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Wen | bear haunt please note
The United Nations World Population Prospects report mentions that by the end of this century, the world's population will exceed the 11 billion mark.
11 billion, in academic predictions, this is the peak of the Earth's population, and then the population will gradually decrease.
One thing goes on and on.
"The number of virtual people will be 10 times that of humans in the future", in the imagination of artificial intelligence "Xiaoice", virtual people seem to be the masters of the future world.
We can't fully believe Xiaoice, because he is a member of the virtual person. But at the same time, it cannot be denied that this "ethnic group" is gradually infiltrating human life.
Clothes, virtual anchors in the live broadcast room receive you; food, virtual spokespersons recommend hamburger packages to you; live, a virtual employee of a housing company won the best newcomer award; OK, virtual people have become hot car models.
In short, in the past two years, the east wind of the meta-universe has gradually flourished, blowing more and more virtual people into the public vision.
But everyone knows the virtual person, but they don't know the true face of the virtual person. Objectively speaking, the vast majority of people who watch the lively melon eating masses have only stayed on the literal surface.
It's time to ask the virtual person three souls: Who are you? Where did it come from? Where are you going?
Text: Bear out of ink please note
Are they human?
What is a virtual person? This is the first question that needs to be clarified.
However, to this day, the industry still struggles to find a unified and clear definition.
From the perspective of application, CITIC Securities divides virtual people into two categories in the industry research report, namely personality type and practical type, while the State Key Laboratory of Media Integration and Communication of Communication University of China divides it into three categories: identity type, service type and performance type, while Tianfeng Securities emphasizes the three different concepts of virtual person, digital person and virtual digital person...
Each has its own reasons, and consensus has not been reached. Then let's start from reality and see what the virtual people who are active at the moment look like:
The first is the virtual person in the e-commerce live broadcast room, a character image standing in front of the stage, behind which is actually a set of intelligent customer service system.
What was originally a text exchange with a customer is now spoken from the mouth of a virtual anchor. But if you ask a few more questions, you will find that such virtual people can only interact mechanically according to the established procedures.
The second is the virtual people in short videos and advertising films, such as the top stream Liu Yexi in the virtual human circle, and Higaga, who shot commercials for McDonald's some time ago, they often appear in a completed video work, and the interaction with the plot is basically 0.
Finally, there is the twin virtual person of the real person, that is, the real-time mapping of the human being in the real world to the virtual world, as in the "Ready Player One" movie, whether from the perspective of virtual or human, it is the closest to the true form of the virtual person.
Most of the virtual people on the market can not jump out of the three categories, based on this, we have a clearer understanding of virtual people: they have two basic characteristics, anthropomorphism, virtualization.
Correspondingly, Noiteng, who is in a leading position in the domestic motion capture field, said to Xiong Chumo, its co-founder and CTO Dai Ruoyan that when the industry talks about virtual people, it generally cuts from two dimensions, "The first is whether there is a person in the middle, and the second final product is real-time or post-production." ”
This extends to the technical level.
Nakajin, the concept originated in Japan, refers to the manipulator behind the virtual person. Through different implementation methods such as motion capture, expression capture, and voice drive, the group portrait of virtual people can be further subdivided.
Dai Ruoben said: "Virtual people with middle people can carry out relatively complex and timely interactive behaviors, while virtual people who rely on state machine synthetic actions, synthetic expressions or artificial intelligence synthetic actions are more used for low-frequency interactive customer service scenarios, such as virtual news anchors reading and broadcasting." ”
In the second dimension, real-time rendering and post-production of virtual people are also the difference in technical routes. The former emphasizes timely virtualization mapping, while the latter is the film and television production process.
When applied, different technical means are used on demand. For example, Liu Yexi usually has the main position in short videos, and strengthens the identity label of virtual people through plot content. And when some activities need to appear and interact, she will also come to the scene, and some time ago she was on the same stage with Mo Yan.
So, just as humans are divided into different races in the real world, there are clear boundaries between virtual humans. The most typical difference is that some virtual people are really people, and some are not people.
Is this fire vain?
