The Heart of the Machine is original
Machine Heart Editorial Department
If you trace the origins of the concept of "digital people", you can go back to the 1990s. Of course, at that time, most of the digital people were non-real people who existed in film and television works. In recent years, with the continuous advancement of technologies such as CG, artificial intelligence, and motion capture, the interactive and social attributes of digital people have gradually increased, and the boundary between virtual and real is disappearing.
Especially after the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in early 2020 and the fire of the meta-universe concept in 2021, the attention of digital people in various industries has remained high. Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and other Internet giants have all entered the market, investment institutions have competed for layout, and digital people have become a new track sought after by capital.
Specialized digital human figures have also emerged in various fields, such as virtual idols, virtual customer service, virtual tour guides and other different functions of virtual digital people have been providing users with high-precision customized services in the fields of social networking, games, office and so on.
At this time, the live e-commerce industry under the epidemic has ushered in explosive growth, and the epidemic has made more people watching live broadcasts and participating in online shopping. Since 2020, live e-commerce has entered a golden period and gradually showed a "blue ocean effect". From the essence point of view, live e-commerce is reconstructing around the core elements of "people, goods and fields", and continuously upgrading and developing with the system goal of optimizing "cost, efficiency and experience". In this field, the application of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual digital people is highly expected.
If live e-commerce meets "virtual digital people", what kind of revolutionary changes will be produced? How will an MCN organization maximize the value of virtual digital people?
On April 10th, Yaowang Network held the 2022 "AI WANT IT" Yuanwang Digital Strategy Conference through online live broadcast. At the press conference, Yuanwang Network disclosed the identity information of the virtual digital person "Kong Xiang" who has recently exploded out of the circle and its follow-up development plan.
In addition, Yuanwang Network also officially announced the company's research and development results and strategic layout in new digital asset-related fields such as twin anchors, digital asset libraries, and digital collections, which further established a new path for the upgrading of digital technology companies, and also marked the official launch of the company's digital asset business and the opening of a new business growth curve.
Debut is a fire: virtual digital person "Kong Xiang"
At present, the mature user base of virtual people is accelerating incubation, and virtual idols that can interact in real time and have a more vivid image are the core of the current virtual human economy, and they are also the valuable traffic entrances for the metaverse to take shape. In the marketing scene, the digital people's gameplay is as rich as the real people, from content e-commerce promotion, live e-commerce, joint customized products, to the conference platform, the party performance, to the signing of group photos, new media marketing and other forms of marketing based on brand appeals, digital people can meet to the greatest extent.
Yuanwang Network is one of the earliest institutions to cultivate star artist anchors, not only has rich experience and success in laying out star anchors, but also has been at the forefront of the industry in the application and upgrading of digital technology. It is understood that Yaowang Network has carried out strategic cooperation with a number of well-known companies in the industry that master virtual person technology, and has the professional ability to apply virtual person technology to live streaming with goods.
"Kong Xiang" is the first virtual digital person launched by The Remote Vision Network.
According to the conference, "Kong Xiang", the first virtual digital person of The Remote Vision Network, will be applied to live broadcast scenes, film and television dramas and variety shows. At present, "Kong Xiang" has received cooperation endorsements from three brands, becoming the first virtual human brand close friend of three beauty brands such as Shile Skin, Vichy and NYX.
From the perspective of ready-made experience, the ability of the head anchor to carry the product is beyond doubt, but the larger the traffic scale of the live anchor, the higher the cooperation cost for the brand.
In contrast, the value advantages that digital people can tap are more obvious: virtual digital people are less costly and more controllable, more stable, more secure, and more in line with The cognition and aesthetics of Gen Z. Thinking further, virtual digital people also represent various possibilities in the future multi-terminal and metaversal universes.
In addition, The RemoteView Network has also announced a new way of playing live e-commerce with higher simulation, stronger interactivity and wider application - twin anchor technology. Through AI deep learning, this technology aims to make the model's expression and face detail positioning completely reach the synchronous state of the live performer, and can realize the "replication" of the anchor in short videos, live broadcasts, and TVCs.
With the help of twin anchor technology, Yuanwang Network has now carried out the content of the short video "twin" series of stars and anchors, which is different from pure CG virtual people, and twin anchors are a new technical game. The technical support is to replace only one person with the same screen, and only one person can be replaced by multiple people on the same screen.
During the press conference, Xie Rudong, chairman of Yuanwang Network, also connected with the company's Kuaishou head anchor "Yu Dagongzi" to demonstrate the application of technology:
Twin anchors have high degree of simulation and strong interactivity, and will be more widely used in the field of live broadcasting than the images produced by pure CG technology. It can not only achieve "multiple people are one person", copy and produce N head masters, but also realize "one person is multiple people", so that each IP has the possibility of wireless expansion. After the twin anchor actually enters the live broadcast room, it will bring a magical experience to the audience.
