Reporter | She Xiaochen
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In addition to the ice piers that have burned all over the country, virtual people have also become a highlight element of this Winter Olympics.
Meet Gu, a digital Homo sapiens based on sports star Gu Ailing, was the first to appear. In the two days of Gu Ailing's debut on February 5 and Gu Ailing's first gold on February 7, Meet Gu appeared in the Migu Winter Olympic Studio to interact with the host, showing the virtual dynamic image with a 1:1 restoration.
Image source: Migu Video
Also appearing at the Winter Olympics are "3D Virtual Ice Ice" and AI virtual weather anchor "Feng Xiaoshu", which are based on CCTV reporter Wang Bingbing and "China Weather" host Feng Shu. The well-known virtual singer "Luo Tianyi" also sang at the Olympic Cultural Festival.
Virtual people "perform their duties" in different scenarios, making the Winter Olympics a large-scale test field for industry applications.
Interactivity has become the norm for every virtual person. Taking "3D Virtual Ice Ice" as an example, compared with the past, "3D Virtual Ice Ice" has a more three-dimensional body shape, richer voice, tone, body movements, etc., and has multiple human characteristics in appearance, behavior and interaction. In addition, iFLYTEK launched the exclusive H5 of "Ice And Ice Belt You Say Winter Olympics", which allows users to interact with the virtual ice on the screen by tapping the screen. The technology involved in this is not only 3D modeling, but also speech synthesis, AI-driven lip expression synthesis, virtual human body movement control and other technologies, which are no longer limited to a single simulation.
If the digital people of Gu Ailing and Wang Bingbing only stimulate people's interest in interacting with virtual people, other virtual people play a more practical role in the Winter Olympics.
In November 2021, Baidu Intelligent Cloud and CCTV jointly launched the "AI Sign Language Anchor". In this Winter Olympics, the virtual anchor provided sign language services for hearing-impaired users through AI technology, playing the role of an artificial sign language anchor.
Image source: Baidu
Compared with hyper-realistic digital people, the image of virtual sign language anchors is not realistic, but the AI technology involved behind it is relatively complex.
It is understood that the virtual person is based on Baidu's intelligent digital human platform Xiling, using self-developed speech recognition, machine translation and other artificial intelligence technologies.
Baidu needs to build out? Set sign language translation engine, so as to achieve word and audio and video content to sign language translation. After that, the avatar is driven by a natural motion engine optimized for sign language, which interprets sign language into the expression of digital people in real time.
This also reflects a development trend in the virtual person industry: in addition to cultural and entertainment interaction, virtual people "go from the outside to the inside", superimposing more technologies to serve the vertical field.
AI virtual weather anchor "Feng Xiaoshu" is also a typical example. This is a virtual person jointly created by the China Meteorological Administration Huafeng Meteorological Media Group and Microsoft Xiaoice Company, at the beginning of the production, "Feng Xiaoshu" took "China Weather" host Feng Shu as the training goal, relying on the Xiaoice framework digital twin virtual human technology to build.
Xiaoice said that in terms of technology, "Feng Xiaoshu" combines Xiaoice deep neural network rendering technology (XNR) and small sample learning technology to improve the overall naturalness to a degree that is difficult to distinguish from real people, and the training cycle is only one week.
Combined with the training of the speech expert model, the mouth expert model and the face rendering expert model, "Feng Xiaoshu" accurately learned the coordination between Feng Shu's own mouth movements, eye and facial muscles, and finally presented a natural and realistic effect.
It is worth mentioning that the production of the above-mentioned virtual people has the figure of a major science and technology factory, including Ali, iFLYTEK and other companies, all of which have specially customized virtual people for the Winter Olympics.
Of course, this is first and foremost due to the importance of the Winter Olympics themselves. The gradual maturity of technology and application has paved the way for the concentrated appearance of this virtual person.
In 2021, thanks to the popularity of the concept of "meta-universe", virtual human companies facing the C-end and B-end are gradually moving from behind the scenes to the front, and the above-mentioned big factories are also competing to enter the game. According to data from the Head Leopard Research Institute, the current virtual digital human market size has exceeded 200 billion yuan, and this figure is expected to reach 270.3 billion yuan by 2030.
However, it is not easy to promote the application of virtual people from the perspective of industry. Entrepreneurs in the virtual person industry once told Interface News that in the domestic market, most companies' cognition of virtual idols, virtual people and even virtual content stays in the stage of "industry + virtual", and the future larger business should be in the "virtual + industry", which is a more long-term process.
From the perspective of the production technology itself, there are many gaps between different companies, and not every virtual person can be as realistic as a human. In addition to modeling, motion capture, etc., AI technology is also an important factor in determining the maturity of virtual people in the future. At this point, Microsoft Xiaoice, Baidu, Ali and other companies have a long period of accumulation, but relying on large factories alone is far from enough.
In addition, convincing more industrial application virtual people is another problem.
CITIC Construction Investment Securities pointed out in the research report that the underlying technology of overseas virtual person companies has developed relatively quickly, and has more advantages in CG, drive and other aspects, while the domestic virtual person type is more diversified and has more advantages in reaching users. The appearance of virtual people in the Winter Olympics may be a starting point, and whether more industrialized applications can be continued in the future depends on the dual development of technology and commercialization.