Decoding The Secrets And Challenges Of AR Games

Throw out the elf ball, run out a fairy, then accompany you all the way to upgrade the monster, save more elves -- this is the core scene from the Japanese anime "Pocket Monster" (later renamed "elf treasure dream"). The content product, which has been active for decades, is still a hot super IP. It has also activated more and more industrial ecology. AR game is one of them.

In 2016, a Pok mon Go, which was based on the IP, was given great attention when it came to the market. It was estimated by the agency that it only purchased 811 dollars for application within 2 billion days.

The core of this game is the AR technology that has been explored for many years. With the game as the main product, Niantic, a technology company behind it, has also realized several rounds of financing and has a market value of tens of billions.

But this seems to have been a solitary case. Similar to VR, the AR wave has been ups and downs, so it is still too early to say that it will get great value in the industrial application level. Even at present, AR glasses have become Microsoft, Google, HUAWEI and many other large factories competing for in-depth exploration, and the maturity of the real industry chain also takes time.

The success of Bao can dream tour is not based on the leap of AR glasses technology, but also based on the AR software application of geo positioning technology +AI. This may be an important reference model for AR games.

At the recent global mobile Internet Conference GMIC, Zhang Hansong, the former chief scientist of Niantic, pointed out in his speech that the essence of AR is testing deep content in the real world and carrying out multi-level narration based on this. This will be an important rule to maintain the vitality of the explosive game.

Since then, he accepted the twenty-first Century economic report reporter's interview. He said that 5G technology is not the dominant factor that can promote the development of AR games in essence, and creative content is the only factor. Based on this, a team with AR and AI knowledge structure in two aspects can make product experience better.

The essence of AR games

"At present, AR has experienced at least third waves of development." Zhang Hansong told the twenty-first Century economic report reporter that in this round, the progress of hardware is reflected in the miniaturization and low price brought by Moore's dividend. "The cost of AR equipment has fallen from 10000 yuan to even 100 yuan, but the traditional technical problems of AR, such as optical problems, have not been completely resolved."

Backtracking, the concept of augmented reality (AR) originated in 1990 and was put forward by Boeing. Until 2006, the industry was in the exploratory stage, and universities and research institutions were continuing their efforts in related technologies and devices. In 2008, AR technology opened up the commercialization of the consumer sector. The aforementioned large plants were put into research and development. By 2015, Microsoft released HoloLens holographic AR glasses, becoming a key node in the industry.

According to the analysis of Soochow securities, from 2019 to 2030, it will be a period of rapid development of AR, and the market oligarchs will also be born during this period.

But Bao can dream tour was born at the end of the second stage. Zhang Hansong pointed out that AR's technological iteration has not changed much about the experience of AR games. To sum up, in fact, whether a AR game can succeed can hardly be explored from the perspective of technological breakthrough.

"This is the opposite of Jobs's product philosophy." He went on to say that instead, AR games need to start from the perspective of application itself and content creation, and see if the current technology means can be used. The logical line created by this product is established.

From a different perspective, the game can be jointly launched by Niantic and Nintendo and Google, and Niantic has previously been a Google company and has been operating independently since 2015. The three combine together the mature technology accumulation and content production ability, which may be the key factor to support this AR game to become popular around the world.

Whether the game products can become "exploding money" is a little "metaphysics" story in the circle. Besides Bao can dream, Zhang Hansong also led the launch of many AR games, but the ultimate goal of maintaining a long life in the world is still a treasure dream.

"From the point of view of key technologies, the reserves of these games are almost the same. The main purpose of the technology platform is to build a global geographic database. The other supporting technology systems are basically the same. The core difference lies in the story behind the game, some of which are based on hard core science fiction background, and others are based on the popular novel Harry Porter. "I can not comment too much, but this phenomenon is worth studying and considering whether the background story can really match the form of AR."

Under the epidemic situation, the AR game that advocates outdoor travel is also facing new changes. This requires the game itself to recognize the scene more intelligently, and can complete the corresponding tasks in the differentiated indoor.

So close to the door at home, this kind of hand tour has gained a steep upward trend similar to pure online games. According to Sensor Tower, an overseas mobile market research firm, in the week of March 16th, the global gamers' expenditure reached $23 million, up nearly 67% compared to the previous week.

Next challenge

As a product category that tests technology and creativity at the same time, the next blending of AR games and cutting-edge technology will bring new experience paradigms to the industry.

"5G is hardly a panacea. As a new technology, it needs to bring practical significance." Zhang Hansong stressed to the twenty-first Century economic report reporter that for AR games, the important effect of 5G will be mainly reflected in the lower delay to support the sharing experience of many people. However, based on the characteristics of high precision and low power consumption of 5G, the game with the need of positioning function will be more economical than the way of positioning by GPS global navigation system.

Therefore, during the interview, he repeatedly pointed out that 5G as the underlying technology, how much changes it can bring to the AR game industry is still related to the game itself.

"The success of a game depends on many factors. In fact, in the current 4G era, bandwidth and delay will not cause much trouble to the game itself, so the network (iteration) is not a very obvious demand. Zhang Hansong believes that if the technology iteration factor is used as the opportunity background for the emergence of phenomenal games or applications, the possibility is not great.

The next challenge for AR games comes from creativity and new materials.

Zhang Hansong pointed out that in fact, the AR game with location positioning as the core requirement of playing games has almost no difference in the technical capability of the main countries in terms of the underlying technical capability. Even the head mounted AR glasses have different nature in different countries.

At present, the challenge of the industry comes from materials. This is also a common problem faced by AR designers and developers. "Personal feel, AR equipment, the world does not exist who has obvious advantages, various technical solutions are in the Warring States period. Practitioners are more looking forward to breakthroughs in optical materials, hoping to make headwear AR glasses equipment acceptable to ordinary people and achieve the desired results.

He told an example of the twenty-first Century economic report reporter that in the United States, although some start-ups of research and development of AR products have already achieved financing, they failed to achieve the desired results of high quality and low price, and they could only choose to transform to the direction of enterprise application. This means that the head mounted AR products are not yet mature enough.

"But the definition of AR is actually very broad, and Pok mon (Po can dream) is a good example." Zhang Hansong believes that the core technology support for this AR game itself is the map, but it has been developing for many years and is quite mature.

Another technology that is strongly related to AR games is AI, which is a major breakthrough in the AR gaming experience.

Zhang Hansong pointed out to reporters that the next generation of AR games needs to support the perception of the physical world by supporting AI technology from the neural network computing level, so that it can quickly identify the physical environment. At present, this is still in the primary stage, and the energy consumption is still high, but it will be a fast growing field.

The so-called AR, namely Augmentation (enhanced) +Reality (reality), is indispensable to the two, and the former must play a role through the latter. He analyzed, therefore, the cognition of reality needs two aspects of talents, namely computer vision, and talents who are biased towards the neural network, and it is best to expand their skills to computer graphics.

In fact, computer graphics and computer vision are the opposite of logic. The former is after modeling, the image is processed by further rendering, and the latter is used to restore the model with an image and determine whether it is accurate or not. But these two aspects of knowledge structure are all available, and the scope of thinking can be much broader. "Practitioners need extensive interest and continuous learning." Zhang Hansong said so.

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