In the face of the emerging "ethnic group" of virtual people, I wonder if everyone has a sense of déjà vu.
As mentioned earlier, the virtual people represented by the virtual anchors in the e-commerce live broadcast room, they just put on a new skin bag on top of the familiar things, thus making people have a strange and familiar sense of contradiction.
In fact, the same is true of other types of virtual people. For example, Yoo Ye-hee and Higaga are similar to the avatars and Alita characters in special effects movies; twin virtual people driven by technology such as motion capture are inevitably reminiscent of the iPhone's Memoji function.
Virtual people who claim to come from the digital world of the future do not seem to be as mysterious as they think.
And this is also a manifestation of the virtual person's excessive fire.
According to the report released by Ai Media Consulting, the core market size of China's virtual person in 2021 is 6.22 billion yuan, and the scale of industrial trial production driven by it is 107.49 billion yuan. It is expected that by 20215, the two sets of figures will swell to 48.06 billion yuan and 640.27 billion yuan, respectively.
The scale is as large as 100 billion, and there is no shortage of people fishing in muddy waters.
For example, Dai Ruoben believes that "post-production, output is completely unequal, and at present, strictly speaking, it cannot be regarded as a virtual person." Their production methods have actually existed for many years, but now the various technologies are more complete and the production is faster. ”
A film and television practitioner also expressed the same view, "In the script, you can portray any character, whether it is a virtual person or an alien, but not everyone can catch fire." ”
Liu Yexi's company Chuangyi Technology revealed that the cost of the team for Liu Yexi is more than one million yuan, and more than 160 people are serving her. Behind liu yexi's IP, a mature film production team is supporting it.
The reason why we have to bother to package virtual people has only one purpose - commercial value.
For example, some entertainment companies have spent a lot of money on virtual idols in the past two years, because compared with real idols, virtual people do not grow old, can do multiple jobs at the same time indefinitely, and do not have to worry about him collapsing, let alone contract disputes with the company.
Station B attaches great importance to virtual idols, and since the opening of the virtual anchor section in 2018, it has frequently shot in this field. In 2019, through the acquisition of Shanghai Henian, luo Tianyi, the top virtual idol, was acquired, and in early 2022, a company specializing in the research and transportation of virtual idols was acquired.
The same is true for virtual anchors and virtual employees, and executives of a company that provides customized services for virtual people in China said that their company's virtual people have been applied in scenes such as live e-commerce, live show broadcasts, online education, film and television content production, etc. "Virtual people can be said to be completely owned by the company." ”
Although Liu Yexi's company said that it does not take the road of virtual idols, it is actually doing the IP economy. Moreover, the real person has to share with the MCN, and the income of the virtual person goes to the company," the industry insider said.
This fundamentally determines that the service group of virtual people at this stage is mainly B-end customers.
This is also the case, whether the brand hires a spokesperson, the company cultivates virtual idols, IP, or news anchors and anchors who are active in the screen, although the audience of the virtual people is concentrated on the C-end, the people who pay for the virtual people behind the scenes are without exception the B-end business owners.
Create value for the B-side, but the experience of the C-end audience has not been substantially improved, and even in some scenarios it is not as good as the real person.
For example, the virtual anchor in the live broadcast room of some Taobao stores, the merchant has achieved 24-hour non-stop broadcasting, but for the user, the virtual anchor is like a ruthless reading machine, the pre-prepared copy rotation, can not personalize the answer to consumers' questions.
So the question is, since it cannot reflect the needs of the broad masses of the people, when the freshness passes, how long can the virtual person burn this fire?
Yomoto Space What Dry?
"If the metaverse is the ultimate form of digitization, virtual people are the digitization of the subject of people."
Practitioners of the virtual human industry generally believe that virtual people are equivalent to the infrastructure of the metaverse, and when humans migrate to the metaverse, virtual people are everyone's digital doppelgangers.
According to this logic, the virtual person should be based on the metaverse, but now it is obvious that the metacosm has not yet arrived, and the virtual person has gone first. In the case that the metaverse is far from being built, the overhead virtual people have begun to "take orders online", and even created a market size of 100 billion.
