Bytes can’t see Apple’s halo

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The byte distance from Apple is more than one PICO 4.

Author丨Tian Gu Editor丨Yiye

Source: Science and Technology News

A year later, PICO officially released the new generation flagship VR all-in-one machine PICO 4. Compared with many previous versions, this generation of PICO 4 fully integrates the gene of Byte’s “power to create miracles”.

On the hardware side, PICO follows Meta’s subsidy strategy. When the parameter configuration is full, the price of the National Bank version is still reduced compared to the previous generation.

It can be seen that after a year of integration with Byte, PICO has deeply realized the benefits of deep pockets. Previously, under the strong subsidy, PICO 3 took the first place in the Chinese market in just one year, and the shipment volume increased by 35 times compared with that before the acquisition.

With high-density publicity and admirable price/performance ratio, whether PICO 4 will become the iPhone 4 of the year, a milestone in leading the VR industry into the era of mass consumption, has become the focus of external discussions.

However, in sharp contrast to the domestic market, consumers in overseas markets are more willing to call PICO 4 a strong competitor to Quest 2, which is a VR all-in-one machine of the same type that Meta released two years ago.

Obviously, compared to the crazy optimism in China who is keen to discuss PICO being comparable to the iPhone, overseas consumers who have been educated by Meta for many years are more calm about the arrival of the VR mass consumption era.

After all, what everyone can’t help but ask is: PICO 4 product itself has no revolutionary breakthrough, why does VR usher in the iPhone moment?

Part.1

The ripening iPhone moment

In 2019, Facebook (now Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that 10 million users is a sustainable and profitable threshold for VR hardware, and once this threshold is reached and crossed, the content and ecosystem will explode.

Two years later, IDC data shows that global shipments of AR/VR headsets will reach 11.23 million units in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 92.1%. Among them, the shipment of VR headsets reached 10.95 million units, breaking the inflection point of 10 million.

By Zuckerberg’s standards, the VR industry has reached an inflection point globally.

Focusing on individual products, IDC’s Francisco Jeronimo tweeted in June that the Quest 2 is the most successful VR headset so far, with nearly 15 million units sold since its release in September 2020. Significant growth in sales and consumer adoption helped.

However, from the perspective of commercial value, Quest’s rapid progress cannot make up for Meta’s failure in social media, its main business. This year, Meta’s performance in the capital market plummeted.

The so-called inflection point of VR does not make Meta what the future iPhone looks like in the eyes of the capital market. The fundamental reason is that most VR industry practitioners selectively ignore a problem: whether the shipments based on subsidies can really support a prosperous content ecology.

On the one hand, the subsidized VR boom is a hardware product under the typical Internet thinking. In the eyes of Internet giants, subsidies are an artifact that is invincible. There is the super ecology of LeTV in the front, and the metaverse world of Meta in the back.

However, from the perspective of historical development, whether it is Jobs’ iPhone 4 or Musk’s Model S, as epoch-making masterpieces of mass-produced consumer market hardware, the revolutionary significance of the product itself is enough to make it calm and confident in the price in the market.

On the other hand, the PICO under the byte methodology, even if the sales are extremely high under the subsidy strategy, but for mass consumers, they still need to think, why should they buy such a product?

As for whether the acquisition of giants can speed up the popularization of VR equipment, Geek Park had previously questioned when interviewing Ma Jiersi (currently the head of PICO social networking).

But in Ma’s opinion: “If VR wants to achieve the popularity of mobile phones, it must be below 20g. This is determined by the structure of our human body. The upper limit that the ears and bridge of the nose can withstand is 20g, which means our glasses. .VR headset, whether it is 100g or 200g, sorry, people will be very uncomfortable wearing it for more than 30 minutes and need to take it off.

