Ding Lei analyzes Netease's VR layout: VR games or live broadcasts and education launched during the year will add VR elements

August 18 news, after Netease just announced its second quarter financial report ending June 30, 2016 today, Netease CEO Ding Lei accepted an analyst earnings conference call. In answering questions from analysts, Ding Lei exposed many of Netease's ideas and progress in deploying VR. For example, it has invested in NextVR, a U.S. VR live broadcast startup. For example, Netease's AR games will be launched "without waiting until next year".

Original title: What investments Netease has made in VR? Ding Lei revealed this information

on August 18. Today, after Netease just announced its second quarter financial report ending June 30, 2016, Netease CEO Ding Lei accepted the analyst's earnings conference call.

In answering questions from analysts, Ding Lei exposed many of Netease's ideas and progress in deploying VR. For example, it has invested in NextVR, a U.S. VR live broadcast startup. For example, Netease's AR games will be launched "without waiting until next year".

Let's take a look at the core content:

Investing in NextVR

In response to questions from Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Eddie Leung about the VR layout, Ding Lei said that Netease attaches great importance to the development of VR/AR. The company invested in NextVR in the United States last quarter. This company specializes in conducting live broadcasts.

At the same time, in terms of AR, Netease is also very careful and has tried to consider applying AR to the best in different games. At the same time, I also noticed the popularity of Pokémon GO in the West, but I also looked at whether this kind of innovation model can be sustained.

Ding Lei said that in short, Netease will not lag behind in VR/AR, because in the past five years, the company's mobile games have been far ahead in the market. It is because the company has made sufficient preparations since 2009, and in the next period of time, we have achieved today's results by exploring and innovating. In the VR/AR field, Netease started earlier than any competitor and invested the most money.

In addition, he also mentioned,"We are also the only partner of Google's VR platform Daydream in China, so the company has very close and even strategic cooperation with the world's best VR hardware companies, platform companies and content companies." I don't know if this is just a slap sentence, because Huawei, Asus and other companies have also stated that they are DayDream's first partners.

Will VR games be launched within the year?

In response to a question from Nomura Securities analyst Jialong Shi about Netease's first VR/AR game, Ding Lei said that the company has developed VR/AR games and is testing them, but VR will be a little later, not that we have not developed well, but because there are still very few VR devices on the market at present, we hope (the hardware market) can mature a little before we release the product.

The same is true for AR, but it may come out a little faster. As for how fast it will be, Ding Lei said,"I don't think we have to wait until next year."

Live broadcasting and education will add VR elements

. When answering Tianhao Capital analyst Hou Xiaotian's questions about the application of live broadcasting in e-commerce, entertainment, news and other fields, Ding Lei said that Netease is a pioneer in this field and has started doing live broadcasting four years ago. Netease has three live broadcast platforms. One is Netease CC live broadcasts related to games and e-sports, including live broadcasts of Dream Westward Journey, Hearthstone, etc.; the other is Netease BoBo, a live show broadcast launched two and a half years ago, including singing and talent performances.

At the same time, after the Spring Festival, Netease added live news to its news client. These are Netease's three live broadcast platforms. They are currently profitable and are not listed separately in the financial report, but the company attaches great importance to it.

Ding Lei believes that Netease's future innovation in the live broadcast business will mainly include VR live broadcast content, which is why the company invests in NextVR. Ding Lei believes that the next generation of live broadcasts should be immersive multi-dimensional VR live broadcasts. At the same time, we are very optimistic about education. Netease Open Classes and Netease Cloud Classes have achieved very impressive results in China. The company is developing Internet classrooms based on VR technology to allow everyone to have an immersive classroom experience.

Editor: Nancy