The order of succession is inverted, and it still comes down to the difficulty of landing the value of virtual people in C-end users.
Liu Yexi rose millions of fans overnight, and the scale of fans exceeded 10 million in two months, and there is no doubt that he fully enjoyed the traffic dividend under the wind outlet of the meta-universe. Baidu's virtual person Xijiajia became the spokesperson for McDonald's new products, but the brand took a fancy to the heat of the meta-universe, and then tilted its marketing activities to virtual people.
As mentioned earlier, the current activity still stays with B-end customers. Virtual people are just "digital workers" that companies have paid for.
The 640.27 billion yuan market scale driven by the virtual people mentioned by Ai Media in the report is the realization of the virtual people at the B-end.
Virtual people participate in business activities
On the one hand, the traditional IP monetization model, borrowing the heat of virtual people and meta-universes to make the scale of fans larger, and then monetize through brand promotion. AYAYI, which became popular in May last year, received an invitation from a first-line brand in the second month and successfully joined Alibaba, with continuous business activities. According to industry insiders, Luo Tianyi, the predecessor of the virtual human industry, and the brand linkage quotation is about 1.5 million yuan, the endorsement price reaches 10 million a year, and the appearance fee is not lost to the real star;
On the other hand, Ai Media Consulting analysts believe that the virtual human image combined with artificial intelligence and other technologies can enable new formats such as virtual anchors, digital employees, and virtual idols to meet the diversified needs of users, and then generate market opportunities.
From the B-end to the C-end, the completion of the metaverse is a hard threshold.
Under the outlet of the meta-universe, the pace of the virtual reality industry's entry into the C-end consumer market is accelerating.
For example, Noiteng's entry-level motion capture products have become smaller and lighter with each iteration, and some people in the industry have regarded them as consumer products.
Another example is the domestic enterprise STEPVR, which has been insisting on the field of virtual reality for many years, and gradually has technical reserves such as motion capture, force feedback, and universal treadmills, and after the rise of the meta-universe concept, it recently launched an entrance-level new product connecting the meta-universe, directly for home users.
According to the IDC industry report, the global AR/VR headset shipments reached 11.23 million units in 2021, an increase of 92.1% year-on-year. Among them, the shipment volume of VR headset reached 10.95 million units, breaking through the important inflection point of the industry with annual shipments of 10 million units. IDC stressed that 2021 is the year when the AR/VR headset market has exploded again after 2016.
The pie is thriving, but crossing the threshold is no easy task.
The "Oasis" game in Ready Player One
Taking the scene shown in "Ready Player One" as an example, the hardware level needs to enter the virtual world from the real world, and the software level needs to build the whole people and applications represented by the "oasis", as well as the corresponding meta-universe ecology.
Consistent with the depiction of Neil Stephenson, the conceptual proposer of the metacosm, it is a digital space in which people can truly live.
Objectively speaking, the level of hardware and software development at this stage is still difficult to compare with the settings of "Ready Player One" and "Avalanche". As a result, the consensus of the public to migrate to the digital world cannot be formed, and the soil for the popularization of virtual people cannot be discussed.
Although virtual people appear frequently, they still have a long wait to truly integrate into public life. At the very least, that day will not come until the metaverse takes shape.
Therefore, an industry insider said bluntly, "In the next long time, it is difficult for virtual people to be directly used by C-end, tool providers and service providers in the upstream of the industry chain, and (their) service subjects are still mainly B-end." ”
Write at the end
Who are you? Where did it come from? Where are you going?
Returning to the three soul questions in the opening chapter, the answer is already clear.
Who is the Virtual Human? To the general public, he is the digital twin of each and every one of us;
Where do the active virtual people come from at this stage? They are more of a product of commercial activity under the wind, like a virtual worker;
And the place where the virtual person will eventually go is the metaverse that does not know where it is.
The development of things always spirals upwards.
No one can deny the digital trend represented by the virtual people and the metaverse, and what we need to think about is whether the current development path of the virtual people and the metaverse deviates from the envisaged digital future.
If the road goes off, when will it get back on track?
Let the bullets fly a little longer.
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