When the headset can achieve less than 20g, it will have the opportunity to replace PCs and mobile phones. In order to achieve below 20g, I estimate that it will take 5 to 10 years, and at least the last two years have not seen a major technological breakthrough. “

This obviously means that the current VR equipment is still far away from the iPhone, and it can only be regarded as the hardware under the subsidy, and has not yet entered the stage of normal mass market product competitiveness.

Part.2

Is fitness VR-driven 3.0?

In the history of the VR industry, the last time as lively as now can be traced back to the first year of VR in 2016.

This year, the products represented by the VR box, through the use of mobile phones, achieved VR effects with a simple lens combination + mobile phone drive. In the first half of 2016 alone, the number of VR boxes shipped from the Shenzhen factory reached 15 million units, and a few months later, it doubled to 30 million units.

According to Zuckerberg’s current inflection point theory of shipments, this year’s VR box also ushered in an inflection point.

In terms of the capital market, Baofeng Technology’s stock price with the concept of VR has doubled 45 times in this wave, and has won 37 daily limits in a row. The halo of the iPhone is also clearly visible for a while.

In the consumer market, Taobao sellers with VR boxes said that consumers who bought VR boxes at first were mainly early adopters, but since they can be used with mobile phones, sellers usually give consumers some pornographic video resources after delivery, so that the store can use it with mobile phones. sales are rising fast.

However, due to low technical barriers and poor product experience, the management of superimposed e-commerce platforms became stricter, and finally the VR box became a piece of history in the long history of the industry.

If it is said that in the era of VR box, pornography was the first driving force, which created a shipment of 30 million units, but it is difficult to sustain due to the low added value of products and the edge of the gray industry; then in today’s era of VR all-in-one machines, Meta is Subsidy-driven VR equipment has also fallen into a new predicament after reaching 10 million units shipped.

In the subsidy strategy under Internet thinking, the market space of a product often comes from benchmarking.

The current pricing consensus of around 2,000 yuan for the VR all-in-one machine comes from the early subsidy strategy of Meta to benchmark the Quest 2 against the Switch. Under the product benchmarking is the competition of the scene, to exert its immersion for C-end users, and quickly popularize the game market on a large scale. Therefore, the use scene of VR equipment is also reduced to the scope of game consoles.

According to the current game hardware market of tens of millions of units, the capacity of the VR industry has basically been seen. This is obviously not in line with Meta’s imagination for VR devices, let alone Byte’s iPhone moment. In this case, in the creation of the content ecology after the release of PICO 4, Byte introduced fitness after video, games, and social networking.

Some practitioners said that focusing on the introduction of fitness content can be seen as an imitation of the development path of Apple Watch.

The first Apple Watch released in 2015 can measure heart rate. In the following years, independent GPS, swimming waterproofing, breathing training, electrocardiogram, blood oxygen measurement, sleep recording, temperature sensing and other sports and health monitoring functions have been added, and gradually become independent. for mobile phone use.

Iterative updates focusing on health functions have become the No. 1 driving force for consumers to buy Apple Watches. According to consumer market data research, 67.9% of consumers buy smartwatches for exercise records, and more than half of consumers also need sleep records and health monitoring.

Under the driving force of healthy sports products, even if the entire consumer electronics market is not very prosperous this year, according to a market report released by Counterpoint Research recently, during the second quarter, global smartwatch shipments still increased by 13% year-on-year, among which Apple Watches It ranks first with a market share of about 36%.

So imitating the Apple Watch’s road to the top, will fitness become the 3.0 driving force for VR growth after pornography and subsidies?

From the perspective of market demand, according to Forrester data, a quarter of adult netizens in the United States are interested in VR headsets, and 18% of users use VR mainly for sports. In January of this year, Google Trend data showed that searches for “VR fitness” reached an all-time high.

From the perspective of fitness effects, a set of comparative studies conducted by the Virtual Reality Health and Exercise Institute (VRHI) shows that VR fitness can integrate games and sports, but it will make people underestimate the amount of exercise. Good sports effect. Players can exercise arms, legs, or a combination of multiple parts of the back and arms through VR games, and can even exercise with weight-bearing programs in conjunction with the game.

