Are XR and short videos mutually reinforcing or counterproductive?

In recent years, the collision and integration between XR technology and content creation has become more frequent. The launch of XR devices has brought new imagination space to the virtual world, and also brought new challenges to content creators. For a long time, the "vicious cycle" in the XR industry has been difficult to break, making the industry development difficult. If you are a reader interested in XR technology and content creation, it is recommended to read this article and think about how to seize the opportunities brought by this wave of changes and become one of the main forces driving this revolution.

Perhaps, an "immersive content revolution" is on the way.

In the earliest drama performances, people built stages in real life and watched performances to relax. The emergence of movies completely separated the stage from reality and brought it to thousands of households only through images. Games jump out of the reality and build a brand new world view. People play roles and travel and release themselves in different worlds...

It is not difficult to find that people's pursuit of "visual entertainment" is moving towards the direction of "departing from reality", while at the same time, the experience in the "new world" must be infinitely close to reality. This is also an important reason why concepts such as the metaverse, XR, and generative AI have attracted much attention.

XR has always been regarded as the key to open the door to a new world, and major manufacturers continue to increase their investment in launching their own products. However, due to content experience and technical barriers, no phenomenal products have ever appeared. Until half a month ago, the Apple Vision Pro released by Apple seemed to meet people's basic imagination of XR devices and also brought new imagination space to XR content production.

There is a vicious cycle in the XR industry: due to the lack of scenarios, applications, and content, it is difficult for users to experience the content and therefore they are unwilling to buy it. This makes it difficult for developers to make money, and they are not willing to develop XR applications and are unwilling to create content for XR devices.

Apple has a strong appeal among the developer community. The launch of Apple devices has accelerated the development of applications to a certain extent. A content ecosystem centered on XR devices may soon arrive.

01 XR and short videos, mutual promotion and mutual restraint

At present, short videos, as a universal form of content entertainment, occupy most of the fragmented time of users. It has become a normal practice for users to watch short videos on their mobile phones in their spare time. Under the influence of the new trend, major short video platforms have begun to deploy XR equipment and content fields, hoping to seize the output window of future content.

Take ByteDance as an example. After acquiring PICO for 9 billion yuan, ByteDance began to combine VR devices with short video content. PICO used VR on Douyin as one of its selling points, hoping to boost the sales of XR devices with the help of its exclusive content advantages. Subsequently, PICO began to establish close cooperative relationships with content production companies and media platforms, and tried to provide itself with UGC content through the rich creator resources on Douyin, so as to accelerate the improvement of the content ecosystem.

However, the characteristics of short videos are fragmentation and can be viewed anytime and anywhere. Using complex and heavy VR equipment to watch Douyin is a paradox in itself. The selling point of VR short videos has not brought substantial sales growth to PICO. According to relevant people within ByteDance, PICO's sales target in 2023 is about 500,000 units, with a sales target of 350,000 units for the C-end and 150,000 units for the B-end. This target is about 50% lower than that in 2022.

The combination of short videos and XR has not achieved good results. The reason is that the usage scenarios of the two are completely different.

For most C-end users, XR devices provide a sense of presence, and users pursue the full connection of senses in the virtual world. This immersive experience is based on the support of hardware devices. Users need to wear more complex devices and sacrifice the wearing experience. Therefore, short videos and other life-oriented entertainment applications do not conform to the usage habits of XR devices. Instead, games, movies, and other scenes that require a large area of ​​time are more applicable.

For example, Apple Vision Pro targets office, entertainment and home scenarios. According to Apple, users can watch 3D movies, work remotely and play games while wearing Apple Vision Pro. These scenarios require linear time and users need to be deeply involved.

From wearing experience to usage scenarios, XR devices still have a long way to go before they become the next generation of "mobile phones", but the emergence of Apple Vision Pro has undoubtedly caused ripples in the long-dormant market. XR devices cannot kill short videos, but they provide users with another way of entertainment, which may promote the innovation of content creation and inject new imagination into the field of short videos.

02XR content world under AI narrative

In fact, XR, AI-related technologies and short videos are always colliding and trying. For example, the virtual people in short videos have discovered a new way to present short video content through technology, and the emergence of AIGC has also provided efficient tools for short video creation. The combination of creators' emotions and technology is empowering content creation.

With the change of technology, AIGC can now process any content format, including text, voice, code, image, video, and even 3D model actions, etc. If AI can perfectly understand the creator's intentions and ideas, it can save a lot of tedious and repetitive modification work.

