Author / Little Lotus
In 2002, in the movie "Simone", because he could not find a suitable heroine, the male protagonist, with the help of a talented programmer, created a virtual person "Simone" that everyone loved.
There is a line in Simone that reads: "Our ability to falsify has exceeded our ability to distinguish between true and false things." In 2021, more and more virtual idols live on the Internet like real people, and more and more big factories announce the world - we also have virtual idols.
iQiyi launched the trend virtual idol label "rich boom", Lehua created a virtual idol girl group "a-soul", Watsons launched "Qu Chenxi", ASUS launched "Tianxuan Ji", and even the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University has its own virtual idol - artificial intelligence (ai) virtual person "Hua Zhibing".
Collectively referred to as "virtual idols", which rely on digital technology to generate, there is also a clearly defined distinction between virtual characters that do not exist in reality. The first is the virtual singer represented by Hatsune Mirai and Luo Tianyi, although it has a virtual role, it is essentially a kind of music virtual synthesis software; the other is a virtual anchor represented by Lehua's a-soul girl group, which is a virtual role played by "middle people" under the influence of the two-dimensional culture is gradually forming its own culture; and it is easier to identify anthropomorphic virtual people, although they have a similar appearance to real people, but they are mainly digital people created by artificial intelligence technology.
Based on Baidu Encyclopedia's explanation of the term "virtual idol", this article refers to virtual anchors, digital people, and virtual singers, which rely on computer digital technology, as virtual cultural products.
What is certain is that the current "virtual idol" track is showing an unprecedented boom.
A high-tech product of "old-fashioned"
Thanks to the "spectacle" brought about by the "combination of virtual and real", people always have a sense of novelty when watching virtual idols. But in reality, aside from the visual effects progress brought about by technological breakthroughs, the operating model of virtual idols is essentially very traditional. For the universal virtual idols on the market, daily fan sucking is mainly through the joint operation with the virtual anchor "middle person", or the content creator behind the digital person, through daily live broadcast or corresponding content output, stabilize the virtual idol's personality, so as to attract more people to love.
Since there is still no mainstream favorite virtual idol on the market, most of the official announcements of virtual idols are a microblog, a video, with a press release, and the small idols affiliated with large companies are in line with reality. Putting out a song or two, streaming it live, attending an event, or intermittently updating a video on social networks is no different from any influencer or idol on the market, except for its appearance.
Similar to the birth of most "virtual idols", the birth of Disney's hottest female star "Lingna Belle" was also sudden last month. As a "new friend of Duffy" without any story support, a short stop-motion animation, a simple dance step, Lingna Belle suddenly joined the Disney family.
Also not a real-life character, Lingna Belle relies on the "appearance" made of doll clothes, coupled with the staff who perform in the doll costume, to give "LingNa Belle" a character personality. The actor does not have to make a sound, relying on only a few actions, the yuanqi little explorer really "lived" in Disneyland, and immediately became a hot search regular, the surrounding hot selling to the end of the stock, and even the scalper claimed to have to be supplied to buy.
Also relying on the people behind the character to supplement the human design, through interaction, to achieve the way of co-creating the role with the fans, there is a great similarity with the "virtual idol", but the "virtual idol" park is on the Internet, and the "Disneyland" also needs to be uploaded to the Internet through fan shooting, in order to be seen by more people.
Despite not having a story of its own, with Disney escorts, everything seems to make sense. But for the "virtual idols" born from the digital world, it is not easy to cross the wall of virtual and reality like "Chuansha Daji" and "survive" in reality.
Technology is one of the barriers, because modeling "social death", wearing a mold when acting, Caton and other reasons will make people quickly get out of the virtual world, in the 3D modeling technology and computing power is not developed enough mature, the early birth of virtual idols are quickly sunk into the Internet sea.
The high cost of operation and maintenance also makes the virtual idol disappear quickly once it loses its heat. Hertz, a virtual singer who once reached the final of "Children of Tomorrow", also became a topic of conversation, but once it left the support of capital, it became a thing of the past.
Degradation of content farms
It's not that there are no myths that belong to virtual idols.
In 2007, Hatsune Mirai was born. Originally just a library of sound sources developed by music software company Crypton, in order to expand sales, Crypton set Hatsune Mirai as a young girl with green hair and a double ponytail.
The strategy was successful, and within three months of its release, More than 25,000 sets of Hatsune Mirai Sound Library were sold. Crypton's market share also soared from 6% to 27.6%. What's even more wonderful is that at the golden age of the development of Japanese fandom culture, Niconico Animation, a well-known animation barrage website in Japan, and pixiv, a fan-creation website, were launched, and many people uploaded cover songs produced by Hatsune Mirai, and a large number of painters began to create Fan paintings of Hatsune Mirai.
As a sound source library, the main thing that supports hatsune's future longevity is the continuous birth of the Divine Comedy. Compared with live singers, it is cheaper to use Hatsune Mirai to make music, which nourishes the dreams of some amateur musicians, and also gives birth to works with wide singing and many covers, such as "Sengan Sakura" and "Girl in the Deep Sea", realizing role co-creation in another sense.
But in the end, virtual Singer is still a highly procedural product. Similar to the current AI anchor, although its own miracle was born in the right place, for virtual idols, this success is not replicable.
Compared with hatsune's future starting point, that is, the peak, the domestic well-known virtual song Ji Luo Tianyi, which was born in 2012, did not achieve profitability until 2017.
Unlike virtual singers, virtual anchors or virtual people do not have the ability to produce high-quality content for a long time. Anthropomorphic virtual people who are highly dependent on creators, have high costs of content creation, long production cycles, and are easily forgotten in the high-speed Internet society. At the same time, the team that produces virtual people is mainly based on technological breakthroughs, and the quality of content still cannot reach the ability to compete with other types of content, and its biggest competitiveness is still the gimmick of "virtual people".
Virtual anchors who rely on long-term live broadcast fans are more difficult to break through from the existing fan base. Due to the greater reliance on the personal business ability and charm of the "middle man", the virtual anchors as a whole showed an uneven development, and the members of Lehua's virtual idol group a-soul had set a record of 1.25 million yuan in single-day live broadcast revenue, but more virtual anchors were still tepid.
Fundamentally, the virtual idols that were originally the products of content have been fully degraded in the content field, making it difficult for myths to be achieved.
Due to the excessive emphasis on the "sense of interaction", the virtual idol represented by the virtual anchor eventually becomes a subculture of the small circle of self-hi, and the new memes and black words that are constantly updated with the live broadcast also make the circle of the virtual anchor more limited. The virtual people who attach too much importance to "technology to restore real people" have received new technical restrictions, and the production cost of real-time feedback under the current technology is still high, so they have to live in the Internet world as ordinary "internet celebrities" in the form of short videos or picture updates.
As a representative culture of the "meta-universe", the development of virtual idols is inseparable from the power of capital, but at present, it seems that virtual idols that are still limited in technology are still new minerals to be developed, and the anxious end of various large factories is not so much a optimism about this track as a kind of tentative and advance layout.
From the perspective of the content field of virtual idols, in the absence of an innovative operating model, it is difficult to surpass the myths of predecessors by relying only on the creation of existing idols or IPs to create virtual idols. Given that virtual idols are highly dependent on the development of technology industry, with another innovation of technology, the next round of "hot" will soon be pulled, and at the moment when capital is optimistic about the meta-universe, it may not be far away from us.