Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On August 26, AR brand Rokid held the launch of 2023 Rokid Jungle new products at the International Conference Center of Hangzhou Future Science and Technology City, and took the lead in launching consumer OST personal space computing platform Rokid AR Studio.

Photo from: Rokid official Weibo according to the official website, Rokid was founded in 2014, is a product platform company specializing in human-computer interaction technology, and consumers are familiar with it, mainly due to a number of consumer-grade AR glasses products launched by Rokid in the past two years.

For example, their Rokid Air smart glasses, launched in September 2021, sold out 60, 000 units at the beginning of the year. At present, Rokid and Xreal (formerly known as Nreal), Thunderbird Innovation and INMO are also known as the "four Little Dragons of AR".

Photo from: Rokid official website takes advantage of the hot east wind of the XR industry, Rokid is in the limelight in the consumer market. On the other hand, the company is also favored by capital. According to the information of Tianyan check, Rokid has completed a total of 10 rounds of financing since its birth. Last year alone, four rounds of financing of about 1.359 billion yuan were completed, and the ability to "attract money" is amazing.

Photo from: Tianyan check on the one hand is the pursuit of capital, on the other hand is the wave of industrial recovery, the way forward for Rokid seems to be downwind. However, under the glamour, there are hidden worries.

XR cooling, AR consumption scenario and ecology are not yet mature after two years of frenzy, the XR industry, which has recovered through the trough, seems to be calming down again.

According to IDC, an international market research company, AR / VR first showed a sharp slowdown in global shipments in the first quarter of 2023, with the overall market down 54.4% year-on-year, and shipments for the whole of 2022 also fell 20.9% year-on-year.

Photo from: the actions of the leading companies in the IDC industry are also barometers. For example, the decline in sales of the industry giant Meta VR last year affected the flash collapse of the shares of the upstream industrial chain companies, as well as the subsequent price increases and layoffs.

Since then, the closely watched Tencent XR business has also reported the departure of the person in charge, project adjustment, layoffs; Kuaishou meta universe head quit, the project suspended; Microsoft fired a large number of meta universe application employees; byte beat's Pico also began to "optimize" the team.

Under the background that meta-universe is cooling and XR is not as expected again, there are also many uncertainties in the AR market. First of all, AR is already a minority. According to the data report of Group Intelligence Consulting (Sigmaintell), the global VR head shipments in 2022 are 9.7 million, while the AR head shipments are only about 340000.

Although AR equipment shipments have been growing in recent years, the small base still shows that the market is far from mature.

Photo from: CINNOResearch, for example, in consumer application scenarios, at present, most AR glasses are portable "projectors" and need to be connected to a mobile phone, PC, host, etc. In order to work, they have no math power, which is equivalent to projection accessories, and the application is very single.

In terms of the content of the screen, it is mainly focused on watching movies and playing games. Most of the content from iqiyi, Tencent, Youku and other third-party film and television brands, AR native content is very lacking. The same is true of games, not only a handful of numbers, but also mostly leisure Mini Game, such as "Arena of Valor", "Game for Peace" and other players cover a large number of players, there is no corresponding AR version.

In terms of technology, the MIcroLED + diffracted optical waveguide scheme, which is widely regarded as the ultimate AR display scheme, still has a long way to go before the real large-scale production. And in addition to showing that VR devices need to balance battery life, heat and performance at the chip level if they are to work independently, it is also a daunting challenge.

In other words, AR devices are far from being truly mature in terms of products and technology.

As for the B side, many AR manufacturers, including Rokid, have made some achievements in the B side before they cut into the consumer side, but that's it. With the current products and technology of AR equipment, there are still too many scenarios in the industrial, government and enterprise market that are difficult to develop. The application of AR on the B side is mainly high fault-tolerant scenarios such as distance training, education and exhibition, all of which have to wait for the maturity of product technology and application ecology.

In addition, the application of AR on the B side will also face the trade-off between cost and demand in the short term. Because behind the large-scale popularization of AR is not only the cost of one-time procurement, but also subsequent software maintenance, hardware maintenance and other costs, which is not consistent with the environment when reducing cost and efficiency, not to mention that many key industries will reject AR glasses shooting because of intellectual property rights and trade secrets. The popularity of AR on the B side is far more difficult than expected. In addition, the influence and acceptance of giant manufacturers on the B side will be better than that of startups.

The industry as a whole is not as expected, the current immaturity of the AR industry, all players in the industry need to be cautious. Rokid is no exception.

Where are the advantages and opportunities of Rokid? As one of the representative brands in the domestic AR market, Rokid also has its own advantages.

First of all, Rokid, originally an AI unicorn company, had made achievements in the field of smart speakers before entering the AR market, and was able to develop its own AI voice interaction chip, as Rokid founder Zhu Mingming stressed in the past: "what we do is not only AR, but human-computer interaction."

In the future, the combination of AR and AI will be very close, because AR is called "augmented reality" after all, which requires close integration and interaction with reality. In this process, AI must be used to understand and perceive the environment. Traditional AR companies focus more on optics, and Rokid has a natural advantage at this point.

