Senior executives resigned, large layoffs, unpaid wages were suspended, and the XR business line of large factories was "restless" Can AIGC save the day?

Original source: Metaverse

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

In 2023, ChatGPT falling from the sky will detonate the entire technology circle, and all kinds of manufacturers will deploy large models, and the “100 model war” that appeared in a short period of time will also be recorded in history.

We are no strangers to the intensity and speed of the AIGC outbreak this time, because the metaverse two or three years ago also experienced such a scene, Roblox became the first stock in the metaverse, Facebook directly changed its name to Meta, and various manufacturers also regarded the metaverse as the focus of their final business planning, but this year after the new AI became the focus, the heat of the metaverse seems to be “flat”, and even the XR industry with it has also entered a cold winter.

So, is the cooling of the XR industry just because of the “fever” of the metaverse? How did the AIGC outbreak affect it?

The “restlessness” of the XR business line of the big manufacturer

In 2012, a VR glasses called Oculus Rift came out, which is considered to have opened up a new track in the field of consumer electronics, and now VR products have been recognized by people for more than 10 years, during which the industry has had ups and downs, from 2014 to 2015, and there has been a bubble burst at the end of 2016.

Now, as the metaverse boom fades, the XR industry has also flattened, and the Metaverse has observed that the major companies that once vigorously deployed in the XR industry have frequently experienced layoffs and executive departures.

In August last year, the XR Lab of the Ali Damo Academy, which was established less than a year ago, ushered in a high-level personnel turmoil, and its chief scientist Tan Ping and a number of senior executives also left one after another.

On February 16, Tencent’s VR department, which was established for 8 months, almost laid off more than 300 people in the business line, and Tencent’s external response was: It will change the hardware development path and no longer do things that throw money at self-development.

In May, Ma Jie, the person in charge of the research and development of China’s first metaverse product, “Xirang”, also announced his resignation.

In August this year, iQIYI’s VR company Dream Bloom Technology was exposed to wage arrears and suspended. At the same time, its QIYU VR products have been fully launched on JD.com and Taobao.

On November 7, PICO, the VR division of ByteDance, issued an internal notice announcing layoffs, involving more than 300 employees. As a major manufacturer in the XR industry, PICO is backed by the big tree of ByteDance and has incomparable advantages and resources from other manufacturers. But it also caused the company itself to spread to the entire circle as long as there was a stir.

At the end of 2023, the turmoil at PICO has undoubtedly put a huge question mark on the future of itself and the XR industry.

Looking at the global XR industry, Apple’s Vision Pro, which has been sharpened for seven years, has not yet been officially launched, but its high price is destined to become a plaything in the hands of a niche. Meta’s Quest3 started with sluggish sales, Meta has cut Q4 shipments by 5%-10%, and expects Q1 shipments to decline by 70%-80% month-on-month next year.

Metaverse believes that this wave of adjustment in the XR industry this year is due to the collapse of the metaverse outlet, the sales of XR equipment are less than expected, and the capital market’s pricing model of technology companies has all been revalued to focus on profitability rather than user growth, and the global economic downturn has prompted many large manufacturers to make strategic adjustments.

Lack of applications, high production costs, can AIGC solve the dilemma of the XR industry?

We believe that the XR industry is still in the early stage of development, and from the perspective of consumers, it is the stage of transition from enthusiasts to ordinary consumers, which is characterized by the application scenarios of products, the iterative standards of hardware and the future development direction have been relatively clear, but in terms of experience, there are still deficiencies in price, soundness of content ecology, portability, market education, etc.

Among them, the lack of ecology and application is the biggest bottleneck hindering the further development of XR, we see that the number of applications in the hardware is still too small, there are more than 500 applications in the Quest3 store, and there are only 50-60 applications in the Vision Pro app store, but many of them are demo or early MVP.

At present, XR’s excellent content is basically concentrated in the field of games, such as “Half-Life Alex”, “Resident Evil 4VR Edition”, etc. According to Omdia, the global VR content market revenue is expected to be $3.1 billion in 2022, of which VR games account for about 89% of the revenue. The extremely single application scenario directly limits the development of the industry, and XR needs to quickly expand in other content scenarios outside the game field.

It’s no secret that building an app in the XR industry is a very large and complex undertaking because creating content in XR is hard and somewhat similar to making a blockbuster game, requiring a lot of technical talent such as game engines, programmers, designers, 3D developers, and sound engineers, as well as a lot of time and money.

