VR is growing rapidly and is also practicing the metaverse, but we think AR glasses have the potential to replace smartphones.
At the end of October, Facebook changed its name to Meta, which was an important step in Facebook’s transformation into a “metaverse company” and led to more discussion about the Metaverse.
The metaverse does not have a clear and unambiguous definition. Simply understood, the metaverse is a reflection of the real world in the virtual world.
Since we want to map the real world, the difficulty can be imagined. AR, VR, MR (collectively referred to as XR) should be the devices that are currently closely related to the Metaverse, but XR devices are still in the early stage, to realize the metaverse, promoting the development of XR equipment is the key.
1. The Metaverse and XR
The metaverse is a buzzword, but it’s not a new concept.
The 1992 science fiction novel wrote, “As long as you put on headphones and eyepieces, find a terminal, you can enter another three-dimensional reality simulated by the computer through the connection. Everyone can have their own avatar in this virtual space parallel to the real world.”
The concept of the Metaverse, which was proposed 29 years ago, will become an overnight success in 2021. It is closely related to the listing of Roblox, the first multiplayer online sandbox game platform in the Metaverse this year, and is also inseparable from Facebook, Tencent, and NVIDIA, the participation of giants such as ByteDance.
Most people have seen Facebook’s renaming of Meta, but they tend to ignore the Oculus Quest2, a VR device launched by Facebook. It is also a smart device closely related to the Metaverse. Since its release in October 2020, its shipments have hit new highs. This is the basis for Facebook’s transformation of the Metaverse Company.
Goolton Technology Co., Ltd ,as an AR glasses company ,believes that a real metaverse product should have 8 attributes: identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, anywhere, economic system and civilization. XR devices apparently share many of these features.
2. XR from vertical integration to horizontal expansion
In 2015, the scale of China’s VR investment rose from 270 million to 2.4 billion, an 8-fold increase in one year. The following year, 2016, was called “the first year of VR”.
However, soon, due to the unresolved technical challenges, the VR equipment has a strong sense of dizziness, there are not many games and content, and the VR equipment with poor experience has not been popularized. The VR investment bubble also burst, and the industry fell into a trough.
However, with the improvement of technology and the gradual development of software and application ecology, after the completion of better vertical integration of XR equipment, various forms of products, including 5g AR glasses, smart glasses and commercial VR all-in-one machines, can provide better experience, accepted by more consumers.
This year, both the number of products released and the number of shipments in the XR industry seem to indicate that the development of the XR industry has ushered in a new high. IDC predicts that global VR shipments will reach 8.3 million units in 2021, an increase of 50.2% over the full year of 2020.
When more people have XR devices, to attract more people to use XR devices, applications become the key, and the key to rich applications is the software development platform.
3. AR has the potential to replace smartphones
AR innovators or enterprises can obtain platform technology, project funding, joint marketing and promotion, and hardware development kit support in advance, including application developers such as fitness and tabletop games. The official launch time is spring 2022.
In fact, Goolton Technology Co., Ltd is optimistic about the current development and future potential of AR. We see VR gaining momentum in the short term, especially in areas such as gaming, fitness, B2B, and the practice of metaverse concepts. But we think AR glasses have the potential to even replace smartphones in the future.
We expect that in the next three to five years, AR glasses, Chinese augmented reality glasses and commercial VR all-in-one devices will gradually converge, eventually forming an ultimate device form that can realize all experiences. But for VR and MR devices, it may take longer to realize this trend, because the display modules of these devices support optical see-through, and they are deployed very differently.
