Black Technology! Beijing Spring Festival Gala "Su Xiaomei" show off dance skills Will virtual people on stage become "everyday"?

On the spring evening of Beijing Satellite TV, Liu Yu and "Su Xiaomei" jointly performed the program "Galaxy into Dreams".

Beijing News Shell Financial News (reporter Luo Yidan) In the Spring Festival Gala of Beijing Radio broadcast on the first day of the Chinese New Year, a virtual person and a real person performed on the same stage of the program "Galaxy into Dreams".

According to the program introduction, young singer Liu Yu joined hands with the virtual person Su Xiaomei to jointly perform the cross-dimensional reality stage show "Galaxy into Dreams". The virtual person "Su Xiaomei", who debuted on the stage, showed traditional skills such as chanting and dancing swords, and used virtual characters to add a cross-dimensional national style science fiction color to the Spring Festival Gala of Beijing Satellite TV, leading the audience to experience the virtual world immersively.

It is understood that the virtual person "Su Xiaomei" who appeared on the Spring Festival Gala in Beijing was launched by Blue Cursor.

Shell financial reporter learned that this is not the first time that virtual people have appeared on the stage of the party or concert. At the Jiangsu Satellite TV New Year's Eve concert broadcast on December 31 last year, the virtual person "Teresa Teresa" created by The Digital Kingdom once sang songs such as "Story of a Small Town" and "Walking the Road of Life" with singer Zhou Shen. In 2019, the CCTV Network Spring Festival Gala launched "Xiao Xiao Sa", "Zhu Xiaoxun" and other virtual hosts created with CCTV hosts as samples, and looking further ahead, the famous virtual images luo Tianyi, Trip Love, Hatsune Mirai, etc. have also held offline concerts. So, can virtual people replace real stars to stir up the entertainment industry?

"Su Xiaomei" show off her dance skills, where is the difficulty, how much does it cost?

"It's not technically difficult to get a virtual person on stage, interact with a real person in a real scene, and share the stage with a real person." Lu Cheng, an observer of the virtual idol industry, told Shell Financial Reporter, "First make a 3D model of the virtual person, and then use augmented reality technology to project it onto the stage, which is also available in the camera function of Huawei mobile phones." Taking the program of Beijing Satellite TV as an example, it should be found that an actor with real dance skills is responsible for the dance movement capture of the virtual person, and then the male actor cooperates with the virtual person's position to present the stage effect of the final virtual and real interaction. ”

In an interview with Beijing Youth Daily, program director Guo Yan revealed that the digital virtual character "Su Xiaomei" is based on the legendary sister of Su Dongpo as a creative prototype. The recording time of the whole program alone is up to 11 hours, which is the longest shooting time of the Beijing Spring Festival Gala, "The recording scene of "Galaxy into Dreams", due to the particularity of the combination of virtual reality and stage, the director team has extremely high requirements for the lens screen and stage cooperation. Especially when it comes to Liu Yu's stage position, it is even more strict to be completely consistent every time. In addition to the rehearsal of 3 hours, the empty mirror recording took 4 hours, and the final recording also took 4 hours. ”

"Although the technical principle is not complicated, the difficulty is that the production of virtual people requires many steps, including 3D modeling, motion capture, sound and light rendering, etc., and the cooperation between them is very testing to the producer, and each step is very 'money-burning'." Lu Cheng said.

The company behind "Su Xiaomei" is a blue cursor, why do many companies have laid out virtual people?

It is understood that the virtual person "Su Xiaomei" who appeared on the Spring Festival Gala in Beijing was released by BlueFocus on January 1, 2022, and BlueFocus said that this is the landmark landing of its "meta-universe strategy, which will open a new layout of BlueFocus virtual IP business." ”

The blue cursor indicates that at present, with the development of virtual technology, virtual assets (including virtual people, virtual objects, and virtual environments) will be indispensable element assets in the metaverse world. In the future, BlueFocus will also lay out the virtual IP market for a long time, and work with vertical industry partners to develop virtual cultural creation, virtual music, virtual idols and other tracks, create more virtual IP with industrial applications and create a beautiful imagination, and meet the multiple needs of users and commercial customers.

