex network environment, is the most practical and the best choice to enter the “meta-universe”.
NetEase Yunxin, coming!
The industry’s first virtual image real-time interaction fusion SDK , the first step into the meta-universe
In view of many problems currently facing, NetEase Yunxin jointly launched the industry’s first “avatar +RTC” integration SDK with NetEase Fuxi Laboratory, and formed NetEase Yunxin virtual image real-time interactive solution based on the integration SDK.
The solution CAN not only vividly restore the virtual human image, but also combine with the Communications Acceleration Network (WE-CAN) real-time transmission capability of NetEase Cloud, which CAN realize the virtual human real-time interaction and help enterprise customers to realize the virtual image real-time interaction scene. Take the first steps into the metadverse.
Specifically, NetEase Yunxin virtual image real-time interactive solution has six advantages:
First, image: highly restored, extremely clever.
NetEase Yunxin virtual image real-time interactive solution can detect users’ facial expressions and movements through cameras or uploaded videos, so as to drive 3D virtual characters to make the same facial expressions, including facial expressions, head posture, eye movement, tongue sticking out and so on.
Part of the traditional practice in order to reduce the equipment performance requirements, often at the expense of user experience expense, such as animation matching way: when the user to speak, or behavior, the default database of expressions and movements of animation to match, the last of a series of frames match play to realize the virtual person “express”. However, human behavior is diverse and random, and it is impossible to predict all behaviors. It is conceivable that there will be so-called “facial paralysis” or “zombies”. The NetEase Yunxin virtual image real-time interactive solution adopts the scheme of “real-time capture on the end and real-time drive on the cloud”, which is more real and flexible than the animation matching scheme.
Two, hardware: no wearable devices, mobile phones can be achieved.
NetEase Yunxin virtual image real-time interactive solution supports the use of common monocular camera for migration, without the need for other mobile capture equipment, simple and convenient. After the SDK of NetEase Yunxin is installed on ordinary mobile devices or PC devices, virtual humans can be generated and driven to interact with remote human-driven virtual humans in real time.
Three, performance: end – Cloud coordination, 1000 yuan machine can also play.
After the user collects audio and video through the terminal device (mobile terminal or PC terminal), the user outputs the motion model data through the SDK of NetEase Yunxin, and transmits the collected audio and video data to the cloud for virtual image reconstruction and synthesis.
Through the data analysis modeling and rendering of mobile capture in the cloud, NetEase Yunxin virtual image real-time interactive solution greatly reduces the performance pressure of the double-end algorithm, reduces the user entry threshold, so that more thousand yuan machine users can also experience the fun of virtual interaction in advance, feel the welfare of the meta-universe.
Interaction: low latency, no lag, in the metasverse “ Face-to-face communication “ .
As a converged communication cloud expert, NetEase Yunxin’s RTC capability has been in a leading position in the industry. For the indispensable “real-time interaction” scenario in the metasverse, NetEase Yunxin WE-Can global intelligent routing network escorts “zero-distance” communication.
In the face of complex and diverse network environments and terminal devices of varying quality, WE-CAN CAN stably provide real-time interaction with millisecond delay in the global scope. Through intelligent routing network, WE CAN select the best route and reach hundreds of countries and regions in a hundred milliseconds, providing 99.9% of calls with free audio and video services. Based on NetEase yunxin WE-CAN global intelligent routing network with high reliability and low latency, NetEase Yunxin avatar real-time interaction solution CAN realize virtual human real-time interaction, just like real world face-to-face conversation.
Five, convenient: 1 a SDK Can realize the meta-universe 2 Big core technology.
In the face of the two problems of virtual image and real-time interaction in the metasverse, the integrated solution of NetEase Yunxin deeply integrates virtual image and RTC at the technical level. Customers no longer need to connect with multiple suppliers, but only need an SDK to build a virtual image real-time interaction scene full of reveries and high experience
The integration SDK of “virtual image +RTC” of NetEase Yunit undertakes lightweight work such as audio and video collection/pre-processing, data analysis, coding transmission, decoding and rendering, transfers complex and high-computing power work to the cloud, forms an efficient end-cloud collaborative working mode with the help of the integration SDK, and provides virtual image real-time interactive integration capability. It takes only one SDK to overcome the high technical barriers.
Vi. Scenario: finance, e-commerce and other industries, reduce cost and increase efficiency faster.
It is worth mentioning that NetEase Yunxin virtual image real-time interactive solution can not only be applied to the metauniverse world or entertainment and social industry, but also widely used in all walks of life to help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency, but also improve customer experience, so as to improve user retention rate and create revenue.
1. Financial industry: Virtual digital person customer service, providing 7 x 24 hours warm service
2. E-commerce industry: Virtual human live delivery + customer service, bringing double improvement of business revenue and customer experience
(Application example of e-commerce industry)
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summary
It is undeniable that it is only a matter of time for the realization of the metacosmic scene and the maturity of the metacosmic industry. Ready Player One may still be a few years away, but the convergence of reality and fiction is a major trend on the Internet.
All the time, NetEase Yunxin strives for perfection in polishing technology, standing at the forefront of the industry to explore the wind direction, hoping to help industry customers do not miss every opportunity. Now, welcome friends and NetEase yunxin together, take the first step into the meta-universe.
Fill in theNetEase yunxin virtual image real-time interaction program free experience information collection table, free trial now.
Pay attention to the NetEase yunxin public account, reply to “yuanyuke” can be free trial.