However, from the actual experience, VR fitness is often limited by equipment and becomes a safety hazard.

The current VR fitness games generally determine the reward mechanism by setting up leaderboards and other methods, but lack the mechanism to prevent sports injuries. And because home fitness is in a relatively closed state, when wearing a VR headset, the player’s ability to perceive the outside world will be weakened, and the ability to stress will also be reduced accordingly. Players cannot objectively grasp their own fatigue level and breathing rhythm. When fully immersed in VR, muscle injuries such as sprained feet and strains are easy to occur.

On the other hand, the long-term wearing of VR headsets forms a closed space, and it is difficult to solve the problems of wearing comfort and visual fatigue of fitness people. Therefore, to a certain extent, VR fitness can improve the penetration rate of VR headsets among non-tech enthusiasts by virtue of its fun and immersion, but whether it can become a high-frequency VR consumer can drive it into mass consumption. The essential.

After all, fitness, as a self-disciplined behavior, is far from comparable to the driving force generated by early pornographic cues and mid-term monetary subsidies. Therefore, PICO founder Zhou Hongwei conservatively believes that PICO 4 should be an all-in-one VR machine capable of reaching 1 million shipments.

Just putting it in the global market, compared to the 15 million units shipped of the Quest 2, which has been released for two years, there is still a lot that PICO needs to catch up with. It is worth noting that, possibly in order to avoid direct competition, there is no Quest 2’s US home in the list of global debut markets for PICO 4.

Part.3

VR is far from the end

Before the release of PICO 4, on the first anniversary of its acquisition by Bytes, PICO officially announced a brand upgrade. In addition to the regular brand visual upgrade, the corporate vision was upgraded to “become a leading world-class XR platform, achieve developers and creators, Create a better life experience for consumers around the world.”

It may be due to the multi-route layout or the prudence in the industrial exploration path. In this upgrade, PICO has moved from VR to the XR world, which includes VR, AR, MR and other virtual reality hardware product directions.

In an interview, Zhou Hongwei once said: “The advantage of VR is that it can create a fully immersive scene. In the future, technology can also be used to create AR or MR scenes that integrate reality and virtuality.” At the same time, he emphasized that PICO and Byte are also paying attention to In the AR industry, do some internal exploration of AR technology.

According to previous market news, entrepreneurs from hardware such as Luo Yonghao and Cook have chosen to skip the VR route and choose AR products.

After all, the difference in shipment volume comes from how much the product can cover the consumer’s life scene and usage time. For example, tens of millions of game consoles are shipped on weekends, over 100 million of PCs used in office work on weekdays, and billions of mobile phones used 24 hours a day. For the mass consumer market, the more productive AR hardware scene may be the more anticipated iPhone moment.

Not only that, but for the inside of the VR industry, the iPhone moment from an outside perspective may just be a fallacy of the media and historians.

Recently, as a technology giant in the VR field, former Oculus CTO John Carmack was asked in an interview with Lex Fridma reporter: Centuries later, when you think back to these experiences, this marks the occurrence of change, that is, most of our world. are beginning to enter virtual reality. Perhaps there are historians who can really identify the moment that marked this change. For example, data-driven emergence, like the emergence of products like Myspace.

John Carmack said: “I think that’s the fallacy of historians, they’ve been trying to find the so-called main cause, the dominant factor, etc. A lot of those things are like exponential curves that we see, but the reality isn’t that a single thing grows exponentially, it’s that there are hundreds of little sigmoid curves that overlap and they just happen to keep adding up, so you’re at any given point There is some kind of exponential growth, but no single curve is decisive.

The real world is that you don’t have to exaggerate a single moment, and you can’t ignore the small changes in the industry every day. Looking back a few years later, PICO 4 is just a drop in the ocean of human beings moving towards virtual reality.


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