▼ Baidu VC's first investment: AR and artificial intelligence have great potential for collaboration from Baidu VR On February 14th, Baidu Venture Capital officially announced that it participated in 8I of US virtual reality Augmented Reality, B’s round of US$27 million in financing, and this is also the first round investment of Baidu Venture Capital, which is also the succession of Lu Qi’s joining. After Baidu invested for the first time, it has a higher strategic significance for Baidu. As a first investment, Baidu chose AR alone? First, the arrival of AR air intake, to seize the time of technology upgrades Last year is probably the first year of AR. The famous pokemon go game is popular around the world. On average, 30 million users are online every day. At the same time, on the domestic Alipay in the end of December also launched the AR red envelope, has also been hot for a while, and QQ also followed up and created a miracle of hundreds of millions of users involved. Therefore, it can be said that last year was the first year of the AR outbreak. "Pokemon Go" completed the first round of education for users, and users had a preliminary perception and usage habits for AR. But on the other hand, no matter whether the "pokemon go" or AR red envelope is still not a real AR technology in nature, it is currently a coincidence of image recognition + LBS technology, and it is not too difficult from a technical perspective. Therefore, although the current AR game is in full swing, it is still in the early stage of technology and there are still more opportunities. In January of this year, Baidu set up an AR Lab. In the development of more potential, and the investment is also a technology-driven 8I company, it is intended to seize the window of the AR technology upgrade. Second, the imagination of AR and artificial intelligence is huge Wu Enda, chief scientist at Baidu, said that 8I's technology and products will be widely used with Baidu's various products. Ali and Tencent, although the other two parties also invested in the two AR companies, magic leap and Meta, they are still investing only so far. They have not yet been integrated with their own business, and this is also related to their respective genes. However, Baidu has the technological advantage of artificial intelligence. This technological advantage combined with AR technology has great potential. In the previous "Most Powerful Brain," Baidu artificial intelligence robots competed with the most powerful brain players for face recognition, speech recognition, and other projects. They eventually defeated human players and demonstrated that their current level of technology has reached a very high level. Strong stage. 8I focuses on 3D character rendering in the AR field. It is committed to achieving large-scale, low-cost, high-precision rendering of 3D characters. It has successfully developed a series of image capture, stitching, and compression core algorithms, and has entered into real applications. In the practical phase, it has already had more cooperation with companies such as L'Oreal and the times. Therefore, 8I is a technology-driven AR company, and Baidu is also a technology-driven company. The two parties agree on the starting point and the final appeal. Therefore, both parties are bound to land in the near future. Practice. Earlier, it was said that there is not much technical content in the AR red envelope that can still be hot for a while, and with the combination of stronger AR technology and artificial intelligence technology, it is very likely that the next phenomenon level product will appear. Third, the Internet of Things, "AR+" is rising Mobile Internet allows everyone to get rid of the shackles of the PC and can connect to the Internet anytime and anywhere. The rise of the mobile Internet has also profoundly changed the way of marketing communication. Marketing has started to shift from offline newspapers and magazines to offline. On the platform, and began to have functions such as effect monitoring and conversion, which cannot be achieved in the traditional era. In the future, more physical worlds will be connected to the same network. This brings great opportunities to AR. At present, the way of Internet marketing is still single, and it is always the form of graphic and text pushing. User interaction is still scarce, driven by the physical world networking. AR can open extremely diverse interactive ways. AR + interaction, the first layer is the use of AR technology for simple facial deformation of the face, such as FaceU, Snow, such products, on the basis of the original video on the face of the head-tie type of transformation. The second layer is through the AR technology, the object of the specified animation triggered, for example, after the cooperation of Baidu and KFC AR ordering marketing plan, the user triggered the corresponding animation by shooting KFC's food, and last year, Baidu has also been Mercedes, Erie, Mengniu, L'Oréal and other companies conducted AR cooperation. AR+ Geospatial, “pokemon go†and AR red envelopes are successful examples of combining AR and geographic location. By combining the geographical location of businesses, AR and marketing are organically combined. It seems that there is a huge amount of 348 million monthly live Baidu maps. The opportunity to achieve greater commercial value through the combination with AR. The AR+ display can be applied to tourism. For example, when a user shoots an attraction, the corresponding AR panorama of the attraction appears, and all kinds of past and present information are displayed in all directions. Prior to this, Baidu revived the Chaoyangmen's activities through AR technology, allowing more people to understand the history of Chaoyangmen in Beijing. This application has a promising future in the tourism industry in the future. In addition, there are various “AR+†appearances. Like “Internet+,†augmented reality AR is a completely new technology that is not completely separate from reality like VR in virtual reality. It has the ability to intervene in various industries and realize more. Big business value. Conclusion: "AR+" is rising. The current AR technology is still only in its infancy, and Baidu's establishment of the AR Lab, advancement of many AR projects, and the current investment in 8I are the preemption of cutting-edge technology windows. At the same time, Baidu itself has many achievements in the field of artificial intelligence, and finally artificial intelligence supplemented by AR, is likely to be born the next phenomenon-level products.