On February 26, the original virtual anchor "Trip Love" announced that it had entered "indefinite hibernation" after holding an online concert "Hello World 2022", and more than 1,000 domestic and foreign virtual anchors participated in the online concert, sending final blessings to the pioneer of the virtual anchor era. In the end, the online concert received 362,600 yuan in revenue and 10.65 million in popularity value in Station B.
Trip Love Concert Image source: Trip Love Weibo
Although hibernating, tripping love will continue to exist with the singing synthesis software CEVIO AI.
As the world's first and most well-known virtual anchor, Trippick Ai can be called the pioneer of Hatsune Future. However, unlike virtual singers such as Hatsune Mirai and Luo Tianyi, who are based on the Yamaha Vocaloid series of speech synthesis programs, virtual anchors such as Trippick Ai are actually a combination of real people and avatars under real-time motion capture and face capture technology, and the actors who provide sounds and actions for virtual images are called middle people.
In June 2021, Station B CEO Chen Rui revealed at the 12th anniversary speech that at that time, Station B already had 32,000 virtual idols and anchors, and the number of anchors increased significantly. Virtual anchors have become a huge group that cannot be ignored, and the beginning of all this must start from tripping love.
B station virtual UP main channel Image source: B station screenshot
Explorer and forerunner of virtual anchors
On December 1, 2016, Trippick opened her own Youtube channel "A.I. Channel" and delivered its first video. In the video, the concept of "virtual YouTuber" (referred to as "VTuber") was first proposed by TripAi, the world's first video blogger to call himself a virtual anchor, and is therefore recognized as the "first virtual anchor" and "the explorer and forerunner of the virtual anchor".
In fact, before the "birth" of trip love, there have been video anchors on the Internet who have gone abroad through virtual images instead of their real images, and there is no shortage of virtual images operated by teams behind them. However, whether it is the quality of the work, the mode of operation, or the later fan popularity and commercial value, the love is far beyond the previous virtual anchor.
A.I. Channel received more than 400,000 followers in just four months due to its acclaimed character image and content style, and since then, the popularity of Trip Love has soared, and on February 23, 2018, the channel reached a subscription of 1 million.
According to a survey of VTuber across Japan disclosed on July 10, 2018, Trip Love firmly occupied the first place with 1.98 million subscribers to the main channel and 900,000 subscribers to the sub-channel, and achieved a major channel subscription exceeded 2 million five days later. In 2019, Trippick Ai was selected as one of the "100 Japanese Respected by the World" and Akihabara Virtual Tourism Ambassadors, and her rising popularity also led Trippick Ai to participate in the 2020 NHK Virtual Red and White Song Festival and become a Japan Tourism Ambassador. Prior to that, fictional characters who had served as ambassadors for Japanese tourism included Doraemon and Hatsune Mirai.
The rapid rise in popularity has also increased the commercial value of Trip Love. In March 2017, Less than half a year after tripping out, Trip Love received its first game sponsorship, and in September of the same year, Trip Love also starred in the TV commercial commercial film of the light novel "Gamers", and then opened the road to commercial monetization such as offline activities, cameo animation, and TV shows. At the same time, Activ8, the planning and operation company behind Trip Love, announced the completion of a 1 billion yen financing in 2020 after receiving an external capital increase of 600 million yen in 2018 to develop a 5G VR live broadcast system.
Success or failure is the "person in the middle"
Why did the first generation of virtual idols with super popularity suddenly choose to retire? As for the reason for "dormancy", Trippy Ai laughed in the video because he was "no longer special".
Trip Love announces "dormancy" Image source: B station video screenshot
The success of Trip Love has allowed capital to smell the business opportunities of the virtual anchor industry, and now the two well-known virtual anchor operating companies Hololive and Rainbow Society have entered the market in early 2018. Under the business opportunities, the virtual anchors operated by individuals and companies have appeared in large numbers, and the content expression has also developed from the initial video to a more interactive live broadcast, and as the "originator", it is difficult to meet the viewing needs of the audience in content innovation, with nearly 3 million fans, but most of the video playback volume is even difficult to reach 100,000, and the online live broadcast data is even bleak to less than a thousand people.
In addition, the reason for the decline in the popularity of tripping people is the wrong decisions of the operating company.
Unlike the virtual singers such as Hatsune Mirai and Luo Tianyi, the virtual idol is more like the costumed doll in the amusement park, not relying on vocal synthesis technology to make sounds, but with the help of motion capture and LIVE2D and 3D technology, a real person plays a virtual role, and the actor is the middle person. This also means that the middle person has a great influence on the virtual character itself, and the change of the middle person may directly lead to the demise of the virtual character.
