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Curiosity and exploration-the ladder of human progress.

On the last day of the 19th century, all the well-known physicists in the world gathered together to draw a perfect end to classical physics, so the topic at that time was how to eliminate the two dark clouds on the beautiful building of classical physics. The first of these two dark clouds is known in classical physics to have air in the earth's space, because sound is transmitted through the medium of air, so what medium exists in the universe that allows sunlight to shine through the vacuum of the earth? The second dark cloud is when people do experiments and find that the radiant energy is likely to be discontinuous.

As we all know, scientists put forward all kinds of seemingly absurd theories driven by curiosity, for example, Bohr put forward the shocking Bohr model, Schrodinger put forward the Schrodinger wave equation ...... Under the iteration and complementarity of the absurd theories, the first dark cloud gave birth to the theory of relativity, and the second dark cloud gave birth to quantum physics, which together overturned the perfect classical physics, it also built the current information age and digital age.

2021 is also an extraordinary year, although its weight is far less than the "two dark clouds", but under the fierce catalyst of the epidemic, artificial intelligence, cloud native and other digital technology integration of a variety of technologies, multiple industries, multiple products, is unprecedented penetration into medical, automatic driving, security and other aspects of the economy and society, so the near future is expected to land what is the trend of science and technology?

Recently, Tencent Technology Xiangshan Innovation Week released "Top Ten Frontier Application Trends of Digital Technology in 2022" (hereinafter referred to as "Report"). Through interviews with winners of scientific exploration awards in key fields and authoritative experts in the industry, it condensed out four major fields of IT remodeling, intelligent world, virtual-real symbiosis, network revolution, and ten frontier application trends of digital technology such as digital twin and quantum computing.

Digital technology is incarnating the new kinetic energy of the future
Before analyzing the report, it should be understood that the explosion of the application of digital technology as a new kinetic energy in the future is not a breakthrough in a single technology, but the result of the gradual increment and integration of various technologies. Just as Si Xiao, president of Tencent Research Institute, said in his keynote speech "offline-online-present" in "the night of science and technology for good": "the concept of yuan universe itself is a trend of gradual development of technology. Just like we said information superhighway 30 years ago and mobile Internet 10 years ago, it doesn't matter what the concept itself is called, it is just a huge pool of technology application and incubation, any single technological breakthrough or hype will not bring us into a new era instantly."

For example, in his speech, Si Xiao said that Tencent plans to build a new future headquarters-Penguin Island (informal name) on a peninsula in Dachan Bay, Shenzhen. On "Penguin Island", we may see Tencent Various accumulations and ideas in smart cities.

Si Xiao introduced that the design of "Penguin Island" was copied in a sandbox game. On the one hand, this digital twin reflects the application of AI, policy and other technologies accumulated by the game in architectural design and other scenarios. On the other hand, in this virtual simulation environment, it can verify the planning and design of a series of transportation, energy and other systems at a lower cost.

In fact, the digital twin mentioned earlier is also a concept pool that integrates multiple digital technologies. For example, a real smart city traffic control system is drawn up in the digital twin, so that buses can wait for red lights, automatically avoid, and wait for people to get on and off the bus just like in reality. Therefore, an automatic driving simulation system is introduced in the digital twin city, and this system is based on a game engine and continuously optimized through machine learning, let the vehicles in the game really perceive the surrounding environment, so as to maximize the restoration of real-life scenes.

Perhaps we have gradually entered a more intelligent "presence office" era. Before the mobile Internet, we worked offline. We needed to go to a real office for work, and we needed to communicate face-to-face or make phone calls or send emails. After the popularization of mobile Internet, the way of working is once again changing. Especially under the acceleration of the epidemic situation, people can work online based on online collaboration tools such as Tencent conference, Zoom and flying books. With the development of XR (mixed reality), perception interaction, virtual simulation and other technologies, the future of "present office" can be expected.

The era of presence is not far away. For example, Meta Company (formerly Facebook) recently released a VR virtual office program Horizon Workrooms. Users can enter this virtual office for interactive office using VR devices such as Oculus, as if they were working in a real office. With the development of XR and other technologies and haptic gloves and other hardware technologies, there will be more and more scenes in the future and the company from the online era to the presence era, that is, virtual and real symbiosis.

In his speech, Si Xiao also cited an example of a big brain hole-Mars immigrants. If human beings "Mars is present" in the future, before sending robots to Mars remotely to build a base, we may first realize the presence of "Mars" in the virtual world, that is, to build a hyper-real model of Mars to simulate various possible situations.

It can be seen that whether it is a smart city concept-Penguin Island, or the Mars immigrants of the sea of stars, they are based on the continuous evolution and integration of existing digital technologies, and they will not be because of a technological breakthrough. It will bring mankind into the "future" era. As Si Xiao mentioned in his speech: "The concepts of the meta-universe itself are a trend of gradual technological development, the technology required in this process may originate from the emergence and application of technologies in completely different fields, but the two application directions are not necessarily in conflict, and may even be interdependent."

Top 10 Digital Frontier Application Trends
As mentioned earlier, the realization process of the "future" new era is bound to be the emergence and application of technologies in different fields. In 2021, when the situation is treacherous, we can see the in-depth development of the application of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence in medical treatment, automatic driving, safety and other fields. Immersive media, digital virtual people and virtual-real integration have also opened the door to a full-real digital world, so in 2022, what will be the application trend of digital technology in the four fields of IT reshaping (cloud native, quantum computing, cloud security), intelligent world (artificial intelligence, complex robots, star-ground collaborative intelligence), virtual-real symbiosis (twins of all things, extended reality), and network revolution (cloud-network integration, energy Internet)?