Cover reporter Fu Wenchao
With the popularity of web 3.0 abroad, and more and more domestic and foreign technology giants launching Metaverse products, China’s virtual digital human industry has shifted from conceptual level to industrial-level application. Recently, Internet Weekly released the “2021 Virtual Digital Human Enterprise Ranking TOP50” list, and Baidu ranked first in the comprehensive strength of China’s digital human industry. Tianya Henian, the production company of Alibaba and Luo Tianyi, ranked second and third respectively.
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 enterprises.
In fact, virtual digital humans have been around for the past few years. The earliest well-known virtual digital person 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 songs; 2020 In 2020, Lehua Entertainment created A-SOUL, which is positioned as the first virtual idol girl group in China, attracting Fang Wenshan to write lyrics and Xu Song to compose music; in October 2021, Liu Yexi released the first video and gained millions of followers and appeared on the list Hot search; in 2022, as the first virtual idol to achieve AIGC, Xigaga can not only paint with AI, 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. 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 the four factors of policy blessing, industrial chain improvement, user population growth, and capital pursuit 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.
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”.
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