Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu, said that with the development of end-to-end cloud integration, the Internet of Things is expanding from the narrow sense of "Internet of Things" to a broader application scenario. "Internet of Things" is the inevitable trend of the evolution of the Internet of Things.

Under this trend, Chai Xuezhi, head of Baidu Intelligent Cloud Virtual Reality Technology, believes that people's perception of information has gradually entered the era of three-dimensional, and VR technology is an important carrier of three-dimensional information.

In fact, Baidu has been in the VR field for five years. In this process, Baidu is more like a builder of infrastructure. In this role, what is the logic of Baidu VR2.0 construction and development? How to promote the three-dimensional development of information? What are the opportunities and challenges under the current wave of the meta universe?

Through interpreting Baidu's VR 2.0 map, Wisdom East has conducted in-depth exchanges with Ma Jie, Baidu's vice president, to further reveal the answers to the above key questions.

1、 Baidu VR's Starry Sea

Looking back at the changes and development of the VR industry along the way, after its rise in 2014, it has not only experienced the highlight of 2016, but also experienced the downturn around 2018. Now, VR is entering the eve of industrial application explosion, and the whole industry is booming. Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu, told Zhidong that when Baidu began to do VR five or six years ago, it was in the stage of VR industry explosion, but bubbles also followed, and this cycle was basically inevitable. Nevertheless, the future of VR industry is still possible. Ma Jie believes that VR is not a new visual way or game way for Baidu, but an interactive way. For a computer system, the input and output mode of computing has brought great progress to the industry from the initial punching to the birth of keyboard and display, and then to the vigorous development of the entire ecosystem driven by touch.

As for the interactive transformation of the next generation of computers, Baidu aims at VR technology. "It is from this perspective that we see the possible impact of VR on the industry, so we started to layout VR five or six years ago," Ma said.

What is the logic behind the launch of Baidu VR 2.0 under the explosion of the concept of the meta universe?

"In fact, its capabilities and technology are more mature, and it has moved from the accumulation of technology to the stage of industrial production." Ma Jie explained, for example, it can make the three-dimensional cost of objects in the VR shooting process very low, so that every enterprise can have the opportunity to use it.

"The metauniverse will also go through this process. Now there are countless people who like it, and so do we. But we also see that it will experience bubbles, and it will take us a long time to find the business model." He said.

Therefore, as a company that has accumulated rich technical experience, Baidu hopes to use cloud, VR and other technologies to provide the most basic platform of the metauniverse for everyone. "We will do a good job in technology and engineering, minimize the cost, and make tools the most convenient," Ma Jie said.

2、 Three characteristics of Baidu VR 2.0, cost reduction and efficiency improvement of technology is the core

"VR technology is the next singularity in the evolution of AIoT." Chai Xuezhi, head of Baidu Intelligent Cloud Virtual Reality Technology, said that Baidu VR's positioning is to be a platform builder and ecological operator in the era of three-dimensional information.

In a nutshell, Baidu VR has formed a complete closed-loop industrial chain from platform construction to ecological operation. First of all, based on Baidu's overall AI capability, they open the VR technology they have honed and accumulated over the years to the development community to better support developers.

At the same time, build platforms and standards around VR content production and consumption, help content producers achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase, and finally form VR solutions designed and implemented in the industry to better address the pain points of industry customers in specific different scenarios.

Based on this positioning, Baidu VR 2.0 released this time has three characteristics compared with version 1.0, namely, more open capabilities, more universal platform and richer scenes.

First, open capacity, Baidu VR 2.0 Relying on the basic support of Baidu Brain and Smart Cloud, we have very rich experience and technology accumulation in the fields of three-dimensional data reconstruction, multi person interaction, and content understanding, editing, distribution, and perceptual interaction. Meanwhile, Baidu VR 2.0 will be opened to the industry in the form of developer suite to better empower developers.

Second, the platform is universal. Baidu VR 2.0 has two platforms at the platform level: VR creation and VR interaction. For VR creation platform, Baidu VR 2.0 launched a unified content format for all categories around content production and consumption, and based on the basic rendering engine, to make the content consumption channel more smooth. On the VR interactive platform, Baidu is still actively exploring more possibilities of three-dimensional information in the metauniverse.

The third is rich scenes. Baidu VR 2.0 has developed VR solutions for education, marketing, party building, exhibition and other scenes based on rich product matrix and technology accumulation.

In the three dimensions of technology, platform and scene of Baidu VR 2.0, the technology layer is the most soul architecture layer of Baidu VR 2.0, and is also the core and foundation of Baidu VR 2.0 to better enable the VR industry.

Chai Xuezhi mentioned that Baidu VR's very important mission is to constantly improve the information density of content, and 3D reconstruction is a very critical path. "We hope to develop a commercial, low-cost and high effect 3D reconstruction solution," he said.

For this path, Baidu VR divides it into three incremental stages: 3D loop, 720 degree loop and 3D reconstruction.

In the 3D loop stage, Baidu VR has launched a general instance segmentation algorithm service with an average IoU of more than 98%, which can generate sophisticated 3D loop content. In terms of 720 degree ring objects, Baidu has also launched 720 degree full-automatic, full angle ring object acquisition and processing software and hardware products.

