3月16日，“Construct Your Metaverse with Alibaba Cloud”线上研讨会顺利结束。本次活动由阿里云主办，于大型VR在线社交平台VR Chat上举行。与会者可以虚拟形象进入房间参与讨论，也可通过直播平台观看视频直播。
本次活动的与会者来自不同国家、不同行业，包括人工智能、游戏、区块链、VR硬件、VR内容创作等领域的高管与工程师等。对元宇宙中的技术应用，在拓展、提升业务，满足客户需求方面的现状及可能性等话题进行了讨论。
会上，小派科技CEO任攀先生(Nordic)发表了演说，从VR硬件公司的角度对元宇宙进行了解读，阐述了小派提出的VR3.0技术标准，解读了小派科技致力于高性能VR硬件研发，定位中高端市场的品牌理念，以及对未来的展望。
由于本次会议的观众多为海外用户，并且演讲者国籍各不相同，会议采用了英语进行交流。以下为任攀先生的演讲全文：
Hello everyone.
This is Nordic, CEO of Pimax. It has been the seventh year that Piamx has been committed to the R&D and manufacturing of VR hardware. With our leading R&D capabilities, we focus on the R&D and production of high-performance VR head mounts. The topic I’m bringing up today is "High-performance VR Hardware is the Gateway to Metaverse".
What is Metaverse
Being the hot topic of late, metaverse has attracted a lot of attention to the VR industry. What does the Metaverse look like? Different industries and companies may have diverse insights to the metaverse, and there is no exact definition as of now. If I were to try and define it, I would say metaverse is a revolution involving information technology, the Internet, artificial intelligence, and VR, AR, and MR game engines. What the metaverse reveals is the possibility of constructing a holographic digital world parallel to the “traditional” world we are used to.
Simply put, metaverse is like a hodgepodge, describing the prospects and possibilities of the Web 3.0 era. We say Web 1.0 refers to the desktop internet era, relying on computers; Web 2.0 refers to the mobile internet era, mainly relying on mobile phones; Web 3.0 era is what we refer to as the era of metaverse. In metaverse, the underlying data technology would integrate 5G and blockchain, and the hardware interaction would be done through VR HMDs.
Immersion is the Cornerstone of Metaverse
But why did metaverse came under the spotlight all of a sudden? In PC based web 1.0 and mobile phone based web 2.0, most of the elements of the metaverse—identity, friends, civility, economy, low friction, variety, anytime, anywhere and many others have long existed, but different from PCs and mobile phones, the latest VR head mounts can provide people with a relatively realistic sense of immersion.
By simulating the physical environment we are in - light, sound, smell, taste, movement, and using the simulated physical environment to affect our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body sense, touch, VR experience can stimulate users to produce chemical and electrical signals to affect the “id”/surface consciousness, which in turn affects the “ego” and “superego”/subconscious. This is the psychological and physiological basis for VR gears to create immersion.
And it is through this process, can people truly enter the virtual world that has existed for a long time. Only with residents, can the virtual world become Metaverse.
To sum up, among the key elements of the Metaverse, immersion is the key and cornerstone. With immersion provided by high-performance VR hardware, people would be able to really enter the Metaverse.
Immersion requires high performance VR hardware
How do we define the technical standard of high-performance VR hardware?
We know that immersion is the prerequisite to metaverse, and it needs to be obtained through high-performance VR hardware. This requires VR manufacturers to revolutionize VR related technologies. Last year, Pimax proposed at the Pimax Frontier press conference that to provide users with the sense of immersion, VR HMDs need to meet the technical standards of VR 3.0, ensuring naturalness, freedom, and self-awareness in VR experience. That is, to ensure visual immersion, physical immersion, and cognitive immersion (corresponding respectively to naturalness, freedom, and self-awareness).
Visual Immersion
Visual immersion corresponds to “naturalness” in the definition of VR 3.0.
Unit of Visual Immersion, or UVI, as its name indicates, is an important parameter to measure visual immersion, consisting of three key indicators: pixels per degree, or PPD; field of view, or FOV; and refresh rate. Each has an upper limit: 60 PPD is retinal level; 220 degree FOV is the natural field of view of the human eye; for refresh rate, 180Hz is the threshold beyond which latency becomes practically indistinguishable to human eyes.
Divide the three indicators respectively by their upper limit (that is, the 100% level), the resulting percentage represents the performance of the VR headset on that particular aspect. The weighted harmonic mean of the three percentages is UVI.
100% UVI means that the human eye is completely unable to tell whether it is seeing an image in the headset or the real world. This sounds surreal, but in fact it is not so far away from us. Released in 2021, the UVI of Pimax Reality 12K QLED would be as high as 73%, close to excellence.