Shell financial reporter learned that at present, there are many companies engaged in virtual people-related business in China, while on the stage to attract attention, receiving endorsements, live broadcasting, and being Internet celebrities are several mainstream "businesses" of virtual people.

"After the epidemic, offline TVC, plane, etc. are difficult to shoot, but the brand still needs to output a large number of materials to establish links with users, so many companies have begun to use digital content production; in addition, the current rollover rate of the entertainment industry is very high, and the brand needs a safe, technical content and a certain amount of traffic to represent the brand to wear clothes and shoot planes; at the same time, since last year, the concept of meta-universe, NFT, blockchain, and the true Internet has made the brand begin to have a sense of crisis. Beginning to want to do digital assets, virtual people are the most easily understood digital assets, these few things determine that almost all brands will not refuse to cooperate with virtual people. Chen Yan, founder of the sub-world cultural company that has a number of virtual people IPs such as Ling and Taosman, told Shell Financial Reporter.

Virtual people replacing real stars is difficult to achieve in the short term

However, Shell financial reporters found that although the virtual person industry is still in the wind outlet, the continuous wind may not be as "strong" as people think.

Prior to this, Oriental Satellite TV had announced that in the Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Tiger, actor Huang Xiaoming would debut on stage with the virtual character "Guofeng Xiaoming" for the first time and talk with "another self" on the same stage. Oriental Satellite TV said in the propaganda that "Guofeng Xiaoming" is based on scanning the whole body of a real person, supplemented by motion capture technology, which not only ensures the true restoration of the characters, but also gives it a layer of fantasy color. However, in the end, the reporter did not see the program in the Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Tiger on Oriental Satellite TV. In addition, in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in the Year of the Tiger, the virtual starry sky, ocean, thousand-mile rivers and mountains and other virtual and real scenes composed of XR, AR, holographic and other technologies have become the eye-catching highlights of the Spring Festival Gala program, but the virtual person did not appear.

Behind this is the high cost of the virtual person business.

Last year, Liu Yexi, a virtual person who debuted with the meta-universe concept, released a 2-minute beauty video on Douyin, which gained 1.3 million followers in 30 hours. Xie Duosheng, the founder of Chuangyi Technology, the company behind Liu Yexi, previously said in an interview with the Beijing News Shell Financial Reporter that the video is only a preview of Liu Yexi's appearance, and the follow-up story will be released on Douyin in the form of a single episode plot. At present, there are more than 150 people in the large middle office team behind Liu Yexi, and the number of small front desk teams is less than 10 people.

In an interview with Shell Financial Reporter, the "Liu Yexi" team said that in the more than half a year before the launch of "Liu Yexi", the investment in research and development costs, personnel costs, and technical costs was "far more than one million".

Even if the production of a less sophisticated virtual human image is not so well-made, its cost is difficult for ordinary people to bear. Lu Cheng said that the current cost of virtual people with two-dimensional images is relatively low, but the cost of an ordinary short video is also thousands of yuan, and the cost of a few minutes of video is also tens of thousands, and if Liu Yexi's hyper-realistic virtual person is made into a video, its cost per second is "at least tens of thousands." ”

However, due to the impact of the meta-universe concept fire, there are still many companies that have invested in the industry tide of virtual people without hesitation. So, in the future, can virtual people replace real stars and subvert the entertainment industry?

"The virtual person industry has been developing for many years, but due to the high production cost, the more well-made the virtual person, the more difficult it is to interact with the audience frequently. In addition, because the current strong artificial intelligence has not appeared, most of the popular virtual people behind the actually wearing a "leather jacket actor" with a moving capture device, the virtual person wants to replace the real star, or in the short term can not do it. Lu Cheng said.

Beijing News shell financial reporter Luo Yidan Editor Yue Caizhou Proofreader Li Ming