Founder Park Interview Series: Homegrown 3D, Physics Engines, and Industrial AI Seek New Opportunities

While the metaverse was gaining strong momentum, the 3D content gap in virtual worlds urgently needed to be filled. Chinese company Zesen Kegong is targeting a new generative logic for 3D content, developing its own software ZENO, emphasizing 'procedural' and 'full-pipeline' approaches, and participated in the primordial spirit VFX production for some characters in the Chinese animated film 'New Gods: Yang Jian.' ^[1]

Zhang Xinxin, founder and CEO of Zesen Kegong, once worked at Pixar. He believes that the real barrier is not the technology one possesses, but the experience and process accumulated from going deep into one thing and continuously discovering and solving problems. ^[1]

Entrepreneurial opportunities in physics engines and motion engines are also emerging. Cui Hanqing, founder and CEO of Motphys, points out that PhysX, Havok, and Bullet are the three most widely used physics engines globally, respectively owned by NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the AMD open-source initiative; Unity and Unreal mostly integrate them. ^[2] In his view, 'data-driven motion' and 'rule-driven motion' can encompass all motion in the virtual world, while demand for improved game quality, cloud gaming, and more realistic virtual worlds brings new business opportunities for physics engines and motion engines. ^[2]

Motphys hopes to use one engine to drive all motion in ultra-large-scale virtual worlds, and its products have already been deployed in real-time simulation-related fields such as the metaverse and digital humans. ^[2]

In manufacturing, Zhang Zhiqi, CEO of Weiyi Intelligent Manufacturing and Zhiyun Tiangong, believes that consumer-side digitalization gave rise to companies such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Meituan, but no true giants have emerged on the production side, and quality inspection has become a major digitalization breakpoint. ^[4] For small and medium-sized manufacturers with many SKUs and relatively short production cycles, the labor cost consumed by quality inspection is close to RMB 140 billion; Zhiyun Tiangong's 'super virtual factory' aims to solve production-side digitalization problems, while Weiyi Intelligent Manufacturing focuses on 'industrial AI + machine vision,' using quality inspection as its entry point. ^[4]

In 2022, Founder Park held 57 livestreams and interviewed more than 60 founders and investors, covering emerging technology industries such as commercial spaceflight, quantum computing, intelligent driving, synthetic biology, SaaS, Web3, and the metaverse. ^[3] In a founder reading list compiled before the Spring Festival, Zhang Xinxin, founder and CEO of Zesen Kegong, recommended 'The Pixar Touch.' ^[3]