Define Your World: How to Understand the Metaverse / Omniverse Internet? | 5Y View
Imagining and thinking about the future world.
Cheng Yu
Partner, 5Y Capital
Metaverse / "Quanzhen Internet" has undoubtedly been one of the hottest topics in recent months, and it's clearly breaking out of tech circles into the mainstream. People are imagining whether the future world will look like the one in Ready Player One, debating questions like whether we'll ever see GDP generated in virtual worlds surpass that of the physical world. From what I observe, people around me are relatively aligned on the endgame, but their judgments on the path and timeline for the metaverse to materialize — and even their fundamental understanding of what the metaverse is — vary wildly.
When a massive wave arrives, people tend to overestimate its speed but underestimate its ultimate impact. 5Y Capital began exploring investments in this direction roughly two years ago. In our view, the metaverse will likely materialize along two main threads: "virtualization of the real world" and "realization of the virtual world":
On one hand, our physical world is evolving from being online, to digital, to intelligent, and now toward virtual — broadly defined "digital twins" are accelerating adoption across industries. On the other hand, experiences in virtual worlds are becoming more realistic and immersive thanks to breakthroughs in 3D content, physics simulation, AI, and cloud technologies. More importantly, the intertwining of these two threads will ultimately disrupt the paradigms for consuming and producing digital content, and even fundamentally transform business models across many physical industries.
XVerse is committed to becoming one of the operating systems and content providers for the Quanzhen Internet. Founder Yao Xing and his team are a world-class hardcore technology team with profound commercial insight, and we share a deep consensus with the company on its vision. This XVerse article, "Redefine Your World," is highly recommended.
Yao Xing
Founder, XVerse; former Vice President at Tencent; former head of Tencent AI & Robotics X Lab
Q1
What is your vision for the future of Quanzhen Internet / metaverse?
Yao Xing: To summarize with some keywords:
Future world: immersive, intelligent, open
Future information: information ascends in dimensions, 3D content will be the dominant trend (it's also currently the most powerful form for simulating the world)
Future internet: hardware, operating systems, software, and standard protocols oriented toward the Quanzhen Internet era will emerge, but there are no standard answers yet, and it won't happen overnight — we need to prepare for a long-term, large-scale engineering effort. XVerse hopes to be one of its operating systems and one of its content providers.
Future people: enjoying the extreme efficiency and powerful emotional output that Quanzhen Internet brings, with rich content and powerful tools, regardless of background or skills, everyone can become a creator and beneficiary, freely able to "redefine your world," follow where the heart leads, and explore the vast universe together.
Q2
Carrying the future Quanzhen Internet will require a very complex technology stack. As a founder with a technical background, what technological "infrastructure" does the metaverse need in your view? And what breakthroughs in which technology areas are you particularly looking forward to?
Yao Xing: We want to especially emphasize: this is an extraordinarily complex problem, involving technologies and industry domains including but not limited to: artificial intelligence algorithms (including deep reinforcement learning, vision, speech, and natural language processing, etc.), computer graphics, cloud computing, video codec, large-scale systems engineering, and many other technical challenges, plus experience in gaming, social, and e-commerce applications.
This is also a high-difficulty problem. Traditional computer science problems demand extreme performance on one or two of the three core variables — network I/O, compute I/O, storage I/O — but with massive content, massive populations, and high-quality content requirements, all three variables must be pushed to the extreme simultaneously. That's rare.
This is also a long-cycle problem. What will be the hardware, operating systems, software, and standard protocols of the Quanzhen Internet era? There are no standard answers yet, but it won't happen overnight — it will be a long-term exploration.
The following is an article from XVerse
As we prepared this article, it seemed everyone had already moved from the "post-mobile internet era" into a new one — from discussing the mass adoption and globalization of video and livestreaming, to the "Metaverse" concept sweeping tech and gaming circles (the metaverse, or Quanzhen Internet), to the NFT craze in the crypto art world, to news of VR/AR companies raising massive funding rounds...
Given that major technological transformations appear roughly once every decade, we're as curious as everyone else: Where will the next explosion of technological innovation come from?
Looking back at history, the internet has always developed around information — making its production, transmission, and consumption more efficient, less costly, and more scalable. In this process, information continuously ascends in dimension. From the early internet that could only transmit one-dimensional text like emails, to the mass adoption of two-dimensional images and sound, to 2.5-dimensional information — video, which adds a time sequence to images — taking the world by storm. Now, 3D content, considered to have "the strongest capability for simulating the world," is poised to break through, and we will welcome a future world that is immersive, intelligent, and open.
As a recently founded technology company, XVerse's goal is to become one of the operating systems (OS) for the Quanzhen Internet and one of its important content providers. We hope to share our technology-related thinking in this article.
First, about our name. Our technology relates to simulating the world. Beyond expressing our technical focus, we wanted the company name to have some Chinese cultural depth, so we looked for inspiration in words or names like Wanxiang (Myriad Phenomena), Pangu, and Yuzhou (Universe).
A partner suggested selecting two characters from the ancient phrase "Yi yuan fu shi, wan xiang geng xin" (With the beginning of a new year, all things take on a new aspect): "Yuan" represents a new beginning, "Xiang" represents the myriad phenomena of the world. The two phrases originate from Zuo Zhuan and Dream of the Red Chamber respectively. The English name XVerse: X is the unknown, Verse represents the universe, and also resembles a poem written to the future world, since Verse's original meaning is metrical, rhymed text like poetry and song.
