Reporter Zhang Zhiwei trainee reporter Zhang Bo
In 2021, the metacosm has ushered in its own first year of development. With the popularity of the metaverse concept, the virtual digital person shines into reality early.
As an important application industry of the virtual reality industry, one of the seven key industries of the digital economy in the next five years, virtual people will undoubtedly show their powerful circle-breaking power with the rise of idol culture and live broadcast culture. According to qubit research data, the current virtual digital person market size has exceeded 200 billion yuan, is expected to reach 270 billion yuan in 2030, of which identity virtual people will occupy a dominant position in the future development of about 175 billion yuan, service-oriented virtual digital people are relatively stable development, the total scale will also exceed 95 billion yuan. According to Research AndMarkets data, the global virtual event market is expected to reach $504.76 billion (about 3,270.744 billion yuan) by 2028.
In 2021, virtual digital people usher in a superfluous wave: Liu Yexi, who can "catch demons", Hua Zhibing, a Tsinghua student who can sing, draw and play the piano. This summer, Stanford University offered a course for the "metaverse, VirtualPeople." The 263 students who chose this course spent more than 200,000 minutes together in the Metacosm. The bell of 2022 is about to ring, and the work of 2021 is coming to an end, let's take stock of the virtual digital people who will "survive in the cloud" with us in the future!
One: Yoo Ye-hee: A virtual beauty artist who can "catch a demon"
(Source: Graphics and text released by Douyin "Liu Yexi")
On October 31, the virtual digital person "Liu Yexi" exploded on the network, the first video released triggered a heated discussion among netizens, the texture of the movie, the style of cyberpunk, the suspenseful and thrilling plot aroused the user's infinite reverie, at the same time, keyword tags such as "metaverse" and "virtual digital person" are also very topical, bringing these concepts into the vision of more people.
Up to now, "Liu Yexi" has received nearly 18 million likes after only 4 videos, and the number of fans has exceeded 8 million. It can be said that it is the "ceiling" of the current metaverse video creation, YYDS!
It is worth mentioning that the core of "Liu Yexi" is based on the image of a virtual person, with beauty as the entry point, plus Elements of Chinese style to show traditional Chinese culture. Liang Zikang, co-founder and CEO of Chuangyi, a behind-the-scenes IP incubator, said in an interview with the media that "Liu Yexi" is one of the "Chinese-style Marvel" characters they have created, and it is expected that a total of 10 virtual characters will all be online within two years. On November 27, Chuangyi launched a new virtual person Yukatana, the label is still meta-universe, but the positioning is different from Liu Yexi's beauty master.
Two: Digital Man AYAYI: A virtual KOL who shuttles between real people
(Source: AYAYI posted on the Little Red Book App)
"Is my sister a real person?" This is the question of countless people after seeing this picture. On May 20, the virtual digital person AYAYI began to operate and publish pictures on various social platforms. Soon, this "personal image picture" with light and shadow quickly became popular. So far, this picture of AYAYI has received more than 100,000 likes and 14,000 collections on the Little Red Book.
Some people say that AYAYI has the beauty of breaking through the boundaries of virtual reality, which is attracting Generation Z young people. The data shows that 70% of AYAYI's fans come from young people aged 17-23.
After its debut, AYAYI has quickly become a virtual KOL that shuttles between real people. AYAYI has reached cooperation with brands such as Guerlain, Porsche, and Ammusi, and has also entered Ali as a "digital employee" and become the digital manager of Tmall Super Brand Day.
As the first Metahuman "product" launched by Burning Wheat Technology, the emergence of AYAYI fills the gap in this field in China, as a sufficiently realistic image created by the Unreal engine, the application space and business prospects are worth looking forward to.
Three: Hua Zhibing, a virtual college student who can play the piano, is studying at Tsinghua University?