At the same time, generative AI can solve the material problems of creators from the root, especially for highly professional knowledge-based content. This type of content requires professional knowledge reserves and clear logical thinking, and its entertainment and personal emotional attributes are relatively weak. Rational technical tools can comprehensively improve the creation efficiency of this type of content.

From the perspective of XR content creation, AI is also fully enabling the construction of virtual world space.

Content production related to XR technology is a major challenge faced by content creators. Although technology companies such as Microsoft have launched developer platforms, compared with 2D content creation, it is still not universal and very difficult. The continuous improvement of generative AI has brought new imagination space for modeling and content production in the virtual world.

At this year's press conference, Apple publicly demonstrated some interesting applications in the virtual world designed by developers, such as 3D human body teaching, immersive racing design for designers, private planetariums, virtual DJs, etc., many of which involved the shadow of AI creation technology.

As early as last year, the Decentraland Foundation held its own Art Week in the virtual world. The entire event featured AI-modeled architecture, AI poetry recitation, and marketing visuals produced using AI. Its creative director once said in an interview: "When used in the creative industry, if used properly, it can improve productivity, but it will not replace human artists. There will also be a lot of AI in the metaverse as NPCs and support robots. We already have text-to-video capabilities, and text-to-3D models will obviously speed up experience building."

The picture comes from Xiaohongshu

In contrast, the most significant difference between humans and AI is that human creation is based on the sensibility and imagination of human creators, while AI creation is based on the training and data it receives. Human taste, creative intent, and content style formed over a long period of time cannot be imitated.

Generative AI is more of a tool to improve efficiency, but it is not the creator itself. The independent thinking of creators and the continuous advancement of AIGC technology will jointly build the richness of the future XR content world.

03 Look at it rationally, the outbreak of XR still has "shackles"

Although the development of XR content is promising, there are still several important issues to be faced if it is to be popularized among the general public.

The first is the breakthrough in interactive technology. From PC, mobile phone to XR, the switch of each generation of mobile computing terminals is essentially an innovation in the way of interaction. Before Apple Vision Pro, most VR devices interacted with peripherals such as handles, which was very similar to the simple projection of mouse and touch in the virtual world, and there was no essential change in the way of interaction.

Apple introduced gesture interaction. The natural pinching and zooming of the fingertips will be captured by the camera on its MR headset, and the screen can be zoomed in and out. The linkage of iris recognition, voice interaction and other methods has jointly created an interaction mode that conforms to the natural operating habits of the human body. However, this is based on the high price of Apple Vision Pro at $3,499, which is destined to make it difficult to become a comprehensive hardware device.

At the same time, the development of mobile terminal devices has always reflected the changing rules of "from thick to thin" and "from heavy to light", but VR devices are thicker and heavier than current smartphones. From this perspective, the transition from mobile phones to VR devices is a "regression" in the development of mobile terminals. Even Apple has not solved this problem.

In addition to hardware technology, the development of XR must be supported by powerful software and content. After all, the original intention of users to buy XR devices is not to collect an unusable machine at home. However, whether it is games, movies, social networking, or office work, they do not constitute the rigid needs of users at present, and can only meet the needs of a small number of groups to try out new things.

Even Apple simply demonstrated the upgrades of Apple Vision Pro for office, home and entertainment scenarios, but did not bring any new applications. In addition, the external battery life of Apple Vision Pro is only two hours, which means that the application scenarios will not be as extensive as mobile phones for the time being.

The XR field currently lacks a "killer" application to attract users into the virtual world. Only when users come in can the industry make profits, thus having the capital to improve the ecosystem and develop new content, forming a positive cycle for the industry.

Nowadays, the integration of the XR industry and the content industry is becoming increasingly close, and technological innovation has enabled some basic content creation to be completed through AI. At the same time, users have higher and higher requirements for content, and their preference for immersive content is becoming more and more obvious. Under this trend, content creators should try to seize the wave of immersive content change, and a new content scenario may be coming soon.

04 Conclusion

Since ancient times, technology has never limited human imagination. The emergence of Apple Vision Pro represents that the barriers of XR devices from a hardware perspective are constantly being broken. I believe it is only a matter of time before XR devices become new smart terminals. In the long run, XR will continue to move forward amidst ups and downs, but the future competition will no longer be centered around hardware, and the "battlefield" will shift to the content side.

In Clour's view, XR will not kill short videos, but it will eliminate a group of content creators who cannot keep up with the trend of the times. Only creators who continue to innovate and keep up with the trend can seize opportunities in the changing times and inject inexhaustible energy into the rapidly developing content industry.

Author: Dake

Source: WeChat public account "TopKlout (ID: TopKlout)"