In May 2019, either in order to cope with the increasingly competitive virtual anchor market, or to reduce the instability factors that people in the middle of the game may cause to trip love, Active8 launched the "four trip love" twin project. Specifically, Activ8 looked for 3 doubles of Trip Love on the basis of The First Generation of TripPing Love's Haruhi Wang, and No. 2 and No. 3 took turns to replace Chun Zhi wang as Trip Love, while No. 4 was dedicated to Chinese audiences.
The standing drawing is the appearance of the show, and the voice actor is the soul of the virtual anchor. Although it still has the appearance of tripping love, the difference between the actors is obvious, and for fans, the soul of tripping love is Kasuga. "The appearance of love and the voice personality of Kasuga can be said to be a match made in heaven," a fan told the Daily Economic News reporter. Fans don't buy into the actions of the operating company and express their dissatisfaction through mass clearance.
On May 9, 2020, the incident ended with the deactivation of The No. 2 and No. 3 Tripping Love except for the No. 4 "China Tripping Love", but the year-long dispute led to the departure of a large number of fans of Tripping Love, and other emerging virtual anchors came to the fore, and Tripping Love was "no longer special" after all. The success of tripping love is inseparable from the chunri hope of the middle man, and what eventually leads to the "retreat" of the trip love is also the dispute about the middle man.
Virtual idols also have to "collapse"
With the emergence of a large number of virtual people and related companies, more and more virtual idols are replacing real people and receiving attention and love from users, and have achieved commercial success.
Take the virtual idol girl group A-SOUL jointly launched by Lehua Entertainment and ByteDance as an example, the group quickly accumulated super popularity after debuting with the excellent quality of the middle people, and generated 1.2571 million yuan in 3.5 hours of live broadcast on the first anniversary, and cooperated with multiple brands at the same time as the "Virtual Interactive Ice and Snow Carnival Gathering Night" at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
A-SOUL participates in the Beijing Olympic Games Gathering Light Night Image source: Screenshot of the official Weibo of the Beijing Winter Olympics
In addition to A-SOUL, virtual anchor Ice Candy also appeared on the stage of the night of the gathering light with singer Zhang Weijian. Ice Candy's friend, virtual anchor Leng Iris, released an original song in collaboration with Lynk & Co Motors.
According to Qixinbao data, the number of new virtual person-related enterprises in 2020 and 2021 will be 36,080 and 66,293, respectively. As of January this year, the number of domestic virtual person-related enterprises has exceeded 160,000. In addition to the virtual people created and operated by the company and for the purpose of commercial activities, it can be found through the search of the virtual anchor area of station B that there are not a few virtual images built by individuals.
The operator of the domestic virtual artist group PSP-LIVE told reporters: "Technological progress has lowered the threshold for the production of virtual characters, enabling us to build virtual characters into a more three-dimensional and image, and also providing an opportunity for people to create an ideal 'self' that is divorced from the background of real identity." Therefore, the use of figurative, movable avatars to construct virtual identities will be a trend in the future. ”
Compared with real idols, virtual people can carry out "perfect" differentiated customization according to different needs, and it seems that they will not face problems such as age growth, appearance pressure, "overturning" and "collapsing houses", which is also a beautiful idea for many companies when creating virtual idols.
However, virtual idols will also "collapse", just like tripping on love. The head of the virtual group of Xuanshi Interactive Entertainment told the "Daily Economic News" reporter, "Trip Love first played an AI, and the early planning was extremely diluted people and operations, and then the person who trip love collapsed, resulting in a sharp decline in its popularity." Whether it is a virtual person who needs to be played by a "middle person" or a virtual person who operates through artificial intelligence, any change in its actor and operation team may have an irreversible impact on the virtual person, so we should be more vigilant about the problem of "collapsing houses" when operating virtual people.
The virtual anchors pioneered by Trippick Love are now full of colors, and there may be more changes in the future. Just as Trippy Ai also mentioned fresh hot concepts such as "metaverse" and "NFT" in the video, he said that he will upgrade to "super AI" and accompany everyone in a better way in the future.
With the development of technology, where will the future of virtual people be? What new situations will virtual anchors evolve? Just like the trip love that debuted in the past, no one knows everything in the future, but there will always be a forerunner who will go forward to explore.
Reporter| Li Jianning Liu Zhongning (Intern)
Editor| Yang Xia (Intern) He Xiaotao Wang Jiaqi
Proofreader | Sun Zhicheng
| the original article of the daily economic news nbdnews |
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