Significance to the industry
Looking back at the products released by Apple over the years, every time they were released, they were criticized by the general market, or there was no lack of cynicism from critics right after they were released. But looking HE Tuber back afterwards, we have to lament that Apple has triggered a single product craze in the market every time, especially in the field of consumer electronics. The release of iPad led to the craze of tablet computers, the release of Apple watch triggered the craze of wearable devices, and the release of Airpods triggered the craze of TWS earphones.
As Steve Jobs famously said, consumers don’t know what they want until you put the product in front of them. What you see on paper is ultimately shallow. Only when users actually see and use them can they experience what kind of experience these products can bring to them, or how they have changed their previous usage behavior. Once the behavior is used to it, Once you develop it, you will find that you can never go back.
For example, when Air pods were released, the entire industry laughed at them: "Isn't this just cutting off two wires from the headphones that come with the iPhone? Industrial design is really lazy. It's too easy to lose, isn't it? In the future, should I buy a chain specifically for Airpods to prevent them from being lost? In the future, I can pick up everyone’s lost Airpods to make a fortune...I definitely won’t pay such an IQ tax. Wired headphones are so cheap, and the price is dozens of times that of wired headphones. I have to keep charging it..." A few years have passed. Do you still carry wired headphones with you every day? How many people scolded Apple when they saw the release of Airpods, but after buying them, they discovered that they smell really good. Even if you need to charge it frequently and you are afraid of losing it, you prefer to use wireless TWS headsets when you are working out, using the toilet in the office, or talking on the phone while doing other things on Zoom.
Therefore, the author believes that Apple has made the right choice again this time. Whether it is the experience of successfully leading previous single products or the product tonality of Apple Vision Pro, it is different from all previous competing products that overly emphasized the entertainment virtual attributes of the Metaverse. Apple once again chose to return to human nature and objective laws.
In the face of the global economic downturn and weak consumption, shipments of smartphones, major consumer electronics products, have declined for several consecutive quarters, reaching the lowest level since 2013. The entire industry of the Metaverse has gone from being extremely enthusiastic last year to being completely eclipsed this year. Large AI models such as ChatGPT have become the new darlings of capital. The release of Apple's Vision Pro is a shot in the arm for the entire metaverse industry, and it also brings the spark of Prometheus to consumer electronics friends. Why should the next mobile phone be an iPhone?
Future-oriented imagination = why the next personal electronic product must be a mobile phone
Table 1. Comparison of mainstream VR/MR competing products in the world
Through comparative analysis, we can see that in fact, the mainstream To C VR currently on the market are mainly entertainment games. Even at various meta conferences, Xiao Zha mentioned that people can play metaverse scenes wearing oculus. Activities other than entertainment games such as office work, meetings, meditation, etc. However, the core product functions currently written on the oculus product official website mainly support various games, and the remaining MR/VR, which is more oriented to productivity scenarios, is also mainly oriented to To B users and scenarios, so the pricing is also higher.
At present, there is no one that is not only oriented to C-end users and scenarios but also meets productivity and home needs in addition to games, so Apple's product positioning is also very accurate. On the one hand, it fills the gap in this type of product, and on the other hand, it also provides new imagination space and new design paradigms for what MR can do (such as the design of its space FaceTime).
The metaverse that people imagine does not need to be completely virtual and animated digital avatars, but a digital twin that is as close to the real world as possible. It can even blur the boundaries between reality and virtuality, allowing reality to be enhanced and virtuality no longer necessary. Misty.
People in all walks of life are talking about chatgpt, large language models, AIGC, and whether people will be replaced by AI. General artificial intelligence has become popular. People will even hold an "AI Spring Festival Gala" specifically for artificial intelligence; it seems that the metaverse The concept of the metaverse is outdated, and those who work on the metaverse have no future, but the author believes that this is the best era to breed the seeds of the metaverse; because even the most powerful GPT-4 is intangible and incorporeal, and it needs a various scenarios, products, and hardware to carry it.
Is this carrier a mobile phone? That big model can only exist in the form of various AI chat assistants at most. Compared with the previous Siri and Ali Xiaomi, they will not be so stupid, and the answers will not make you furious; but a 2D plane carrier such as a mobile phone, Limited by its interaction method and the form of display content, it cannot fully unleash the full potential of AI large models, but spatial computing can.
Because spatial computing requires more dimensions of information processing and content production, and these information processing and content production seem to be very inefficient under people's previous production paradigm. For example, making a 3D model takes a human designer several days or even more. long time.
Spatial computing requires not only touch, but also the simultaneous calculation and processing of various information such as natural language, spatial position, gestures, expressions and eyes, and timely response; these are precisely the advantages of large AI models. It can learn to process these complex input signals from higher-dimensional multi-modal training, and quickly respond accordingly, better understand and recognize people's intentions behind it, and provide services that are accurate and exceed expectations. This is the metaverse that the author envisions.
The core of technological progress should be to serve people, rather than replace people. We look forward to a beautiful new world created by technology and people. There, people can eliminate the language barrier of the Tower of Babel, and they can transcend cultural, racial, and gender differences, communicate on an equal footing, and build a future together. That is the promised land of human civilization.