In this case, if the company is asked to form a separate team to do it, it can lead to a huge investment that is not ideal. However, after the combination of XR and AIGC, the system can be freely controlled with voice or gestures, and complex model production and scene construction can be handled through natural language, and even code is automatically generated, which greatly reduces the cost of XR content production, and shortens the production time that used to take half a year to a month or even a week. And, it creates a subversive experience that’s as cool as Iron Man’s manipulation of the Warframe through Jarvis’ AI.

The emergence of AIGC is promoting the development of XR applications in the direction of 3D, interconnection, and high immersion, especially in the game field, which has begun to improve creative efficiency through AIGC.

For example, the Code Assist and Material Generator launched by the XR game engine Roblox are AI tools that help community users improve the efficiency of game production. There is also Unity AI released by Unity, which is also an AI tool to help developers make games faster and better.

The improvement of AIGC capabilities is driven by large models, such as language models to improve perception ability, visual models to enhance cognitive ability, and multimodal large models to improve creative ability. Some experts have shown that large models are not only for language but also for multimodality, and there should be for the metaverse in the future, such as spatial computing large models, which are basically not available on the market now, and should be developed by relevant companies in the next two or three years.

In the future, XR’s B-end business will be better?

In recent years, with the acceleration of global digitalization and the deepening of emerging technologies such as AI, cloud computing, and 5G networks, the XR industry is expected to usher in a recovery gestation period, according to market analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, the global market size of virtual and augmented reality technology will climb to $661.40 billion by 2025, a figure equivalent to a compound annual growth rate of 86.3% between 2019 and 2025.

In the B-end market, we have seen that many companies have used XR+AIGC to improve daily management efficiency, and many leading companies, including large enterprises such as Accenture and Walmart, are completing employee training through new technologies.

Walmart, for example, typically develops a number of Dialogue Trees for training, and then develops them down the path of each option, which also involves creating Interaction Points.

Through the XR device, in the process of Q&A with employees, we can understand its advantages and disadvantages, and give more targeted training to bring greater training coverage. XR flexibility is not available in traditional pre-framed training, where the trainee can perform all the assessment with the trainer’s digital avatar as long as they wear the XR headset.

In this process, the most powerful part of the combination of AIGC and XR lies in personalization, even companies with similar business models and organizational sizes to Walmart cannot copy each other’s training programs, because each company has its own cultural values and business style, which helps to ensure the uniqueness and pertinence of the training to a certain extent.

In addition to improving the efficiency of daily management, XR has also evolved in recent years in industries such as healthcare and education, and has helped different organizations accelerate their digitalization process.

At the beginning of the year, they released the industry’s first AR headset that can be used in both the operating room and other clinical environments, which can assist doctors in clinical treatment by reconstructing 3D medical images and labeling medical devices.

Rokid, a domestic AR smart glasses manufacturer, has also started from basic sectors such as AR+ remote and medical training. Previously, doctors have been contacting remote experts through video, but this method often has the dilemma of remote cooperation due to uneven lighting and unclear image quality. Rokid Glass 2 allows experts to participate in the diagnosis and treatment in real time from the first perspective, giving a comprehensive understanding of the patient’s condition.

At the end of 2022, Meta took the first step, and its new VR product Quess Pro and Microsoft “married”, Microsoft’s Teams, Office, Windows and Xbox cloud games will all be introduced into Meta’s VR headset.

In April 2023, at the Laval Virtual conference, PICO launched the new VR headset PICO G3, which is mainly aimed at B-end markets such as education, medical care, training and marketing.

Although the XR market is currently a bit sluggish, we are pleasantly surprised to find that even in today’s complex XR market, the entire industry and enterprises are still building up momentum, and new technologies, new products, and new applications are still making breakthroughs and opening up new paths. It is foreseeable that with the passage of time, XR will be integrated with more industries and technologies to produce more solutions in the future, enabling the digital development of various industries.

Write at the end

With the passage of time and technological development, although the XR track has temporarily lost its color, the world’s leading technology companies are still stockpiling related technologies and products, and the market competition is still quite fierce. As an important piece of hardware on the road to the world of the future, XR may be able to regain its brilliance at the right time as new products continue to be introduced.

In the book “Necessity” written by Kevin Kelly, it is mentioned that in the short life span of our lives, after experiencing the two platforms of “PC” and “mobile communication” to promote social development, “virtual reality” will be the next disruptive platform. And what we’re saying is that no one can predict the future with certainty, but the discussion about the next disruptive platform will go on forever.