News briefing
Facebook announced that it will invest US$50 million to fund Metaverse research institutions and project partners around the world as it bases its energies on the Extended Reality (XR) project and research funding. As noted by Facebook, it will work with governments, the industry, scholars and experts, and also announced that 10,000 people will be recruited from the EU for active deployment in the Metaverse project over the next five years.
Impact analysis
Metaverse and XR have been popular topics of discussion in the world of science and technology lately, and they are, more or less, similar concepts to VR/AR. Virtual Reality (VR) is the 3-D world that the user sees and feels entirely virtualized by AI and HPC(high performance computing). Augmented Reality (AR) part real and part virtual, combining the virtual world on the screen with interacted scenes from the real world. Metaverse and XR are a shared virtual world online allow users to communicate through games and other ways, also players can purchase and trade via digital assets. At present, since Metaverse is still a developing concept, a global common agreed definition has yet been released.
The already dormant concept of virtual reality has seen trends, commotions and waves once again triggered via recent announcements of measures by Facebook. In addition, other technology giants such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google are most optimistic about growth and have, in succession, invested in product layout. For days to come, the VR/AR/XR market will surely grow steadily while being driven by the four major factors of investments from major manufacturers, game/community/navigation applications, the B2B market, and the formation of the OpenXR/rOS+5G ecosystem. It is estimated that shipments of relevant applications for sensors should have reached 51 million units in 2021 and 594 million units by 2024 – a compound annual growth rate of 126%. Such new technology applications represent an additional opening for new PCB product exports. With light and miniature features in demand, it is expected that HDI, FPCBs and rigid-flex PCBs and substrates related to AI/HPC will become mainstream products endowed with the application of such technology.