TecRah

Wen Lanjie

Editor Liu Shiwu

In the just past 2024, we focused on experiencing big VR spaces around China and found that the VR industry has quietly undergone major changes.

The transition from a small space personal equipment, to a hundred square meters of super-large experience space, making VR large space this new form of offline entertainment, has become a new choice after the script kills the escape room cinema movies and other offline entertainment scenes outside.

In an empty space covered with digital positioning, people put on VR equipment, and the surrounding environment becomes Egypt, which is nearly 10,000 kilometers away. Under the guidance of the tour guide and the cat god, people entered the pyramid of 1 1 restoration, witnessed the funeral of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs mummy production and so on.

This is last year’s hot VR space works, the disappearance of the pharaoh Horizon of Khufu pyramid immersive exploration experience exhibition hereinafter referred to as the disappearance of the pharaoh.

The so-called VR Big Space refers to a form of offline entertainment that combines immersive space and traditional VR video content based on LBE Location Based Virtual Reality (LBRVR) technology. Compared with traditional VR image content, VR Big Space allows players to have more exploration space and interactivity.

The Vanishing Pharaohs, produced by France’s Excurio and introduced by Boxin Omniverse as a domestic distribution company, has become a ceiling-level work in the industry, and has also become a topic of discussion among many practitioners who have flocked to the industry.

As early as June 2022, The Vanishing Pharaoh caused a frenzy of experiences in Paris, France, and in May 2023, it landed in Shanghai for its Asia premiere, attracting more than 190,000 attendees in three stretches, and was then shown in Beijing, Chengdu, Xi’an, Guangzhou and other places. Until this summer, the production is still continuing its popularity. Some media reported that the revenue of The Vanishing Pharaoh may have exceeded RMB 30 million.

Netizens are almost unanimous in their praise of the production, with some consumers saying that it’s not that Egypt is unaffordable, but that The Vanishing Pharaoh is more cost-effective.

Thus, the wind of VR space is blowing in China.

Money on the wind

Cosmic Conjecture Technology Co. For short, Cosmic Conjecture, is one of the players who joined the track along with this boom.

Cosmic guess vice president Wang Meng said to 36 Krypton, the company probably from July last year began to focus on the VR large space this track. At the beginning of this year, due to the project of the disappearing pharaohs and other projects driven by the explosion of fire, it gradually VR space as the company’s key direction. At present, Cosmic Conjecture is mainly responsible for content creation.

Nearly a year after the formal establishment of the project, Cosmic Conjecture has already released two works, one is the Cosmic Conjecture Journey in cooperation with Suzhou Museum in June this year, and the other one is also a project that landed on the ground in June, which is called Jungle Mystery I, Returning to the Jurassic Period. The former has received more than 60,000 people since its launch in June, with a cumulative box office of 5 million dollars, while the latter has a cumulative box office of more than 6 million dollars.

On November 25th, Cosmic Conjecture’s third VR space project, Panda’s World, was also officially released.

There are also earlier entrants that have taken shape in scale.

Peng Junxi still remembers the first time he experienced the VR big space, even the details of the wearing equipment have not forgotten, After experiencing the VR big space works, it is as if you have experienced the story. He used a phrase that he no longer remembers the source to describe the significance of VR Big Space. The VR experience is to 2D video what color film is to black and white film. And such an experience has made Peng Junxi’s determination to start his own business.

2016 is the year when VR became the focus of the market, and it also spawned the first batch of VR big space players in China. The following year, Peng Junxi set up his own company, named Shenzhen Bitshape Space Technology Co.

In 2018, Bitshaped Space relied on doing immersive exhibitions for the real estate industry to achieve expansion, and in 2019, the company began to focus on longer-term development, doing VR big space theaters.

But the epidemic has put the brakes on all offline businesses. Peng Junxi thought that he could hold out, and at one point in 2022, he expanded the number of its VR large space to more than ten, but the epidemic cycle is much longer than we thought , and the related business had to be suspended.

Fortunately, in 2021, the meta-universe became the wind mouth at that time, and also became the turnaround of the bit-shaped space at that time. With the existing foundation, Bitshaped Space reached cooperation with IKEA UOB and other companies, producing a number of online virtual space programs to survive the winter.

Today, bit-shaped space under the VR large space theater, combined upcoming online, there are more than 20, and the expansion will continue. In addition, Peng Junxi told 36 Krypton, the company’s profit this year can exceed 10 million yuan. And so far, Bitshape Space has just over 30 members.

On October 25, according to a media industry research report released by Huaxin Securities, China’s immersive industry is expected to reach an industry scale of 250 billion yuan in 2026 after a 2020 to 2022 consolidation and a restart of heat in 2023, according to a media industry research report released by Huaxin Securities.

Bit-shaped space also opened up a franchise model, according to Peng Junxi, the current franchise stores only need to bear the cost of store rent equipment purchases and human resources, not counting the later dividends of the IP licensing fees, the threshold of entry can be reduced to about 300,000, and is expected to return to the capital in 3 6 months, which has been close to the speed of the short play.

However, Peng Junxi also said that such a low cost, and such a fast rate of return, is located in the current stage of the dividend period to achieve, behind the competition will be more intense.

Content is king of the business model has not been established

After more than a year of development, now VR space has formed a clearer industry chain, including content development and hardware production as the core of the upstream, to distribute the distribution of the main midstream, as well as to provide marketing and offline operation of the downstream.

