Will the Metaverse Concept Make a Comeback Next Year? Sora Plays a Significant Role
-
"Now is the era of internet celebrities. I have already apprenticed myself to Yu Minhong, learning how to become an internet celebrity and diligently posting short videos every day," said Zhou Hongyi, who is already at the age of knowing his destiny, undoubtedly one of the few remaining active veterans in the internet industry. Recently, he has frequently posted short videos sharing his insights on OpenAI's latest text-to-video model, Sora. For example, he believes that due to the impact of OpenAI's release of Sora, the concept of the metaverse may make a comeback next year.
In related videos, Zhou Hongyi mentioned that when using traditional computer graphics and film industry special effects methods to recreate certain scenes, we tend to favor 3D modeling, setting up lighting, creating particle models, and then rendering frame by frame. However, this method is actually very inefficient and costly, simulating the world in the most cumbersome way. In contrast, Sora's approach is very similar to human dreaming, where the basis of dream content is what we see in our daily lives, and this accumulated experience does not require 3D modeling or frame-by-frame rendering.
In other words, he believes that Sora's working principle is very similar to the process of humans creating scenes in their brains while dreaming, which is the biggest difference from traditional computer graphics. As the most popular text-to-video model currently, Sora's 'evolution' is evident in its ability to generate 1-minute-long videos that rarely violate the objective laws of the physical world. It can also switch scenes and provide multi-angle shots. Simply put, Sora's emergence has lowered the difficulty of video creation, making the transition from text to video no longer reliant on various complex tools.
If we set aside potential cost issues, Sora is like a supercharged version of video editing software, turning the slogan of 'democratized creation' into reality to some extent. Zhou Hongyi dares to predict that the metaverse will regain vitality next year precisely because of the AI-related technological progress represented by Sora, and the maturity of intelligent agents, which will address the biggest weakness of the current metaverse—content. It's worth noting that two years ago, the concept of the metaverse held a position in the tech world similar to AI today, regarded as the new chapter of the internet industry.
Creating a virtual world independent of the real world is the ambition of the metaverse. After more than a decade of mobile internet development, the growth of internet traffic has peaked, and the progression from text to images to videos seems to have reached its limit. However, users demand more complex and immersive experiences, making the simulation of the real world the new direction. Almost every advocate of the metaverse has spared no effort in promoting the idea that it is a virtual space replicating the real world, similar to those depicted in movies like Ready Player One or games like Cyberpunk 2077. Users would only need to design their avatars to begin a second life in this digital realm.
To make the virtual world, which currently exists only behind screens, more realistic, the vision of the metaverse is undeniably ambitious. However, while the ideal is grand, the reality is stark. Given the current state of semiconductor technology, communication technology, virtual reality, AI, and sociological theories, achieving the "Oasis" from Ready Player One in one go is nearly impossible. Yet, creating a virtual space more lifelike than traditional MMORPGs is not difficult. Unfortunately, the metaverse concept faded just a year and a half after its initial hype, and even its staunchest proponent, Meta, has shifted focus from the metaverse to AI. In a sense, the current metaverse finds itself in a situation strikingly similar to that of video games in their embryonic stage during the 1970s—where participants' computational capabilities and ambitions are severely mismatched. However, most metaverse players have chosen to ignore objective constraints rather than taking a pragmatic approach, with Meta being the most prominent example. The company's Horizon Worlds was touted as offering an explorable virtual world, yet after spending tens of billions of dollars, it only materialized as a social platform within the metaverse.
Given current technological limitations, rendering a photorealistic 3D world would likely take centuries. This explains why Roblox's digital communities use "Lego-like" models—existing computational power simply can't support anything beyond simple 2D cartoonish graphics. Of course, beyond the lack of computing power preventing realistic rendering, the absence of compelling content remains the primary reason many users remain uninterested.
Classic games from the 1970s and 80s like Snake, Tank Battle, and Super Mario Bros. featured crude graphics with zero realism, yet players at the time were utterly captivated by them. Facing similar hardware limitations, early video game developers chose to focus on gameplay, creating more engaging content to satisfy players. In reality, examining past metaverse-related products—from Baidu's XiRang to Meta's Horizon Worlds, and other companies' metaverse social platforms and games—their eventual decline appeared as a lack of popularity, but the root cause was too few content creators relative to consumers. A counterexample is Roblox, the "metaverse concept stock," whose namesake game Roblox has consistently remained in the top 10 of global mobile game download charts since the metaverse concept gained traction.
When traditional professional content producers cannot meet users' content consumption demands in the metaverse era, Sora's emergence offers new possibilities by enabling users to become content creators themselves. While Sora may face issues of insufficient precision for professional scenarios, making it less viable there, these limitations don't apply in the entertainment sector. After all, for most people, mastering traditional video production requires too many specialized tools—including Adobe Premiere Pro, Shotcut, and Blender—and the learning curve for these tools is prohibitively steep. The process of learning AE and Pr has deterred most people from becoming video creators. In contrast, while Sora does require certain skills from users, the grammatical proficiency it demands is something most people have already been trained in during their school years, thus eliminating the need for additional effort. With Sora, everyone has the potential to become a creator, and the content produced transcends amateur endeavors.
Therefore, when the era arrives where everyone is a creator, the metaverse may finally become "vibrant and lively."