The future digital world "Oasis" depicted in the film Ready Player One
How do we understand Quanzhen Internet?
This is a question we're often asked, and the answer must return to the essence of the internet — disrupting the production, transmission, and consumption of information, making information ascend in dimension with greater efficiency, lower cost, and greater scale. In the Quanzhen Internet era, we believe information will rise to three dimensions (coexisting and co-prospering with one-dimensional and two-dimensional information), with forms infinitely approaching the real world.
The boundary between virtual and real worlds will gradually blur. On one side, reality is virtualized — meetings, social interactions, games, and learning scenarios that occur in reality are moved onto virtual worlds, becoming video-based or cloud-based. On the other side, virtuality is realized — including 3D printing, online shopping with offline pickup, and recently the hot trend of encrypted digital collectibles (NFTs). Massive amounts of virtual social data and physics simulation data will be produced and, in some form, act upon or project back into reality, gaining meaning.
Whether from real to virtual or virtual to real, the internet's value — from function to emotion — will be tremendously unleashed. In terms of efficiency, Quanzhen Internet can break through limitations of time, place, and physical rules; seeing ten thousand years in a glance, traveling a thousand miles in a day will no longer be legend — everything that exists in the real world will be maximally enhanced. Emotionally, through social, gaming, cultural, and entertainment applications across many scenarios, it will provide emotional pleasure and solace to humanity at massive scale and low cost.
Information ascending in dimension will catalyze new business models, driving the birth of new technologies, new products, new services, and new industries. And the development of past internets has all been built upon foundations of hardware, operating systems, software, and standard protocols — what will be the next-generation infrastructure for Quanzhen Internet? There are no standard answers yet, but we are already participating, and we are certain it will be a long-cycle, large-scale engineering effort that won't happen overnight.
How to understand the relationship between Quanzhen Internet and AGI?
These are two relatively large technological concepts with epoch-making future impact. The XVerse founding team has been exploring AI technology since 2016, so let us share our perspective based on that experience.
The ultimate goal of AI is to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or strong AI. AGI essentially means enabling machines to simulate human perception, cognition, and decision-making intelligence. In popular terms, it's like the hosts in Westworld with self-awareness and human-like intelligence. And Quanzhen Internet, or Metaverse, is itself a simulation of the real world and its general intelligence by a virtual world.
With the development of deep reinforcement learning technology, various forms of intelligence have shown breakthrough progress: in decision intelligence, AlphaGo and AlphaStar conquering complex games from Go to StarCraft; in cognitive intelligence, Transformer, BERT, and the powerful GPT-3 model; in perceptual intelligence, various ResNets and WaveNets — all showing us the tremendous potential of simulation technology.
If AGI-powered intelligent NPCs (non-player characters) appear in Quanzhen Internet and become digital natives, how should we judge whether we ourselves or the world we inhabit is real or illusory? If AGI-powered robots can complete any work, what revolutionary changes will that bring to productivity, production relations, and even society as a whole? These are all questions worth continuously pondering.
Redefine Your World
Simulation will be a cross-disciplinary complex technical problem, essentially about providing the most authentic and intelligent services in the most efficient and lowest-cost way. Therefore, the team we've assembled must meet the following requirements:
First, it will involve artificial intelligence algorithms (including deep reinforcement learning, vision, speech, and natural language processing, etc.), computer graphics, cloud computing, video codec, large-scale systems engineering, and many other technical challenges, plus experience in gaming, social, and e-commerce applications. Each problem alone is high-difficulty, requiring top talent from different domains.
Second, these complex problems require not only cross-disciplinary intersection but also intra-disciplinary intersection, making technical paths intricate and demanding high comprehensive capability. Taking algorithms as an example: this includes traditional algorithms偏向 data structures, physics approximation algorithms related to graphics, reinforcement learning AI algorithms, and video codec algorithms — all intersecting.
Finally, the entire task is to achieve infinite imagination with finite resources: facing massive users rather than limited users, producing and displaying massive content in real-time rather than with delay. This demands extreme performance on all three core variables — network I/O, compute I/O, and storage I/O — making it a rare challenge in computer science.
These challenges also set extreme requirements for the professional and comprehensive capabilities of the technical team. We are extremely fortunate to have gathered a group of top-tier talent with deep technical accumulation and industrial practice experience. In their work, they must not only make breakthroughs individually but also explore collaboratively. We believe the height and difficulty of these unsolved problems are sufficient to keep this group of technology pursuers excited for a long time.
Finally, sharing our goals and vision. As mentioned earlier, XVerse's goal is to become one of the operating systems (OS) for Quanzhen Internet and one of its important content providers. In this decentralized ecosystem, we connect hardware, software, and users, hoping to reduce the middle process from idea to design to zero for creators, and the distance between users and the virtual world to nearly zero.
With operating systems and content, everyone will have the opportunity to freely "redefine your world" (Redefine Your World), which naturally became XVerse's vision.
We believe "redefine" means that in an infinitely large virtual world, everyone can become a creator and beneficiary. But more important is "your," because everyone has a world in their heart that has yet to be defined. This journey is not about finding reference templates, not about defining someone else's world or a particular world, but about going where "your" heart leads, and taking in the vast universe.
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5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital), currently managing approximately five billion USD across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. We believe that if the crazy you in others' eyes begins to be believed in, the world will be a better place.
BEIJING · SHANGHAI · SHENZHEN · HONG KONG