Among them, the entry cost of the downstream is relatively low, with content and hardware equipment procurement, rent, labor and operation as the main expenses. As the current VR space is still concentrated in shopping malls or industrial parks in first-tier cities or new first-tier cities, and requires hundreds of square meters, it is difficult to land and the cost is relatively high. According to industry estimates, ideally, downstream entry costs also need millions of dollars.

Disappearing Pharaoh Shanghai Store

In contrast, the upstream is a more central presence and requires the highest cost. In the technology of the attack and equipment update iteration, still dominated by large manufacturers, according to Sina VR reports, byte’s PICO series accounted for 47 of the market share, followed by the HTC series and Meta series, respectively.

The development of content, if aligned to high quality, is equally expensive. Taking the industry’s ceiling The Vanishing Pharaoh as an example, the development time behind it was three years long and cost around tens of millions of dollars, similar to the cost of a special effects movie. In contrast, the box office of this work is also the best in the industry, with a peak monthly revenue of more than ten million dollars. Some industry insiders said that after the multi-country and multi-city exhibition tour, the total revenue of Pharaoh is expected to be around 200 million dollars.

In fact, almost all practitioners compare the VR big space with the movie, and they believe that the content is the most core and key issue of this industry.

However, the distribution model of the VR big space industry has not yet been determined.

On the one hand, due to the recovery and growth of the culture and tourism industry in the past two years, the culture and tourism industry around the world has also rolled up a new industry, and the VR big space with novel form and technological breakthrough has become one of their options. And the universe guess is relying on the combination with the local cultural tourism industry to develop business.

Wang Meng said that today many tourist attractions, there is a general revenue model of a single situation, VR big space helps to help solve such a problem.

But at the same time, backed by the attractions of the VR space also exists in the case of insufficient independence, very few people for a single work to choose cross-regional travel and consumption. In addition, in non-holiday time periods, such large space works that complement attractions also suffer from a large box office drop-off.

On the other hand, represented by Bitshape Space, it wants to take a distribution path similar to that of movie theaters, so that offline stores can have multiple VR large-space works in reserve for consumers to choose from A related work can also be synchronized to be screened in multiple VR large-space stores to achieve a scale effect.

Cinema mode is a business model that has been verified by the movie industry for a hundred years, mature and clear chain, which ensures the supply of content and amplifies the revenue at the same time. However, the problem is that the reserve of domestic VR space works is still far less than the number of movies, and fails to form an industry model similar to the movie industry, where content is king.

Even the industry has a certain amount of bad money driving out good money.

Behind the money on the wind, is the problem on the wind

But like every emerging industry, the VR large space track is mixed with a lot of speculators, producing a lot of works with a development time of only a few months and a cost of no more than several hundred thousand or even a hundred thousand dollars.

According to 36 Krypton statistics, only 2024 a year, there are more than a hundred VR large space content on the line, however, its on-line channel Cooperation mode Content type Experience dimension is different In addition to all walking wearing a VR headset, every other detail will appear a variety of points of difference.

A consumer who has experienced the VR space said to 36 Krypton, he himself is out of curiosity about this new form of choice to try, but after the experience felt that the picture is rough equipment debugging a lot of small problems, and there is no content creativity to speak of, even if it is a unanimously praised works of VR space, he did not have the desire to experience it again, as well as in the computer to play the game.

Peng Junxi also said regrettably, so far, the domestic VR space works in more than 200, there is a serious homogenization of content quality is not high. Almost two years have passed, people in the industry to discuss good content, or only Pharaoh this case, very few people say that there is a domestic content can do the same as Pharaoh, or beyond it.

Peng Junxi believes that today will form such a state of the industry, is due to the domestic VR space is still in the early stages, has not yet formed the state of volume content. He believes that the key to this lies in the circulation of information and content, not a large space with only a few works, the need to allow the audience to have the space to select and compare.

WOW! Sanxingdui Beijing Hopscotch Store

In addition to the quality of the content is not passable, the repurchase rate is low The poor independence is also a problem at this stage of the VR large space.

Several consumers who have experienced VR space experience feedback, they almost have no attempt to experience again and ideas, VR space is far from becoming the same form of mass entertainment as the movie.

In addition, influenced by the recovery of cultural tourism, governments around the world are actively combining cultural tourism with VR big space. However, as far as the current situation is concerned, this kind of VR big space project is characterized by an obvious dependence on holiday tourism traffic.

According to Wang Meng’s feedback, in July and August this year, the monthly box office of its projects can exceed one million yuan, but in the summer past, in some of the third and fourth tier cities, the monthly box office of these projects reached a low of one or two million.

In addition, Wang Meng also said that LBE’s repurchase rate is very low, the average user will watch it once, at most will watch it for the second time, but almost will not watch it for the third time.

As early as before the rise of this big VR space, VR technology has already set off several waves. According to a white paper on the status of VR experience stores in China, there were more than 3,000 VR offline experience stores across the country in 2016, offering a wide variety of content including VR games, educational experiences, virtual tours, and more. But because the profitability of these experience stores is less than 30 , a large number of stores had to close, and the wave passed.

Meta-universe is not the savior of VR, nor is it the key direction of VR development After all, for a technology industry that is still in the exploration stage, meta-universe is more conceptual, and it can establish the industry of content as the king and land a mature commercialization scenario, which may help everyone to live.

Today’s VR large space has risen, but this gust of wind can blow for how long, is still unknown.

36 Krypton game Feng Min, also contributed to this article.

The pictures in this article are all from the network and field shooting

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