Fang Ziqing's family background was not wealthy; she was just a girl from an ordinary family. Although she was already a high-level executive at Sun and Moon Technology Company with a monthly salary of over ten thousand, she did not have a habit of spending lavishly. After realizing how much Feng Jun had spent on her, she felt as if she had made a mistake.
It wasn't until they walked into a restaurant and sat down that Fang Ziqing recovered from her initial shock.
"Have you always spent money like this?" Fang Ziqing asked. It felt good to have someone spend money on her, but the feeling came so suddenly that she was slightly unaccustomed to it.
"Not at all. Before, I was just an ordinary worker, the kind who earned three thousand yuan a month. I didn't even dare to look at luxury goods." Feng Jun casually ordered a few dishes, then handed the menu to Fang Ziqing. "Order whatever you like."
Fang Ziqing's heart was pounding at this moment. Although she had met Feng Jun through a blind date before the New Year, she hadn't decided to pursue a relationship with him. Especially after the significant success of the smart pet's launch, as a company executive, she naturally knew Feng Jun's current worth and status. While she yearned for those Mary Sue-style domineering CEO novels, Fang Ziqing understood that some things were beyond her control, and if handled poorly, she might even lose her current job.
Feng Jun, however, had different ideas. He treated this as a normal romance. Although he already had Li Lu and the others in the Doomsday, he didn't have a girlfriend in reality. His parents' wishes were one aspect, and besides, they were two different worlds. Feng Jun also needed to find a partner in reality to fulfill the matter of marriage.
The food was served quickly, and the two began to chat while eating. Fang Ziqing was naturally very curious about Feng Jun, especially regarding the creation of the smart pet.
"Are the company's products, those smart pets, cats, and dogs, and the program design all done by you?" Fang Ziqing asked.
"How could that be? I have a professional team for research and development, design, and programming. I'm just a porter who stands at the forefront and sheds blood and sweat," Feng Jun said.
Fang Ziqing herself loved small animals. After the official release, she bought a cat set for herself, which was a large orange cat with yellow and white fur. As a personal user of the product, the two naturally had more to talk about when discussing it.
"Buying the smart pet cost me 3999 yuan, but it was truly worth every penny. Besides being able to play with me at home, the cat's eyes also have a camera function, and the shooting angles are great. I don't even use my phone to take pictures anymore," Fang Ziqing said, sharing some of her recent photos with Feng Jun.
"Don't tell me, they're really beautiful. Did you take all of these with your smart pet?" Feng Jun looked at the photos on Fang Ziqing's phone. There were landscape shots and personal photos, and the lighting effects in every single one were almost maximized, with excellent detail capture.
"Yes, that's right. There are already many bloggers online researching this. It's said that the smart pet's imaging specifications are comparable to some cameras costing forty or fifty thousand yuan. Let me find it for you to see," Fang Ziqing said.
Soon, Fang Ziqing opened a mobile app and shared some articles and videos from it with Feng Jun. Feng Jun took a quick look. After the explosion of popularity in the past few days, some bloggers had discovered an even more incredible function of the smart pet: its camera capabilities surpassed those of an SLR.
After opening a video, Feng Jun saw that this blogger was originally a digital photography enthusiast. He collected everything from Leica cameras costing tens of thousands to Hasselblad cameras costing hundreds of thousands, and he spared no expense on various lenses. However, in the past few days, he discovered that the photos taken by his Leica M-A camera were not even as good in terms of pixel quality as those taken by the eyes of the newly purchased smart pet dog. And that camera alone cost him forty-nine thousand, not including the lenses and other equipment he bought.
The smart pet itself is equipped with photosensitive elements and imaging lenses that Feng Jun brought back from the Doomsday. These components form the eye part of the smart cats and dogs, using a neural-like optical crystal structure, and combined with software imaging algorithms, they can take photos with 60 to 70 million pixels. However, Feng Jun did not treat this as the core selling point of the smart pet; he merely built a photo function into the app bound to the phone.
When the owner gives a photo command, the smart pet will choose an angle and take a picture with its eyes, then transmit the taken photo to the phone via the network. Moreover, this function was not placed on the homepage of the software, but only in an inconspicuous corner. This function did not receive much attention at first; people were more focused on the intelligence and interactivity of the smart pet itself.
The photography circle is inherently a niche community, mainly because the entry cost is relatively high. A set of high-end camera equipment can almost be comparable to a car, and there is also a hierarchy of disdain among different classes. It can generally be divided into Hasselblad > Leica > Zeiss > Sony > Canon > Nikon > Fujifilm, and so on.
The photography blogger who discovered this immediately felt that something was amiss. For this, he specifically contacted several friends, brought various equipment and a smart pet dog to the wild for a photography comparison. The results they obtained were heartbreaking: the 2999 yuan smart pet dog produced photo quality that was completely comparable to the effect of an SLR camera costing up to fifty thousand yuan. This was even after comparing it with Leica and Hasselblad; for second and third-tier small brands, it was essentially a dimensionality reduction strike.
As soon as this video was released, it caused a stir in the photography circle, leaving countless SLR enthusiasts sleepless. Some even directly listed their cameras on second-hand websites at a loss.
"You, who make smart pets, actually got involved in the photography circle?"
"2024 New Year's Big Scoop: It's not a phone that's killing SLRs, it's smart cats and dogs!"
"Boyfriends who can't take pictures are no longer a problem; you can confidently leave it to your smart pet."
Countless headlines like these swept through the photography circle.
Feng Jun watched for a long time before realizing that he might have inadvertently overturned the photography circle. At that time, he chose smart pets as his first card because this track was relatively niche, but it was still part of the tech circle, albeit on the periphery. He didn't expect to immediately overturn the tables in both the AI and digital photography sectors.
Using chips worth a few hundred yuan to create high-end AI, and using smart pets worth a few thousand yuan to do SLR photography. Feng Jun had already become the best "involution king" of the year.
Fang Ziqing said, "This feature is too practical, yet you didn't tell us. We didn't even promote it after the release; users discovered it themselves."
"I intended to give users a little benefit, just to build up a good reputation for future products," Feng Jun said.