XR on the cloud helps Alibaba e-commerce unlock new experiences

In recent years, many concepts such as digital man and metauniverse have been extremely hot, attracting attention and controversy. Although the future of "completely recreating a virtual world" is still very far away, there are still many landing explorations in 2022, such as virtual idols and spokesmen, 3D 2D experience, immersive concerts and immersive meetings and other new forms, which are the first to test the water in the exhibition, entertainment, new retail and other industries.

Alibaba Group's e-commerce business is undoubtedly the first platform to "unlock" the most new games. Not to mention that many businesses have played virtual human live broadcast, and the platform has also created many "virtual spaces" to provide users with new experience.

The 2023 Tmall New Year Festival has built an immersive "Tmall 2023 ideal life virtual space" for user interaction. The interaction adopts pure 3D space+cloud rendering technology, and cooperates with artist image implantation/voice guidance to create beautiful scenes with different styles and themes. Users can collect badges after completing interactive games and looking for colored eggs, and can also interact with artist image online.

Users can reach the ideal living space by opening Taobao on their mobile phone and entering "New Year's Opening", where they can "shop in the cloud". In addition to the Central Street, there are five different sub-spaces with different environments, layouts and playing methods. For example, in the cute pet town, it is necessary to compete with the running cat and choose the desired hairstyle for the dog. Every task completed will be rewarded with a medal, and the voice egg of Yiyang Qianxi will be unlocked. Through the immersive interactive experience with the spokesmen, the user's stickiness and shopping interest are effectively improved, and users can learn about the latest products in the cloud shopping and star interaction.

Before that, at the Double 11 Shopping Festival in 2022, Ali Mama and Jiangsu Satellite TV jointly created the "2060 Voices of the Universe Star Song Festival". Four stars, Pan Weibo, Liu Yuxin, Xiao Jingteng and Zhang Hanyun, appeared on Jiangsu Satellite TV in real life, and their "digital image" was synchronized with the stage performance in the virtual space "Mantavos" mainland. The mainland of Mantavos is rich in scenes, including brand museum, digital collection museum, central stage and other venues. The "Logos" spacecraft is the main transmission point. Users can watch the concert, also enjoy the collection, and visit the brand museum.

"Mantavos" virtual continent stage

The ideal living space for the New Year's Festival includes five 3D trend spaces, and the first version of Mantavos on the Double 11 has three venues. Such a large scene also means that there is a huge amount of visual high-fidelity model data related to character images, environment and maps. If the installation package is packaged and run on the terminal, the installation package may be tens of gigabytes. At the same time, the interior of the space is real-time interaction, and the audience or user can move freely through the virtual avatar. In this way, the required computing resources will increase with the increase of the number of audience access. It is not only large in amount, but also sudden, which requires the super flexibility of cloud computing power.

Behind this is the support of Alibaba Cloud's visual computing solution. Both ideal living space and Mantavos are running on Alibaba Cloud's cloud XR platform and GPU Dragon Cloud Server.

With the support of Alibaba Cloud's XR platform, although the scene model is exquisite and the amount of data is huge, there is no need for the audience to pre-install the software in advance to enter "Mantavos" and "Tmall 2023 Ideal Living Space". Just scan the code on Taobao or click the link, and you can enter the "Mantavos" virtual world with one click. It is not limited to mobile phones, PCs, tablets and other platform terminals, and it will not occupy the actual storage space.

Relying on the powerful pixel filling ability of the gn7i instance based on Alibaba Cloud DPCA computing architecture and equipped with A10 GPU, coupled with DPCA's low latency IO capability, cloud and end can be immersed in the same frequency; Relying on Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing regions and GPU pools across the country, it can carry hundreds of thousands of online performance scenes, bring hundreds of thousands or even millions of audiences into the same virtual stage, and experience an unparalleled sense of presence in reality.

Alibaba Cloud provides a full set of product technical solutions for XR scenarios

As mentioned earlier, users can switch different scenes in the virtual space and interact with other users in real time. The displacement, action and interaction of each user need to be calculated and broadcast to the scene of other users in real time. This means that as the number of users increases, the demand for computing and scheduling will grow exponentially. Therefore, there is a limit to the number of users that can be accessed by a single cloud server and scheduling engine. Therefore, users need to be "partitioned". Similar to the split service in the game, users of different services cannot interact with each other, but similar scenarios can be seen.

Chen Hongxia, head of integration business of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Internet Business Department, said that the wide application of XR technology has provided a new development path for Internet enterprises. Taking the e-commerce industry as an example, enterprises can bring new visual enjoyment and consumption experience to users by creating attractive and competitive new shopping scenes and giving full play to the advantages of immersive experience with strong scenarioization. Nowadays, more and more Internet enterprises are exploring richer application scenarios through immersive experience with technological innovation as the core. Immersive experience is also gradually becoming the frontier of cultural and technological integration and innovation.

At present, the scheduling capability of the cloud XR platform supports 10000 people on the same screen. However, with the scheduling of the upper application, the upper limit of access users may be further diluted. In the project supporting this Tmall New Year Festival, with the efforts of technical members of Alibaba Cloud elastic computing and cloud XR platform, relying on thousands of GPUs to render and carry millions of user traffic in real time, represents the industry-leading capability.

Zhang Xintao, an expert of Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing products, said that with the improvement of the processing capacity of Alibaba Cloud's XR platform on the same screen, it will bring greater flexibility to the application layer and further promote the implementation of XR technology in more industries and scenarios.