With the popularity of web3.0 abroad and the introduction of Metaverse products by more and more domestic and foreign technology giants, China’s virtual digital human industry has shifted from conceptual level to industrial-level application. In October 2021, the virtual beauty expert “Liu Yexi” pushed the virtual digital person to more ordinary users; just a few days ago, Baidu’s AI digital person “Xi Jiajia” became the first virtual spokesperson of McDonald’s, once again Spark industry and user discussions.
Recently, Internet Weekly released the “2021 Virtual Digital Human Enterprise Ranking TOP50” list. Baidu ranked first in the comprehensive strength of China’s digital human industry by virtue of the CCTV virtual anchor and the Winter Olympic sign language digital human anchor. Tianya Henian, the production company of Alibaba and Luo Tianyi, ranked second and third respectively.
Industry experts said that with the development of AI technology and the emergence of digital human production platforms such as Baidu’s “Xiling”, the 2D digital human that took a week to make can now be shortened to the minute level; it used to take two or three months to make The 3D hyper-realistic digital people can now be compressed to a week or two. In the next two years, the production cost of digital human is expected to be reduced from one million to ten thousand yuan, and everyone is expected to achieve “digital human freedom”.
It is understood that the “2021 Virtual Digital Human Enterprise Ranking TOP50” list counts a variety of virtual digital human forms including virtual anchors, virtual employees, virtual idols, hyper-realistic digital humans, etc., and compares 50 participating companies in the industry. Several factors such as virtual image IP influence and main business scope have made a comprehensive ranking of the above companies.
In fact, virtual digital humans have been around for the past few years. The earliest well-known virtual digital human is Hatsune Miku, who was “born” in 2007, and a song “Song of Onion” became popular in Asia; in 2012, Luo Tianyi debuted as a virtual online singer and released a number of national style songs. In 2021 In 2020, Lehua Entertainment created A-SOUL, positioning itself as the first virtual idol girl group in China, attracting Fang Wenshan to write lyrics and Xu Song to compose music; in May 2021, it will be the first one to debut with a beautiful appearance. AYAYI, an ultra-realistic digital figure, has become popular on social platforms with just one personal image, with over 100,000 likes on the first post, and has cooperated with international brands such as LV and Guerlain; in October 2021, Liu Yexi released the first video It will increase by one million fans and be on the hot search; in 2022, Xigaga, as the first virtual idol to achieve AIGC, can not only paint and compose music with AI, but also talk to Mayer Musk and win the “endorsement” of McDonald’s …
In addition to the explosion of virtual idols, the application of digital people has penetrated into the field of intelligent anchors and intelligent customer service.
PK Zhu Guangquan, the virtual anchor of the Winter Olympics sign language cooperation between CCTV and Baidu Smart Cloud
During the Winter Olympics, a video of Zhu Guangquan and the sign language anchor online pk became popular. This is the first AI sign language anchor created by Baidu Smart Cloud. She provided 24-hour sign language services to tens of millions of hearing-impaired users in the ice and snow events. , so that they can also quickly obtain event information; China Mobile’s Winter Olympics athlete Gu Ailing’s digital avatar “Meet Gu” also exploded during the event. In addition, virtual digital employees have joined many companies, such as China Unicom customer service Xiao U created by Baidu and Xiaopu of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank.
In 2022, the State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China, released the “China Virtual Digital Human Influence Index Report”, showing that China’s virtual digital human can be divided into three categories in terms of applications: identity type (real person virtual avatar), service Type (virtual employee), performance type (virtual idol). China’s virtual digital human industry has ushered in an explosive period.
The “Report” pointed out that policy support, the improvement of the industrial chain, the growth of the user population, and the pursuit of capital, these four factors are accelerating the further development of the virtual digital human industry. This has also brought several major trends in the virtual digital human industry. First, the number of landing scenarios has gradually increased, second, the types of digital humans have become more subdivided, and the third is the increase in the level of intelligence of digital humans.
Reducing digital human production and content production costs is key
In the face of the explosion of the industry, Li Shiyan, head of Baidu Intelligent Cloud AI Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, said that there are three major problems for domestic digital people to implement large-scale industries.
First of all, each node of the digital human industry chain is relatively fragmented and cannot be efficiently coordinated, resulting in high barriers to digital human production and tuning. At present, most companies in the industry are only a part or a few of the entire process of digital human production and operation. ring. Secondly, the service scene and the performing arts scene are not effectively connected, which means that the performing arts digital people do not have the business capabilities required by customers, and the service digital people lack personality, making it difficult to communicate emotionally with users. The third is that the cost of digital humans to meet high mobility and high-frequency needs is still very high. In the final analysis, this problem is still the production efficiency of digital humans.
Facing the current high threshold of digital human production, in December 2021, Baidu released the intelligent digital human platform “Baidu Smart Yunxiling”. This is a platform-level product that integrates digital human production, content creation, and business configuration services. It has four major AI engines, and realizes digital human listening and listening through portrait-driven engine, natural dialogue engine, voice interaction engine, and intelligent recommendation engine. Said to be able to understand and interact. It is understood that the Xiling platform can provide one-stop creation and operation services for virtual hosts, virtual employees, virtual idols, and brand spokespersons for industries such as radio and television, interactive entertainment, finance, government affairs, operators, and retail.
The Baidu AI digital human “Xijiajia” based on the Xiling platform will debut in February 2022. She is a virtual idol created by AI. She not only has the ability to express language, facial expressions and body movements, but also can talk and Action, and more importantly, it can perform autonomous learning and iteration, and can also create and quickly generate content based on AI capabilities.
On the other hand, the commercialization ability of virtual digital human becomes more and more important as the landing scene becomes more and more abundant. According to the iiMedia Research report, the virtual idol industry maintains a steady growth trend. In 2021, the overall market size and core market size driven by virtual idols will be 107.49 billion yuan and 6.22 billion yuan respectively. It is expected to reach 186.61 billion yuan and 12.08 billion yuan in 2022. .
In order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, commercialization capabilities require technological innovation in both digital human production and content production. Wu Tian, vice president of Baidu Group, mentioned in a recent guest appearance on CCTV’s “Dialogue” program, “Baidu hopes to shorten the production cycle of virtual humans to the hour level through leading full-stack AI capabilities, reduce production costs, and use AI to drive content generation. “In short, Baidu can use AI technology to achieve high-quality, batch, and low-cost production of virtual digital humans, and maximize cost reduction and efficiency.
Baidu said that Baidu Smart Yunxiling, on the one hand, allows more and more digital people to enter the platform to evenly share the initial investment cost; The high threshold and high investment have really come down. For example, as long as a user uploads a photo on the Xiling platform, they can quickly generate a 2D digital portrait that can be driven by AI. The 2D digital human that took a week to make can now be shortened to the minute level; it used to take two or three 3D hyper-realistic digital people with monthly production time can now be compressed to a week or two.
Baidu’s family of performing digital people and service-oriented digital people
“Our goal in the past two years is to let everyone realize the freedom of digital people through the opening of Baidu’s intelligent Yunxiling platform.” Li Shiyan said.Return to Sohu, see more