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Digital twins | What does the big model mean for the Metaverse: end or rebirth?

       "The future Metaverse should be said to be all roads leading to Rome, and every path is the infrastructure road to build content for the Metaverse." Zhang Zhaogong, associate professor of Communication University of China and head of the Department of Game Design, made the above statement at the 2023 World Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

       "Today, the Metaverse is essentially the logic of value increment." Wang Mao, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Game Business Department (Yuanjing), said at the conference that the value of Metaverse is not a simple logic of stock transformation, not a copy of the real world, or adding a dimension to the simple Internet to realize three-dimensional.
On July 8th, the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, with the theme of "Zhilian World, Generating the Future", closed at the Shanghai World Expo Center. Two years ago, the concept of Metaverse was once popular. From Nvidia's Huang to Facebook's Xiao Zha, to Baidu, NetEase and Tencent in China, Internet giants have occupied positions. The industry once thought that the first year of Metaverse was coming. With the rise of artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT this year, the previously brilliant Metaverse seems to have cooled down. In this context, what development space does the Metaverse have? What other investment markets are worth looking forward to in the future?

Metaverse application scenarios have been launched in multiple industries, leading the game field

      The concept of Metaverse originated from Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche, which depicts a virtual world similar to the real world Metaverse. In "Avalanche", Stephenson describes a cyberspace parallel to the real world, where the experimenter puts on headphones and goggles and can enter a virtual world simulated by a computer and parallel to the real world through a virtual avatar.

      The industry generally believes that artificial intelligence is one of the key factors in the development of the Metaverse. At the conference, several industry experts shared, demonstrated and judged that after two years of development, Metaverse has implemented application scenarios in different industries, including industry, film and television, technical training, cultural tourism, medical and other fields. In the field of tourism, for example, through digital devices and technologies, creating colorful real scenes, dreamy virtual spaces, and cross-border interactions; Using digital light and shadow technology, an immersive interactive night tour experience that combines multiple presentation forms such as laser digital light and shadow shows, 3D mapping, interactive technology entertainment, AR, and no real person performance.

       In the medical field, Hu Weiguo, vice president of Ruijin Hospital affiliated to Ruijin Hospital, introduced the Metaverse content and scenario support in this field at the conference, including digital diagnosis and treatment services for patients, hospital operation scenario construction, auxiliary treatment and precision medicine, clinical ward scenario construction, etc.
Among them, in terms of auxiliary treatment and precision medicine, Hu Weiguo mentioned in his speech at the conference that the application of hybrid reality technology can achieve the fusion of holographic images and real surgery in the lesion area during surgery, and cooperate with other automated technologies used in surgery to achieve auxiliary treatment. It includes AI based rapid Iterative reconstruction, preoperative surgical path planning for patients with brain Granuloma, intraoperative auxiliary precise positioning, shortening the operation time and reducing intraoperative bleeding; In carotid endarterectomy surgery, techniques such as mixed reality and intraoperative neuroelectrophysiological monitoring are used to assist in locating the location of carotid bifurcation stenosis under "fluoroscopy" before surgery, and intraoperative neuroelectrophysiological monitoring is used to "escort".

The game industry is most closely related to the development of "Metaverse" technology.

      "The Metaverse is more like a destination that we will definitely go to, but these destinations have many blocks and paths, among which I think the most important is our game path, because it is highly coincident with the Metaverse, whether it is a production tool or a creative means." Zhang Zhaogong, associate professor of Communication University of China and director of the Department of Game Design, said at the conference.

      Guo Kuangye, deputy general manager of Alibaba Cloud Game Business Department (Yuanjing), said in an interview with surging journalists during the conference that, from the current market, the core technology of games is being exported to Metaverse. From the perspective of landing, more efforts are made within the game industry Metaverse. From the perspective of tools, the game industry has been developing and accumulating since a long time ago, with very solid content and funds, which can better connect the Metaverse.

      "In recent years, we began to review the technical experience of the game industry, export it to Metaverse, and slowly feed it back to other industries." Guo Kuangye told the surging news reporter, "In fact, the industry practitioners of Metaverse are closely watching the technological progress of the game industry, and also looking at what new opportunities can be brought to them from the game industry to other industries."

