Image source @ Visual China
Text | Yuanyi Capital
Over the past year, almost the entire industry has been claiming a relationship with the metacosm.
Just the "virtual people" known as the natives of the meta-universe, this subdivision track has already made geniuses excited and crazy. In the words of Feng Zheng, vice president of Shunwei Capital, "It is better to enter the virtual person industry early than to enter later, and it is better to enter with heavy money than to enter with understatement."
No one does not want to seize the opportunity, new players run to enter, giant companies flock to the market, investors sleep hard at night, ordinary people also begin to wear virtual hoods to make terriers carnival, no one wants to miss this rare new outlet. Although the wind blows pigs can fly, the wind blows foam will also break.
01 What does a virtual person mean for the metacosm?
If you separate the concepts of "virtual man" and "metaverse", you may not feel that the two are closely related.
Because in the thirty or forty years before the birth of the meta-universe concept, virtual people have been all over the film and television works, but the two are combined, and "virtual people", which once belonged to the "extreme subdivision track" of the entertainment industry, suddenly rode the wind. So what does virtual humans mean for the metaverse?
There is a consensus that virtual digital humans are an indispensable factor in the development of the metaverse. Because in the natural world, man is the spirit of all things, and in the meta-universe world, virtual people naturally become the core element. Xu Yuanchun, COO of Xiaoice Company, once said that the future development of human beings must coexist with AI virtual people, and there will be a large number of virtual people around our lives in the future, and the number may be 10 times that of the existing population. Cheng Weizhong, CEO of Zhongke Shenzhi, who has been deeply involved in the virtual person industry for at least 5 years, pointed out that by 2030, virtual people and real people will be indistinguishable, and we will also be filled with a large number of virtual people.
What they all agree with is that the avatars and virtual people of real humans are ordinary natives of the metaverse, creating new emotional connections and social relationships with each other in their work, life, and interaction.
Another reason why virtual humans are valued is that the development of the metaverse is gradual. Because the metaverse can't enter the Ready Player One era overnight, but the trend is bound to be irreversible. Even if it is not possible to accurately judge the final format of the metaverse at present, there have been some deterministic scenes, and the virtual person with many years of technical precipitation is a typical example, and the virtual anchor, virtual idol and other products that have landed may make the virtual person the first in the meta-universe to enter the commercialization.
Like the elegant and kind virtual anchor of the Winter Olympics, Li Weike, the virtual person invested by ByteDance, the virtual idol girl group A-SOUL of Lehua Entertainment, and the virtual employee cui Xiaopan of Vanke... At this moment, countless true and false virtual people are being born, and a large number of data and reports have jointly pushed up everyone's expectations for virtual people. Angela, a partner at Yuanyi Capital, said, "In the past, everyone was listed to compete for the first share of so-and-so, which has been out, and now it is more popular to push the first virtual person in a certain industry." ”
02 Virtual people industry chain, who are investors more optimistic about?
Under the frenzy, some people inexplicably earn money. For example, a company called Jinke Culture changed its name to "Tom Cat" in September this year. People associate the name with the ancient virtual IP "Talking Tom Cat" and forcibly classify it as a metaversic concept stock. It wasn't long before the stock price of "Tom Cat" rose by more than 50%.
"If you look at the latest batch of companies that have come in, you can see that either the team that failed to do the game or the team that failed to do the film and television. They saw that the track was hot and rushed in, but most of them didn't really do virtual people. Zhang Jiamin, the founder of the "virtual person "Ha Sauce", said in a previous interview that the popularity of the meta-universe concept has made virtual people out of the circle, and anyone can come, as if anyone can be a virtual person, but many IPs on the market claim to be virtual people, but the quality is uneven.
Under the prosperous market of "random flowers and charming eyes", the metacosm has also become a mirror. There are many smart people in the mirror, and there are also many stupid and bad people. Because in the definition of CITIC Securities, virtual people can be divided into personality type and practical type, but from any point of view, it is not the same as "people", which can make independent decisions.
The NPC called GUY in "Out of Control Player" can become the virtual person that everyone yearns for, because he is "out of control", and will not be like the current virtual person, according to the prescribed paradigm to interpret content or implement functions, like a "virtual puppet". It is also because of "out of control" that he has become a real "virtual person".
Although most of the players on the market are still far from the real virtual people, but the track is hot, the funds are large, even if there is no strong technology now, the first entry place has a chance of success. Up to now, the number of domestic virtual person-related enterprises has exceeded 160,000. Less than a month after 2022, the number of financing in the virtual person field has reached nearly 100, and the amount of financing has exceeded 400 million.
Recent virtual human track core financing projects
Whenever the company draws the tempting pie of virtual people and metaverses, it will almost deliberately emphasize that "it is still in the initial stage of the metacosm, and it may be more than 10 years away from the metacosm in the full sense" So why are investors now making a big deal out of virtual people? Where is their difference in positive expectations?