At present, Baidu VR has advanced to the stage of three-dimensional reconstruction. The full-automatic three-dimensional reconstruction scheme based on RGB input will be released soon, which will effectively reduce the cost and threshold of three-dimensional products and commodities, and accelerate the progress of three-dimensional information.

In addition, Baidu VR 2.0 has further expanded the technical dimension of content consumption.

In order to expand the rendering mode of VR content, Baidu VR 2.0 launched Cloud The VR solution takes edge computing as an important link, letting edge nodes be responsible for data intensive tasks such as computing, rendering, coding, and other logical intensive tasks such as application management and edge governance.

The edge end and the cloud end perform their own duties and integrate with each other, so that the entire cloud The VR solution has a smoother experience, scalability and deployability. At present, the average delay performance of this scheme is 50ms, which is at the leading level in the industry. The first 5G+Cloud VR test network of "multi city node+MEC deployment" in China has also been launched in Nanjing, Ningbo and other cities.

In order to reduce the technical threshold of content production and consumption, Baidu VR 2.0 also launched the Baidu Developer Suite VR Suite, including the VR content productivity tool Avalon SDK, and the VR content rendering engine Phoenix&Hydreigon SDK.

The former can provide VR content developers with five functions: basic interaction, advanced interaction, hardware adaptation, tool use, and ecological access, which can effectively reduce the technical access threshold for content developers. The latter is mainly designed for the consumption link. It has the basic rendering ability of VR content, and has the characteristics of full platform, full category, full mode, and high performance. Developers can quickly and conveniently produce and display VR content of all categories.

3、 VR is an important technology carrier in the three-dimensional trend of information perception

Today, Baidu's continuous evolution in the VR field is closely related to the construction of the intelligent Internet of Things AIoT.

In Chai Xuezhi's opinion, although the textbook defines AIoT as the interconnection of all things in the form of digital information, there needs to be a hidden premise, that is, all things must be interconnected with people first, and the interconnection of all things serving people is AIoT.

This view is also the two logics of Baidu's building of AIoT. One is the interconnection of people, which is the premise of building AIoT, highlighting people as the theme; The second is two-way perception, which is the path of building AIoT. It forms "sense" by connecting everything, and "sense" acts on everything again, which is "knowledge".

Based on these two logics, we can also see the development trend of the whole information perception - three-dimensional.

With the development stage of information technology as the watershed, the demand of human society for information perception has been constantly changing.

From the initial 2G era to the 3G era, people's information carrier has changed from taking text as the core to taking pictures as the core, until the outbreak of the 4G era, and people's information carrier is mainly short video content. In this process, the information density and perceivable dimensions are constantly improving.

With the arrival of the 5G era, the basic problems of information transmission have been solved, and the carrier of people's information perception will break through the 2D plane. The stronger information density and the higher three-dimensional information of experiential dimensions have become the development trend of the next content carrier, including panoramic pictures, panoramic videos, 3D rings and 3D models.

In fact, these contents belong to VR in a broad sense, "so we think VR technology is a natural carrier technology for three-dimensional information," said Chai Xuezhi. At the same time, under this demand, the combination of VR industry, cloud and AI has also become a general trend.

However, no matter how iterative the development of technology and products is, the real value of VR lies in being able to address user pain points and needs.

At present, Baidu VR has launched various segmentation solutions for education, marketing, government enterprises/industry and other fields. For example, in the field of education, Baidu VR launched VR K12 classroom and VR university laboratory further help the country's education informatization.

In the marketing field, Baidu VR launched a one-stop marketing solution integrating content collection, editing, storage and distribution display for car viewing, advertising, e-commerce and other scenarios, which can effectively help customers improve online marketing effects.

In the field of party building, Baidu combines VR technology with traditional party building teaching, and uses AI technology to enable classroom teaching and quantify data effects, so as to improve the training effect of party member education while reproducing the red classic scene.

In the field of exhibitions, Baidu VR has launched a full link VR online cloud exhibition solution, which effectively reduces training risks and costs and improves training efficiency by combining different requirements of specific industries and enterprises in practical training. Especially during the epidemic, this solution solved many customer pain points.

From Baidu VR In the construction and layout of 2.0, we can easily see Baidu's continuous thinking on AIoT industry and even people's lifestyle. From education to marketing, from government and enterprises to industry, Baidu VR is trying to bring subtle changes and impacts to society from all walks of life.

At the same time, the VR industry under the wave of the meta universe is also experiencing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. As the representative of the Internet technology giant, Baidu now further increases its investment in VR, promotes the two-way transmission of information between the real and virtual world through VR technology, and greatly expands and extends the natural interaction between people and information.

Liu Cixin, the author of the famous science fiction novel Three Bodies, once said: "There are two ways in front of mankind: one is outward, leading to the sea of stars, and the other is inward, leading to virtual reality." Now that the cold winter has passed, the spring of VR applications is gradually coming, and every effort of players in the industry is catalyzing the seeds of application, and we also look forward to flowering The day will come.