After so many years of technical preparation, digital people have finally passed the stage of laboratory products and officially started from the starting point of commercialization. Not only "Kong Xiang", after this, digital people will increasingly enter the public life. Live e-commerce will be one of the important application scenarios for digital people, but there is still room for further development on this road:
First of all, in the process of exploring the landing of digital people in the field of live e-commerce, we must take the lead in solving the problem of high cost and long cycle. Judging from the current millions of dollars in the cost of building digital people, many companies will still be discouraged.
Secondly, from a technical point of view, the application of digital people in the field of live e-commerce still has many difficulties to break through in terms of generation, driving and interaction. Especially in terms of interaction, how to make virtual digital people infinitely close to real anchors and achieve barrier-free communication with the audience is crucial to its landing application effect. Behind this requires the integration of many basic technologies and practical scenarios.
In addition, digital people still need to establish a consensus industry standard on how to land live e-commerce. Whether you are a cargo anchor or a beauty blogger, you need some standards for segmentation to promote its large-scale commercialization.
These are all questions that need to be seriously considered, and it may take some time to solve them, but the future development space for technologies such as virtual digital people and twin anchors is conceivable. At present, teams that master technology and teams with practical needs like Remote Vision Network need to accelerate convergence and communication to bridge the gap between digital human technology and applications.
Make live broadcast truly "standardized"
In addition to digital people, the live e-commerce industry is also facing more tests in the mileage of realizing digital upgrading.
These tests are profound for the "bureau" RemoteView Network: Looking back at 2021, as one of the leading comprehensive digital marketing service providers in China, The Network has cooperated with more than 130 anchors, completed more than 3,000 live broadcasts, cooperated with more than 20,000 well-known brands at home and abroad, and completed the promotion of 63,000 products for these brands.
In this process, The Network observed some shortcomings in the current live e-commerce industry:
First, in terms of human choice. The entire live e-commerce industry has gradually shown a long-tail effect, for large-flow anchors, every start of broadcasting is "icing on the cake", but it is not easy to cultivate new talents in the "snow and charcoal", and it is difficult for ordinary anchors to get efficient support and growth. How to find another way to dig deep into the value of ordinary people? This is a problem that cannot be skipped by the entire live e-commerce field to improve the maturity of the industry.
Secondly, there are operational challenges: in the past, the experience of a successful anchor was passed on by word of mouth, without forming a text precipitation, so it could not convey standardized "knowledge". Teams vary widely, including long coaching cycles, which can take about 4 to 6 months. Overall, the preparation period for a live broadcast used to take three months or more.
Not only that, with the promulgation of a series of rules and regulations such as the Guiding Opinions on Strengthening the Supervision of Online Live Broadcasting Marketing Activities, the Measures for the Administration of Online Live Broadcasting Marketing (Trial), and the Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Transactions, the barbaric growth trend of the live e-commerce industry has gone, standardization is the way forward, and standardized systems have become a heavy chess piece. In addition, the innovative application of AI and IoT technologies has provided new ideas for the digitalization and quality upgrading of the industry.
It can be said that the standardization of processes and systems is the first step to achieve industry upgrading, and it is also an important step in the upgrading of the remote network to a fully digital technology company. To this end, Yaowang Network has set up the Yaowang Research Institute and the Yaowang Live Broadcast Standardization Committee to solidify the successful experience in the past, so as to pass it on to the product technical team, so that all teams can benefit from it.
Based on this, through the integration of financial systems, warehousing and logistics systems, big data platforms, etc., Yaowang Network has innovatively created a unique "Remote Looking Cloud", completed the construction of a standardized process system covering the entire live broadcast link before, during and live broadcast review, formed the feedback of the complete live broadcast operation link of online, digital, intelligent and automated, realized the standardization of live props and tools, and accelerated the incubation of the live broadcast operation team.
This means that The RemoteView Network will become a company of fully standardized live broadcast rooms. In this standardized live room 1.0 version, what a host should do in each link is very clear; in terms of commodity mechanism, the system will also complete the automatic price comparison.
The creation and expansion of Yaowang Cloud has helped Yaowang Network to continue to build a closed-loop system of live e-commerce, forming a replicable live e-commerce methodology. Xie Rudong introduced: "In the future, with this system, we may only need to do 20% of the manual work, and the remaining 80% will be completed by the system."
With the application of standardized live broadcast rooms, the preparation period for novice anchors will be reduced from the original 3 months to 7 days to start broadcasting, effectively saving management costs. At present, the standardized live broadcast room has been tested on April 15 and is expected to be officially put into use in early July this year. Within this year, version 2.0 will also be officially completed.
To become a "digital technology company"
Virtual person IP, digital scene construction, digital asset library... Behind a series of cutting-edge technology layouts, Yaowang Network aims to organically combine existing business with digital assets, and at the same time relies on the standardized process system of live broadcast links created by Yuanwang Cloud to provide assistance for the transformation of digital technology, is committed to creating a new experience for users, and leads the live e-commerce industry into a new stage of compliance and innovation development.
Based on standardization and opening up the future with digitalization, Yuanwang Network is building a truly technology-based industry with a steady, efficient and standardized rhythm. With the deepening of the deep integration of live e-commerce and cutting-edge technology, it is believed that in the near future, Yuanwang Network will continue to deepen its cultivation in a wide field and become a real digital technology company.