For example, in the Rokid AR Studio platform released this time, Rokid Station Pro can be captured by camera and low-delay rendering based on partition ATW / PTW. Monocular SLAM can achieve centimeter precision and accurately perceive physical space. On the other hand, relying on the optimization algorithm and the hardware acceleration of XR2 +, using high-precision real-time image sensors to capture the position of 3D gestures, and meeting the real-time requirements of gesture tracking with low algorithm delay, 3D gesture interaction is completed, which requires the close combination of AI and AR technology.

Behind these is the full-space AR operating system YodaOS-Master developed by Rokid, which has been upgraded from chip optimization, hardware design, software architecture, AR algorithm and creation tools, and provides developers with full-link services from hardware, basic layer, platform layer to application layer.

Photo from: the full link layout of Rokid official video from equipment to system to tools is undoubtedly important and necessary from the perspective of human-computer interaction experience. If Rokid can continue to accumulate and achieve success, it is believed that it will become one of the most significant advantages that distinguish them from other "AR equipment" manufacturers.

Market competition intensifies, Rokid has a strong rival Rokid has advantages, but there are also hidden worries, in addition to the uncertainty of the industry as a whole, Rokid itself is also facing more urgent competition.

According to iResearch's statistics on the sales of domestic consumer-grade AR glasses online platforms in 2022, Thunderbird Innovation, Xreal and Rokid ranked in the top three respectively.

According to the second quarter data released by market research firm Loto Technology in the second quarter of 2023, the TOP3 brands in China's AR online market are Thunderbird Innovation, XREAL and Rokid respectively. Thunderbird Innovation ranked first in the online market with a share of 39.1% in the second quarter, Xreal ranked second with a share of 32.2%, and Rokid ranked third with 18.9% of the online market share.

According to the reports of the two research institutions, the market share of the top three is getting bigger and bigger, and they are beginning to show a state of head aggregation. It will be harder and harder for Rokid, in third place, to surpass the top two rivals.

The first is Thunderbird Innovation, which was incubated by the giant TCL and was founded in 2021 with the industry's first binocular full-color MicroLED holographic waveguide AR glasses. Their consumer products, Thunderbird Air and Thunderbird Air 1s, were released in 2022, directly helping them achieve first place.

During this year's CES, Thunderbird Innovation launched a new generation of smart glasses Thunderbird X2. Its biggest highlight is the use of the current best binocular full-color MIcroLED + diffracted optical waveguide scheme, which is of breakthrough significance.

It can be seen that Thunderbird's leading technological foundation and innovation ability can not be ignored.

Another competitor, Xreal, is not small, and they are in the first place in the global AR market. According to IDC's 2022 AR / VR report, Xreal has become the largest brand in the global AR industry with 98000 units in 2022, and Nreal Air AR glasses is the first consumer-grade AR glasses in the world to break through 100000 sets of mass production.

Photo from: the official Weibo of Xreal should note that before last year, Xreal mainly focused on overseas markets, and only last year it officially launched its products in China. In other words, whether Thunderbird Innovation or Xreal, the working time in the domestic market is actually shorter than Rokid.

In addition to Thunderbird Innovation and Xreal these two strong enemies, Rokid has to face Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and other mobile phone manufacturers to join the war. For example, Huawei only released and pre-sold its first Vision   Glass at the end of 2022. Huawei ranked fourth with 7.5% of the market share of the main online platform for Q4 domestic consumer AR glasses analyzed by Analysys in 2022.

Photo from: easy View Analysis and, at present, AR glasses products often need to be connected to smartphones. When mobile phone manufacturers enter, they will certainly give priority to adapting their own phones and glasses products, which will have advantages over third-party products in terms of experience and features.

In addition to the increasingly stringent competitive environment, Rokid itself also needs to show a more significant lead and advantage in products.

Photo from: Rokid official website, for example, before this press conference, Rokid Max launched in March this year was pointed out by netizens that the upgrade range was limited compared with Rokid Air, the main improvement was the screen refresh rate and virtual screen size, near-eye optical design, such as MTF, eyebox, pupil distance and other key information were not disclosed at the press conference. According to the feedback from the major evaluation bloggers, more than one said that the edge area of the Rokid Max is obviously blurred, and although Rokid Max supports a diopter adjustment of 0600 degrees, it cannot adjust the pupil distance, so some users may see the problem of ghosting.

As for the Rokid AR Studio released this time, although it is true that monocular SLAM, 3D gesture recognition and other capabilities are eye-catching under the blessing of the YodaOS-Master system, it is still unknown what kind of feedback consumers will give in front of the set's total price of 8998 yuan.

The market of AR is still relatively small and still in the incubation stage. For Rokid, there are still many opportunities in the future, but it is also because the market is too small, the probability of fault tolerance is too low, and every step needs to be treated with caution.

Conclusion although we believe that there are many uncertain factors in the next development of the XR (including AR) market, one thing should be certain that the prosperity of XR is inevitable, it is only a matter of time.

For startups, the biggest question is: can you wait until this time comes?

It's a soul question that Rokid can't answer.

Including giants, other brands should also be difficult to answer. It's just that for the giants, until that day, it may just be the dissolution or suspension of a project, while for startups, it may be all.

But for Rokid, this issue may not be the most important right now. The most important thing is whether the technological R & D and innovation capabilities they try their best to accumulate can break through the current market and business model, and then wait for the wind to come.

Related reading: "[XR Uyo-World painting 1] uses chip technology to build a screen, Apple Vision Pro this screen has a story."

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