      Yuanjing, established in 2021, is Alibaba's Metaverse and cloud game technology service brand. It is the further layout of Ali in the field of Metaverse and cloud games when the Metaverse is booming.
      Previously, Ali insiders disclosed to the media that the company's future business is related to Metaverse. This time, Guo Kuangye also revealed at the conference that in the past two or three years, the main work of Yuanjing has gradually deepened the promotion and ecological popularization of cloud game technology in the Metaverse market.
Development opportunity of Metaverse under the AIGC boom: intelligent interactivity is improved and cost is reduced
Since this year, the generative AI technology led by ChatGPT has developed rapidly, and the sound volume of the previously hot Metaverse seems to be much weaker.

      Guo Kuangye said to the surging journalists that he did not agree with the "Metaverse cooling theory", "It is normal that the topics related to the Metaverse have decreased somewhat. When the Metaverse became hot two or three years ago, we all knew that its final form was a long cycle, far away from us, including content, technology and other Metaverse ecology needs a long time to develop. However, this does not affect the continuous innovation of phased Metaverse technologies, programs and products and the promotion of Digital transformation in various industries."

      "Now the Metaverse industry is moving from the original hot spot and brutal growth to a healthy and sustainable link." Guo Kuangye also told the surging news reporter that a long-term development trend of Metaverse is the next generation Internet after PC and mobile Internet. The emergence of AIGC is also promoting the Metaverse to develop slowly towards the 3D, interconnected and highly immersive Internet direction. This year, Yuanjing will put more emphasis on the value creation of the Metaverse, focusing on the combination of the scenario scheme of the Metaverse and the real economy.
       How will the Metaverse develop against the background of explosive growth of the large model? Many insiders said that the former provided a great booster for the development of Metaverse.

     "AIGC stimulates the mass production of high-quality content, which will accelerate the development of the Metaverse. We believe that in the next stage, AI is expected to create a relatively complete digital scene according to human instructions." Guo Kuangye said that in the past, from the earliest PGC to UGC, it was promoted with professional tools. With the launch of tools such as Midjournal and stable diffusion this year, we have seen the gradual realization of AI assisted UGC, which has greatly promoted the growth of content and gradually reduced the cost of content production in the Metaverse.

       Guo Kuangye said to the surging journalists that he did not agree with the "Metaverse cooling theory", "It is normal that the topics related to the Metaverse have decreased somewhat. When the Metaverse became hot two or three years ago, we all knew that its final form was a long cycle, far away from us, including content, technology and other Metaverse ecology needs a long time to develop. However, this does not affect the continuous innovation of phased Metaverse technologies, programs and products and the promotion of Digital transformation in various industries."
      "Now the Metaverse industry is moving from the original hot spot and brutal growth to a healthy and sustainable link." Guo Kuangye also told the surging news reporter that a long-term development trend of Metaverse is the next generation Internet after PC and mobile Internet. The emergence of AIGC is also promoting the Metaverse to develop slowly towards the 3D, interconnected and highly immersive Internet direction. This year, Yuanjing will put more emphasis on the value creation of the Metaverse, focusing on the combination of the scenario scheme of the Metaverse and the real economy.
How will the Metaverse develop against the background of explosive growth of the large model? Many insiders said that the former provided a great booster for the development of Metaverse.

      "AIGC stimulates the mass production of high-quality content, which will accelerate the development of the Metaverse. We believe that in the next stage, AI is expected to create a relatively complete digital scene according to human instructions." Guo Kuangye said that in the past, from the earliest PGC to UGC, it was promoted with professional tools. With the launch of tools such as Midjournal and stable diffusion this year, we have seen the gradual realization of AI assisted UGC, which has greatly promoted the growth of content and gradually reduced the cost of content production in the Metaverse.

      Shenyang said that the global technology giants have made a major strategic layout for the Metaverse, comprehensively strengthened technology research and development and industrial empowerment, and continued to increase XR investment. However, achieving the above-mentioned action plan still faces significant difficulties and challenges. Currently, it is necessary to consider how to improve the interactivity of hardware devices and further do a good job in this area.
With the increasing demand for generative AI, hybrid AI will become the future of AI. Cheng Lixin also stated that generative AI models not only require extremely high requirements for basic computing facilities, but also the cost of reasoning in the cloud has become very high. Therefore, in order to unleash the full potential of generative AI, it is necessary to truly achieve the scale expansion of generative AI in XR and more terminal fields, This requires not only processing in the cloud, but also distributed processing on billions of network source terminals capable of high-performance AI computing with low power consumption, known as hybrid AI.