(Source: Screenshot of the introduction video sent by Tsinghua University on Station B)
Hua Zhibing is a special freshman in the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, the first original virtual student in China, jointly trained by the Tsinghua Department of Computer Science, Beijing Zhiyuan Research Institute, Zhipu AI and Xiaoice.
In June this year, a video about huazhibing was released, which attracted public attention. In the video, Hua Zhibing is portrayed as a beautiful girl with a ponytail, a red backpack and whiteboard shoes. However, this is not huazhibing's appearance, the research and development team explained that the scene in the video is a real simulation, and the NARRATION, background music, face, poetry and paintings of AI student Hua Zhibing are all generated based on AI technology.
Hua Zhibing not only knows four dance styles, can adjust the movement according to the rapid and slow movement of the music, but also can compose poems according to a certain word, and can create a painting according to certain keywords, and even write some short articles. As a virtual digital person, Hua Zhibing has continuous learning ability, can gradually "grow" and constantly "learn" the patterns implied in the data, just like humans can constantly learn behavioral patterns from the things they experience around them.
Four: Three "Ding Lei" "same field" for the NetEase cloud listing bell?
What new tricks can be completed in the company's listing ceremony? At the beginning of December, in the listing ceremony of NetEase Cloud Music, three Ding Lei appeared at the same time to ring the bell together. The so-called three "Ding Lei", one is Ding Lei himself who knocks on the gong at the offline ceremony, and the other two are virtual digital people "Ding Lei", who are portrayed as 29-year-old Ding Lei in 2000 and Ding Lei, 50 years old in 2021.
NetEase Cloud Music held the world's first "meta-universe" listing ceremony through the NetEase Fuxi immersive activity system "Yaotai", reproducing the offline vinyl check-in, major event wall, musician wall and other arrangements, and the participants can create a "digital twin" to enter the virtual auditorium for viewing the ceremony, and can also interact with two "Ding Lei".
In fact, NetEase's layout of the meta-universe moves very quickly, on December 21, NetEase held the world's first "meta-universe" investor conference; on December 25, NetEase signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Sanya Municipal Government, netease will build a NetEase meta-universe industrial base project.
Five: Huang Jen-hoon digital stand-in: "14 seconds" shining debut "deceived the world"
In August, according to a number of media reports, NVIDIA held the GTC online summit in April, and the video speech of NVIDIA CEO Huang Jenxun was not a real person, but a synthetic "digital stand-in". Because the image of Huang Jenxun in the video is too realistic, the news immediately caused a hot discussion on the Internet, and the topic of "Huang Jenxun deceived the world" was also once on the hot search.
However, Nvidia responded that the keynote speech was a total of 1 hour and 48 minutes, and the virtual person appeared for 14 seconds from 1:02:41 to 1:02:55, and the other parts were all live speeches. "To be sure, without a single flesh-and-blood person at the center, it would be impossible to have a keynote speech."
In November this year, NVIDIA released three virtual digital people to fully lay out the "meta-universe". The first is the "mini toy version of Huang Jen-hoon" Toy-Me, at the press conference, Huang Jen-hoon asked the avatar to answer difficult questions about climate change, astronomy and biological proteins, and he answered them like a stream; the second was a cute "eggshell man" image, which talked to a couple through the terminal of the fast food restaurant and understood the needs of the two people who ordered vegetarian burgers, fries and drinks; the third virtual person was upgraded again, applied in the conference software, which can be used as a digital stand-in with a realistic animation avatar.
Six: Popular star Gong Jun: stunning singing and dancing Jay Chou's "Nocturne"
"Popular stars" also give us voice assistants? In August, at the 2021 Baidu World Congress, Gong Jun made his digital debut and sang Jay Chou's "Nocturne" in amazement. On November 29, Gong Jun Digital People was officially launched.
