The Sino-U.S. dollar universe dispute: who can come to the end in this game?

In 1992, the famous American science fiction master Neil Stephenson described the metaverse in his novel "Avalanche" as follows: "Put on headphones and eyepieces, find the connection terminal, and then you can enter the computer simulation, and the real world as a virtual clone. Parallel virtual space of the world."

He might not have thought that in 2021, Metaverse will become one of the most popular concepts in the field of science and technology.

At the moment, Metaverse represents the next generation of Internet opportunities, bringing opportunities for corner overtaking for countries lost in the PC Internet and mobile Internet era.

Therefore, in the context of Metaverse, each country relies on its own endowments and advantages to carry out a comprehensive layout to further strengthen its competitive advantage.

From a global perspective, China and the United States will gain first-mover advantage in the current stage of the layout based on their own strong accumulation of digital economic strength.

United States: Metaverse pioneers, focusing on functional platforms

Benefiting from years of accumulation and deployment in the technical field, the United States has initially formed certain technical barriers in the infrastructure and platforms of Metaverse, and it plays a leading role in many areas of the global Metaverse industry.

Technology: Focus on infrastructure and functional platforms, leading the world in technical strength

The United States’ focus on Metaverse focuses on infrastructure and functional platforms. Its core competitiveness is mainly reflected in the hardware entrance and operating system, back-end infrastructure, and underlying architecture. At the same time, it has strong competitiveness in the direction of artificial intelligence. .

Hardware entrance

In the first quarter of 2021, the shipments of Facebook's Oculus accounted for 75% of the global VR/AR headset shipments. Compared with last year's market share, the industry has shown a certain trend toward the head.

Nvidia has the absolute right to speak and dominate in the field of image processing chips (GPU). Nearly 70% of the Top 500 supercomputers use Nvidia's GPU.

Back-end infrastructure

The United States occupies a leading position in the field of cloud computing. Take Amazon as an example. It has strong cloud computing service capabilities. At present, more than 90% of the world's large game companies rely on Amazon cloud online hosting and are the head company of global cloud service providers.

Artificial intelligence

The United States has conducted a lot of research and application on the basic framework of artificial algorithms, and technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have laid out basic algorithm frameworks.

Among them, TensorFlow developed by Google is the most popular deep learning open source project on GitHub, and has been adopted as the basic algorithm framework by a large number of artificial intelligence projects.

The underlying architecture

Typical cases, such as the game engine developed by Unity, the Unreal Engine of Epic Games, and the bottom hardware of Nvidia's Omniverse, provide powerful creative tools for creators of the metaverse world.

It is not only used in games, film and television and other fields, but has also been widely used in industrialization and automated production.

Application: toC social and entertainment first, toB empowers industrial production

The application of the United States in the direction of the universe is not limited to consumer-oriented scenarios such as games and entertainment, but also extends to B-side scenarios such as industrial design, driving the efficiency improvement of industrial production applications.

To C

In the application for the C-end consumer scene, the American rapper Travis Scott held a concert in "Fortress Night" in April 2020, which attracted 12.3 million players to watch online at the same time;

In 2021, Gucci and Roblox will cooperate to launch a virtual exhibition. Players can enjoy the exhibition and purchase virtual items. Real activities such as entertainment, consumption, and work conferences can achieve immersive experience through games.

To B

Among the B-side customer scenario applications, the NVIDIA Omniverse platform is the most typical.

The vision and application scenarios of the platform will not be limited to the gaming and entertainment industries. Architecture, engineering and construction, manufacturing, supercomputing and other industries are all targeted.

BMW is the first car manufacturer to use Omniverse to design an end-to-end digital twin for the entire factory.

Omniverse simulates a complete factory model, including employees, robots, buildings, assembly parts, etc., allowing thousands of product engineers, project managers, and lean experts in the global production network to collaborate in a virtual environment to produce new products in real life Before, complete a series of complex processes such as design, simulation, and optimization.

China: Emphasis on immersive applications, sitting on the largest potential market

After the rise of the meta universe concept in the United States, Chinese technology companies quickly followed up, and giants represented by Tencent, Bytedance, Huawei, and Alibaba quickly deployed their integrated business advantages.

On the whole, my country is still in a situation of following and catching up in the underlying technology.

However, thanks to strong infrastructure capabilities and population size advantages, it is expected that there will be huge growth potential in the back-end infrastructure such as 5G, artificial intelligence, content and scenarios in the future.

Technology: Take advantage of 5G, and strive to catch up with the underlying technology

5G can provide large-scale data transmission support in the meta-universe world, and can effectively reduce dizziness when using VR and other head-mounted display devices.

At present, the world is gradually transitioning to 5G, and China has a prominent advantage in 5G:

On the one hand, thanks to China's strong infrastructure capabilities, it will promote the rapid popularization of 5G;

On the other hand, Huawei has the technical strength to define 5G standards and has a complete set of “network + chip + terminal” end-to-end 5G solutions to provide network-level guarantee for the development of the Metaverse industry.

China’s cloud computing market is growing very fast. Among them, Alibaba is a global leader in cloud computing. It is committed to providing safe and reliable computing and data processing capabilities in the form of online public services, making computing and artificial intelligence inclusive Technology.

At the same time, domestic AI companies are also making arrangements in the direction of the meta universe. According to the prospectus of SenseTime, its SenseMARS software platform contains more than 3,500 AI models to support a new meta universe experience.

Application: Refer to the development history of mobile Internet, in the future, content and collaboration are expected to overtake in corners

The iteration of the underlying technology will trigger the revolution of the Internet, and the world will gradually enter the meta-universe from the mobile Internet era in the future.

In the future, along with the migration inertia of Internet users, my country will also become the largest market of Metaverse, and it is expected to explode huge potential in scene applications in the ToC field.

The domestic meta-universe application scenarios are mainly focused on application scenarios such as to C experience, and mainly social and gaming scenarios.

Typical entrants include Internet giants such as Tencent and Bytedance, which have formed a relatively comprehensive business layout.

Tencent has the most complete layout in the meta-universe direction among domestic companies. Through investment, it has a concentrated layout in data processing, blockchain, server, artificial intelligence, image processing, virtual scenes and other professional technical fields:

The investment and shareholding ratio in Soul reaches 49.9%;

Tencent Music and VR performance service provider Wave reached a strategic cooperation;

In July 2021, Tencent's agent, Roblox national service version of "Roblox" will be launched, etc.

ByteDance takes social and entertainment as its entry point, and leverages the advantages of short video content and traffic to make efforts in domestic and overseas markets at the same time:

Strategic investment in the independent research and development of the company code of "Restart the World" product;

Acquired Pico, a head VR startup company, to make up for hardware shortcomings;

Invested in AI chip design company Sim Computing and GPU chip design company Moore Thread, etc.

Concluding remarks

The international competition surrounding the metaverse has already begun to emerge, and this game is not only a competition in technology, but also a competition in the systems and policy environments of various countries.

In order to achieve the healthy development of the meta-universe industry and overtaking at corners, it is also necessary to innovate top-level design, improve the supporting governance system, and escort the development of the digital economy at the institutional level.

And although the metaverse is currently being actively explored at home and abroad, metaverse is still a very new concept. Almost all countries have not yet issued relevant policies and regulations, and there are still great variables in future development.

The business community is paying attention to the business disruption and market opportunities caused by Metaverse, but the government should pay more attention to the strategic impact of Metaverse on global geopolitical competition, changes in the international power structure, and potential risks to the country’s domestic political and social fields.