People speak with each other through voice and get a full view of thoughts and meanings by watching each other's gestures, postures, and facial expressions. It is very likely that you get more profound information from non-voice signals in an important conversation, say a business negotiation or a dating argument. It won't be an easy job in a two-dimensional virtual space hosted on the internet. However, it has been so natural to us in our daily lives since we live in a three dimension space called the "real world".
It has been a totally different story for online entertainment platforms that want to improve user engagement for monetization. Internet companies started from text and photographic messages to motion and video messages, and to real-time voice and video. User engagement has been improved significantly by real-time communication, however, it can be better with reference to what we can do in the "real world". Dare we say that we want a virtual world that replicates the real one? Literally, we want a metaverse virtual reality.
According to WWDC 2022 on metaverse, our "real world" has been increasingly interwinding with virtual realities. Inke, one of the world's biggest live streaming platforms, has been following this trend closely.
Inke had won over 200 million registered members as of 2018 when it launched its IPO in the Hong Kong stock market and has been doing whatever it takes to improve its user experience. A metaverse-based product, called Metaverse Karaoke, is one of its recent bold and innovative moves.
On May 18, 2022, the Inke app launched the first metaverse-based product, called the "full view karaoke", upgrading from an online karaoke for an unparalleled user experience.
Inke Metaverse Karaoke Scenarios
1 Have fun in a metaverse karaoke room as a pretty avatar
The Inke app offers a metaverse-based karaoke room, which is pretty luxuriously decorated. The karaoke room looks very big from a 3-dimensional perspective, it won't become crowded even if you put 20 people into it. There is a big theater-style screen, a few lounges, and a mini-stage with spotlights. As a user, you will be endowed with a pretty good-looking avatar and you are allowed to change its face, body, and cloth as you wish. Your avatar will be born in the karaoke room, and you will enjoy rich movements as you can do in a 3D online game. Also, you will see many peer-users like you, some of them even have similar appearances as you. Overall, the metaverse karaoke room and the anthropomorphic-looking avatars make you feel like you are just in a typical karaoke room in our real world.
2 Real-world-like 3D-spatial social interactions open a new door for user engagement
In an ordinary video chat room, you can speak with and see your friends through real-time voice and video, which is much better than a telephone chat or text chat room. However, compared with our real-world conversations, there is still something missing. Yes, 3D-spatial social interactions are absent, such as posture, gesture, and facial expressions. Anyway, with 2D video pictures, an ordinary video chat room can only take us so far. Things are different in the Inke metaverse karaoke room. you are allowed to do a lot of movements or actions in the luxurious room. You can run, or even chase with your cyber pals for fun, and then you guys can sit down as a group on one of the lounges for a quick talk. You will feel that the audio follows real-world physical rules. For example, people's voices will be fading out when you move away, and you won't hear their voices if you are far away enough.
3 Your avatar's posture, gesture, and facial expression can be synchronized with your actual movements
You can do a lot of common actions like what you can do in the "real world", such as jumping up and down, sitting down, running around, waving or clapping hands, etc. When you speak with your cyber pals through real-time voice, you can make social interactions funnier with rich postures and gestures, adding one more important element to making a pleasant conversation. Currently, your avatar cannot be sync-ed with you for facial expressions. According to Inke's product iteration plan, its metaverse karaoke product will support avatar facial expression synchronization. Since Your voice is closely correlated with your mouth and lip movements and facial muscle movements, your avatar will be able to sync-ed with you for facial expressions when the system monitors the critical points on your face and your vocal signals.
4 Multiple perspectives allow you to see your cyber pals from different angles
You are allowed to explore the metaverse from various perspectives, looking at people from different angles, such as first-person perspective and third-person perspective. You can rotate your view all around, up and down, also you can zoom in and out as you wish. when someone is performing on the mini-stage, you can switch your view to a close-up perspective on the stage. You will feel a sense of spatial freedom and would like to explore and play especially under the global pandemic restrictions.
5 Metaverse karaoke offers you the same experience as real-world karaoke
Inke's metaverse karaoke is an upgrade version of a previous online karaoke product, like Kugou KTV. You are allowed to search and select songs. The karaoke is equipped with a rich music repository, and you are guaranteed to be able to find your favorite songs. Hot or trending songs are ranked and listed in a few category panels for your easy selection. Once you select a song, the song will be listed in a queue. Once your turn comes, your avatar will be guided automatically onto the mini-stage by the system, and you will enter a performing mode. A panel will appear at the top-centric part of the screen, showing rolling lyrics of the current song. You can choose to sing along with an accompaniment of pure music or original singing. Other users in the karaoke room can wave, show likes, or clap hands around the stage. It is exactly like what you can do in a real-world karaoke room.
Immersive Metaverse User Experience
The true meaning of the metaverse karaoke is that you can live a brand new life with an avatar appearance that you chose, and you are encouraged to earn cheers, applause, and friendship with a confidence level that you may not have in the real world.
