Facebook announced its name change to Meta. How to treat the brand's new concept of meta-universe?

What is the metauniverse? Today, I will share some of my recent thoughts with you. The illustration comes from my good friend Chen Wei, who shared a PPT screenshot at the China Product Design Conference of Zhiqun. From the perspective of wave and trend, you can understand that these enterprises want to enter the meta-universe now because they think this is the next wave of the Internet. The last wave is the rise of the mobile Internet, and smartphones are becoming popular. Many apps are based on smart phones, and behind them are the rapid growth of many industries and enterprises, such as mobile shopping, mobile taxis, take-away and so on. What is the next wave? Many companies are struggling to find it. At this time, we found that many technology giants around the world began to move closer to the meta-universe. Facebook announced a long time ago that it wanted to be a hyperuniverse, and then simply positioned itself as a hyperuniverse company. Microsoft said that it is engaged in the enterprise meta-universe, and Tencent proposed the all-true Internet. Ma said, from reality to emptiness, we should also enter the meta-universe. And the market value of some listed companies with the concept of meta-universe has also increased rapidly. In the investment circle, some investors and friends said that when they saw the word meta-universe, they all vomited, and any project would rely on the meta-universe.

What is a hyperuniverse? There are three movies. I wonder if you have seen at least one of them: The Matrix, Avatar and Ready Player One. In these films, people will face another world outside the real world. In The Matrix, it is a virtual world created by the supercomputer The Matrix, and people don't know that they actually live in the virtual world. In Avatar, a real person can control another body double through the system to have another identity. In Ready Player One, a takeaway brother became a master in the game world. The hyperuniverse is another world. In terms of standard concept, metauniverse refers to a digital universe with AI, AR/VR/MR and blockchain as its core, which is constructed by many shared infrastructures, standards and protocols. It is not isolated from the material world, but tolerant of each other.

In fact, we use mobile phones every day now, and we are in a different world. Have you ever thought that if we want to buy things in the real world, we should first go to the mall, exchange information with the salespeople in a physical space, and finally complete the transaction. With the help of mobile phones, we can lie in bed, bypass these physical restrictions and directly accomplish the ultimate goal, that is, to buy goods. But the world of mobile phones is not very immersed, and it is also closely connected with our real world. Think about the game from another angle. If you have experienced VR games, when you put on VR glasses, you will find yourself in a new world. And if your virtual world, and other people's virtual world, get through each other, everyone can meet, communicate, even play together, work together, and even have new currency, you can buy things, and the goods are brand-new. At this point, you are completely immersed in another world. The game is just a scene. In people's ideal metauniverse, it is a society. Because of the epidemic, employees of many technology companies in Silicon Valley work from home, and now many technology giants allow employees to work from home for a long time. Many employees here are programmers and other professions, and their daily work is also writing code on the computer. So, what if Facebook, a company, exists completely in the virtual world? Everyone wants to wear VR glasses for the meeting. Everything in it is virtual, but the communication and cooperation between people is real. What will happen? It is likely to find that most of the work can still be carried out normally, perhaps more efficiently than in the real world. This is the hyperuniverse. People's bodies are still in the real world, and their behaviors are in the virtual world.

Back to reality, Facebook changed its name to Meta, and announced that it would shift its focus to an emerging computing platform based on virtual reality, and divide its products into two major sections, one is the original Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and other businesses, and the other is the previous virtual reality business such as Oculus. Speaking of Oculus, Facebook's virtual reality device Oculus Quest was also renamed Meta Quest. Meta Quest 2 is a breakthrough virtual reality head-mounted display device, and I have one, which works well and is better than many previous virtual reality devices. These are the foundations of Facebook's March into the universe. To really support the meta-universe, many fields of technology are needed. For example, chip technology, communication technology such as 5G or even 6G, virtual reality technology, various game technologies and artificial intelligence technology. So now there are so-called hypercosmic concept stocks, that is, products or companies that can set foot in these fields anyway can follow this wave of wind to speculate. So to what extent is the present hyperuniverse? If we use the development of smart phones as an analogy, the hyperuniverse has probably reached the level of early mobile phones, or even earlier, the level of walkie-talkies In other words, the hyperuniverse is still in a very early stage. At present, there is no company or product that can really realize the application of hyperuniverse. Why is the metauniverse so hot? Why do many capitals rush to invest in concepts related to the meta-universe? There are three main reasons: on the one hand, from the perspective of investment, everyone should make an early layout. If this concept has been realized, there may be no chance. Sometimes you will see some early projects of capital investment, which are particularly imaginative and sound unreliable, but only at a particularly early stage can they be successful.

Those internet companies that are particularly powerful today may be considered liars and jokes when they are first said. But they are really lucky, they have invested their capital, and they have all made huge profits. Venture capital, because there are risks, can have high returns. So enter early and lay out early. Capital itself will follow the wind, and everyone is afraid of missing opportunities. Often no one invests, no one really invests, but once it becomes a hot spot, it will suddenly flood in. This is the characteristic of the market itself, because the managers of these venture capital are also professionals, who are responsible for the LP (Limited Partner) of capital, that is, the investors behind it. If the tuyere appears, in any case, for many investors, it is to chase up first. Second, the current market does lack hot spots. There are not so many excellent opportunities in the internet field as before, and now we need to find the next growth point. As we all know, new opportunities are often born from the birth of new equipment and new platforms. The concept of hyperuniverse conforms to these characteristics and caters to everyone's desire for opportunities. Third, Zuckerberg and others have been adding fuel to the fire. In the field of technology and investment, some people and companies must be pushing it. What if they bring motivation and make more people think it is possible? Then more capital and talents will come in, and then the overall technology and market will move forward again, so that what might have been a dream may really become a reality. This is also a cold start. However, we also found that many so-called hypercosmic companies in the market are actually completely out of reach, often because they have no concept. They set up a concept and ignited a wave of virtual fire. Just said a lot of concepts related to capital and market, which may be far from us. For every ordinary person, we should keep an open mind, broaden our horizons, study more actively and look for some possibilities. Don't blindly believe, don't blindly chase hot spots, but don't close yourself up at the same time. I guess after the release of this video, some people will say that it is all a lie, a hype or something. If the world can really be summed up in a few words, it would be too simple. Even if you take all this as new knowledge, knowing that this may be the future trend, many companies are doing related things, and it will be more meaningful to learn more when you encounter some opportunities in the future. This is also an attitude that I hope to advocate. Let's observe this interesting world together, stay curious and maybe find some new interesting opportunities.