The bottleneck of UVI improvement is the limited GPU computing power, which determines the number of frames that can be generated per unit time (that is, the refresh rate) multiplied by the total number of pixels in a single frame. There is also a way to use cloud computing power. For cloud computing platforms like Alibaba Cloud, the electricity fee caused by hardware (computing machine, storage machine) , GAS fee, operation and maintenance fee and other costs are all packed and provided to the demander in equal parts, and provide clients with computing power in a professional and low-cost way.
Physical Immersion
Physical immersion corresponds to freedom in the framework of VR3.0. The VR hardware needs to achieve six degrees-of-freedom tracking, or 6DOF tracking, that is, the tracking of head and hand. At the same time, VR gears need to be optimized in terms of wireless, spatial influence, somatosensory gear, ergonomic design, weight and size control and distribution.
In the future, if we want to build an immersive, tetherless metaverse platform, GPU resources would be essential. With Alibaba Cloud, we can quickly launch GPU-based virtual machines to run heavy workload jobs on rendering, 3D modeling and simulation with a cost-efficient way. That is the foundation of Metaverse.
Cognitive Immersion
Cognitive immersion corresponds to self-awareness in the framework of VR3.0. To evaluate cognitive immersion, we can use the Mirror Test. This test is usually used to test whether an animal is smart enough to know that the image in the mirror is of itself and not another individual. We borrow this concept to test whether we can see our own expressions, sight, and body movements in virtual reality, so as to form a sufficient sense of self-existence. In addition to head and hand 6DOF we mentioned earlier, cognitive immersion also requires the support of many functions such as face tracking, eye tracking, body tracking (full-body motion capture) and even emotion tracking. Only with the support of sufficient cognitive immersion is it possible to form valid communication that supports social networks.
Pimax - Dedication to High Performance VR Hardware
Since its establishment, Piamx has been an upholder of high-performance hardware R&D. Considering the early stage VR industry is in, hardware companies capable in R&D ought to lead the way. Considering the development of Piamx itself, it is necessary to stick to high-end VR headsets.
This picture demonstrates the product positioning of Pimax and other VR companies in different time periods. Three lines are drawn from the origin of this coordinate system, representing high, medium and low-end products respectively. The horizontal axis represents time. The green line represents the upper limit of VR hardware performance, and the white line represents the lower limit. In the middle is the positioning of the VR HMDs from various companies, including Pimax.
From the standpoint of users, in the early stage of VR industry, high-performance VR HMDs have a longer lifespan. Currently, the average life cycle of a VR HMD is around 6-12 months. While Pimax focuses on high-end products, the average product life cycle is more than 24 months due to the leading specs.
Let me explain how this works. Assume that all manufacturers start to develop products from scratch. 12 months after releasing, the specs of Pimax products are almost equivalent to those of other companies’ mid-end products. After 24 months, they can still compete with low-end products on the market, while the low-end products never actually reached the bottom line of performance since the day of release.
One example worth mentioning is that Pimax launched a 4K model in 2016, while it wasn’t until the end of 2018 that a competing 4K HMD was released. In this case, Pimax was ahead of the industry for about 24 months.
So objectively speaking, Pimax products do have higher value due to their long lifespan. Many KOLs call Piamx products “future-proof”. I think it is a concise interpretation of our product strategy.
From the standpoint of a manufacturer, A longer product cycle will result in lower average R&D cost, allowing the company to achieve deeper technology accumulation and better prepared for competition.
Also, in an emerging industry, product performance directly brings better user experience, which contribute to the company’s competitiveness. This is also the basic logic by which Pimax is able to gain a leading role in the international high-end VR HMD market.
Pimax 2022
In the past four or five years, we have gained a sizeable influence overseas, and a good reputation among high-end users. In 2017, we closed Kickstarter crowdfunding with the highest amount in VR category and have been holding the Guinness World Record to this day. Our products have won numerous awards, including the Best VR/AR Product title at CES 2020.
On October 26, 2021, Pimax proposed the technical standard of VR3.0 at the global launch event called Pimax Frontier, and released a phenomenal new product —— Pimax Reality 12K QLED. 12K will operate as both PC VR and standalone VR, and the key specs and functions are reaching the culmination of the current VR industry. The product is expected to launch in Q4 2022.
Pimax aspires to be a pioneer and leader in the VR industry. We hope to bring more products with better performance to users in the future. So now my part is coming to an end, thank you for your attention, and appreciation to Alibaba Cloud for inviting me.