1） Real-world-like spatial freedom brings an authentic immersive metaverse user experience
The metaverse karaoke releases you from the constraints of a 2D cyber world and endows you with the feeling of being alive in a brand new 3D spatial world, where you can stick your cyberpals side by side, and you are not alone any longer. Plenty of elements are added together to create an authentic immersive user experience, including various spatial movements, gestures, facial expressions, 3D spatial voice, and proximity voice. You can read someone's thoughts by looking at his or her facial expressions, and also you can identify voice source locations without looking around. The feeling is so immersive that you will feel that you are so much into it, and cannot help staying longer time than you originally wanted.
2） With the cover of a customized and pretty avatar, your social fear will be gone
Like many other youngsters, you may be afraid to socialize with first-time strangers. Why is it so? Perhaps you just don't feel confident about your appearance, like a few acnes make you uncomfortable when facing strangers, or you are desperate about reducing your weight. Or perhaps you just don't want to show your true identity in case you run into acquaintances. Inke's metaverse karaoke allows you to generate an anthropomorphic avatar initially based on your true appearance, and then you can change your facial characteristics, like making eyes bigger or lips thicker. and also you are allowed to change your decorations and clothes. The avatar is customized by you according to your taste and will cover all of you up, presenting you as a pretty good-looking avatar appearance. Your social fear will surely be eliminated.
3） Metaverse karaoke brings you the sense of a superstar with spotlight, applause, and cheers
I assume that most of you are not celebrities or superstars of any sort. The Inke metaverse karaoke offers you a stage in a luxurious big room and a friendly and casual audience that you have been familiar with after some mingling. You are encouraged to perform your best. If you are talented and good at singing, you will earn applause and cheers in the spotlight. if you aren't a good singer, never mind, most chances are that neither of your cyber pals is a good singer but will embrace you with cheers as well. You will enjoy the feeling of being a superstar surrounded by fans with applause, flowers, and cheers in the spotlight, which you have never experienced in the real world.
The Inke app is empowered with the ZEGOCLOUD metaverse karaoke solution
Inke has long been a loyal client of ZEGOCLOUD's for 7 years. With the mutual trust and confidence built up in the 7 years, Inke built the "full view karaoke" into its app with the ZEGOCLOUD metaverse karaoke solution.
According to the person in charge of the Inke "full view karaoke" product, since the first cooperation between Inke and ZEGOCLOUD in early 2016, the two companies have joined hands to create many internet entertainment and social products that have been loved by Inke's users. This time, Inke and ZEGOCLOUD worked together again to create the "full view karaoke" for the Inke app, which has been proven to be a big success. Since its launch, user statistics have shown positive feedback, generally, users have shown great interest in the interesting and novel metaverse karaoke.
The person in charge of the Inke "full view karaoke" product also expressed that what truly impressed the Inke team was the values that ZEGOCLOUD has brought to them and their users. He summarized ZEGOCLOUD's values as follows:
ZEGOCOUD's metaverse karaoke solution enables them to launch the "full view karaoke" product rapidly without sunk cost on Unity and avatar technologies. You don't have to maintain a Unity team to build a virtual world, and nor do you need to invest in an AI team to develop avatar technology. The solution helps you get rid of all these costs. Even better, your time-to-market will be reduced significantly.
ZEGOCOUD provides a one-stop solution that saved them from the burden of managing at least 3 vendors for metaverse, avatar, and RTC technologies. ZEGOCLOUD encapsulates the metaverse, the avatar, and the RTC technologies to offer a unified interface to your app. You don't have to struggle with compatibility issues among them.
ZEGOCOUD combines Unity, avatar, and RTC technology to create great synergy and brings a full view and immersive user experience to Inke's users. The Unity-powered virtual world allows spatial interactions. The avatar enables the sync of facial expressions; The RTC offers real-time voice with spatial effects; All of these create a fantastic immersive user experience that has never been seen before.
4 How to build a metaverse karaoke product
The person in charge of the ZEGOCLOUD metaverse karaoke solution stated that the solution can help our clients to build metaverse karaoke products rapidly for various metaverse-based scenarios, and achieve outstanding and immersive user experience. We have been working to polish the solution for quite a long period, going through rounds of testing and conquering difficult technical issues. We aim to provide the market with an outstanding, stable, and innovative solution, and help our clients to upgrade their user experience. We have taken plenty of measurements to save our clients from cost burdens.
For example, we have provided a metaverse editor that allows clients to load design assets, and preview how their metaverse will look like. The metaverse editor also allows clients to edit the objects in the metaverse, adding new objects, repositioning objects, replacing objects with new ones, etc. The metaverse editor can lower the development barrier, and reduce development costs significantly.
In Inke's "full view karaoke" product, ZEGOCLOUD provides real-time voice and video, 3D spatial voice, 3D avatar, 3D metaverse, ultralow latency online karaoke, and copyrighted music repository. All these abilities empower Inke's "full view karaoke" product, upgrading the immersive user experience to an unparalleled level that has never been seen before.
If you would like to build a metaverse karaoke product like Inke's, and want to know more about it, please come signup or contact us for consultation.
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