From a technical point of view, Gong Jun digital people are at the leading level of the industry. In terms of appearance, Baidu has introduced 4D scanning technology to capture the subtle changes in the face of real people talking and daily expressions, so as to achieve a hyper-realistic restoration of Gong Junzhen. In terms of voice interaction, the recognition accuracy rate of Baidu App voice search has reached 98%, and it can also recognize various voice dialogues such as mixed Chinese and English, strange words, and dialects. Relying on TTS technology, Gong Jun's digital people are infinitely close to the original sound through the sound synthesized by AI, creating a sense of care and immersion for users.
Gong Jun's "digital people" have been there, will your "love beans" digital people be far away in the future?
Seven: The world's first digital astronaut and Xinhua News Agency's digital reporter Xiao Yi: Started to report on the news
(Source: Screenshot of the video released by Xinhua News Agency)
On June 17, the launch of the Shenzhou 12 manned spacecraft was a complete success, and at the same time, we also met the world's first digital astronaut and a digital reporter of Xinhua News Agency.
Jointly created by Tencent Interactive Entertainment NExTStudios and Xinhua News Agency, its main responsibility is to carry out news coverage for major Chinese aerospace projects such as manned space engineering, lunar exploration engineering, and deep space exploration engineering, and to carry out space science popularization and other work.
Since then, we have had a bond with the universe to transmit extraterrestrial information. Xu Shanna, director of the State Key Laboratory of Media Fusion Production Technology and System of Xinhua News Agency, chairman and president of Xinhua Rong Media Company, publicly stated that XiaoYi is not only a virtual idol of mainstream values, but also represents the exploration of the future. "In the context of the popularity of digital people and virtual idols, we hope to use the ultra-realistic digital image of XiaoYi to connect more young people and transmit more positive energy."
Eight: Technology has a temperature, AI sign language anchors will accompany you to watch the Winter Olympics
"Let's use technology to cross the barrier of sound" is the original intention of CCTV News and Baidu Intelligent Cloud to launch the first AI sign language anchor in November.
As a special group, people with hearing impairments cannot learn about the progress of the game through voice commentary on television. CCTV News AI sign language anchors can not only report the news of the Winter Olympics, but also provide professional and accurate sign language commentary for audiences and friends, which will be applied to the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, news broadcasts, live broadcasts and on-site interviews during the Winter Olympics.
Not only that, starting from the Beijing Winter Olympics, AI anchors will also use AI wisdom to provide sign language services for hearing-impaired users throughout the year, so that hearing-impaired people can quickly obtain competition information. Technology has a temperature, and virtual digital people will accompany the hearing impaired.
Nine: Singer "Ai Ling": "Golden Egg" under Tencent AILab
On June 1, Tencent digital person "Ai Ling" officially announced his debut. "AiLing" was born from Tencent AILab's experimental exploratory technology project - AI Digital People.
Ai Ling can not only compose lyrics, but also sing with an almost real voice, coupled with a digital body built with multi-modal intelligence technology, it is definitely an all-round virtual singer. Tencent AILab experts said that Ai Ling does not need manual tuning, she is behind the song synthesis engine based on deep neural network AI technology, in the degree of naturalness and realism, can surpass the engine based on traditional tuning tools.
In addition, Ai Ling can also generate game commentary with the help of the King of Glory game commentary generated by Tencent AILab, and then generate lively commentary in real time through speech synthesis.
10: Jiangsu Satellite TV's "2060" program evangelistic virtual image
(Screenshot of "2060" program)
On December 24, Jiangsu Satellite TV launched the "2060" program
"2060" is a show for young people, with virtual digital people and animated IP images as the protagonists of the draft, and stage competitions. In the program, the top animation team from all over the country brought 26 animation images to the stage to fully popularize the concept of virtual images to the audience and the people.
From this, we can glimpse the development of the domestic virtual idol track, and the maturity of various science and technology allows the avatars to perform and interact on the stage vividly, but it needs to be further improved in the creation and operation of the virtual image.
The show is over, but the story of virtual life is far from over. Virtual digital people are emerging like a tide, and the field of application is constantly expanding, which will ultimately benefit us humans.
(Edited by Sun Qian)