From the second half of last year to this year's investment direction of virtual people, virtual people are not only a feast for To C, but also a driving force to accelerate the construction of To B. More investors only recognize "infrastructure" projects, an investor said that "buying NVIDIA is logical, buying Qualcomm is also logical, including buying a VR equipment manufacturer, if it is the world's largest VR equipment processor may also be logical, but this is only a very early concept."
Because the virtual person who is purely C-oriented is more like what SM and Lehua Entertainment are better at, because there is an industry accumulation of content operation and IP operation that are needed to create stars. The industrialization path of virtual people is more like To B, and its commercial vitality comes from docking with brands in different fields, which has more commercial imagination value. Regardless of the ultimate development form of virtual people, how to merge with the current real technology and business growth is the right way.
Virtual Digital Human Industry Chain Atlas Source: Head Leopard Research Institute, West China Securities Research Institute
It can be seen that at present, the entire virtual human industry is divided into the upstream basic layer, the midstream platform layer and the downstream application layer. In the To B battlefield, giants can adopt the platform strategy of flood irrigation, and entrepreneurs are more inclined to integrate business sectors to integrate into the innovative optimization of enterprise business experience and form a diversified new model of customer reach. Because not everyone can pay a high cost to pan for gold in the industry, but everyone needs lightweight virtual technology solutions. For example, AYAYI's underlying technology comes from Metahuman Creator, Unreal Engine's creative tool. As the hottest graphic creation engine at the moment, it allows people to create photorealistic digital human images in a matter of minutes.
In China, "Shiyou Technology", with the to B business as the core, has mature commercialization in radio and television programs, brand marketing, live broadcasting, short videos, and education; "Strontium Technology", the developer of virtual human production tools, has obtained three rounds of financing last year with its ability to independently develop CG and AI; "Mofa Technology", which completed hundreds of millions of yuan A round of financing in June 2019, is not only able to complete the creation and operation of virtual people, but also developed a three-dimensional AI virtual human capability platform... The reason why these virtual person creation tool providers or self-made teams have been given high hopes, in the words of Du Zihang, head of AI of "Magic Technology", is that "the virtual person industry has a basic contradiction, a contradiction between the growing demand for high-quality virtual content and the backward productivity of virtual content."
From this point of view, it is not important whether it can catch up with the virtual human outlet, but whether it has mastered the capabilities it needs when the outlet arrives. The media once described Nvidia as a meta-universe "selling shovelers", because Nvidia, which has the advantage of "monopoly" of computing power, can make a lot of money whether it is in cloud computing, meta-universe or virtual people.
Vice President of Yuanyi Capital said, "In addition to the traditional hardware equipment opportunities that everyone knows, there are also huge software innovation opportunities in the meta-universe field, and there are opportunities for virtualization and gamification for all walks of life, such as the construction of virtual space and the private domain marketing of gamification, which have room for growth." "This is because whether in the current digital transformation scenario of the enterprise or the layout of the future meta-universe, the lower the infrastructure capacity, the less likely it is to be replaced by new concepts."
03 To B gold panning, what are the near and far worries?
For To B's virtual human enterprises, the other side of the opportunity is the challenge.
Near-term worries are technical problems, and the production of virtual people is a complex task. The technical level alone involves the underlying supporting technology (artificial intelligence, cloud computing, blockchain, etc.), the capability layer (3D spatial sound effects, ultra-low latency, face comparison, etc.), the application layer (virtual people, content moderation, etc.) and the experience layer (games, social networking, virtual concerts, etc.). The very popular virtual person Liu Yexi is actually presented by a combination of "real body + virtual face + cool special effects", if you only look at Liu Yexi's face, you can still see her shortcomings in expression management.
At this stage, it is not so much to make virtual people more real, but to make virtual people more natural. The natural and realistic experience of getting along and the natural way of communicating behind it all take longer to constantly iterate on technology.
Foresight is the security of digital content in the virtual world. The "fake Jin Dong" incident that has made a lot of noise about AI face swapping reminds everyone that we need to pay more attention to virtual social problems, and also represents the excessive real appearance of virtual people, which will disturb everyone's cognition of "human beings" and appear "real dummies are stupid and indistinguishable".
With the development and maturity of virtual human technology, compared with the current Internet ecology, the meta-universe has more realistic factors because of the evolution and integration of technology, and has full-time and real-time, its content form is more diverse, involving more complex social and economic relations, more data, faster response, and the difficulty and cost of content risk control will also be greatly increased. For the digital content risk control in the meta-universe era, new solutions and regulations are needed to deal with it.
In addition, cost is also a headache for many enterprises. At present, whether it is the shipment of hardware or the landing scene of virtual people, it is difficult to equate with market expectations. However, Angela, a partner at Yuanyi Capital, is not particularly worried about costs, she believes that the virtual person industry can also use MVP (the simplest and feasible product) to verify feasibility, even if the early trial and error fails, it can also gain pit experience.
As for how much imagination there is in this industry in the future, we may as well let the "bullet" fly a little longer.