"Let you hear what you want to hear, let you see what you want to see." Joi can satisfy all your fantasies. ”
In Blade Runner 2049, the protagonist K stands alone on the overpass, with a huge naked blue-haired Joi in front of him. K heard Joi's voice again—after his own Joi had been kicked in the face.
In the movie, K and Joi are not really human, K is a replicant, with the same flesh and blood as humans, and implanted human memory; and Joi, just a virtual image living in the projection, can never touch his lover, and even outside the movie, the audience is still arguing about whether Joi has autonomous consciousness.
Joi in Blade Runner 2049
If a replicant like K is still too far away from our world, what about Joe? Can we have our own Joey, as in the movie?
When digital people enter life, virtual light enters the real world
In 1982, based on the character Lin Mingmei in "Timeless Fortress", the world's first virtual singer was born, and his album also successfully entered the well-known music charts at that time.
In the new century, two-dimensional virtual singers such as Hatsune Mirai and Luo Tianyi have gradually entered people's vision and set off a new cultural trend among young people. With the innovation of technology, the exploration of digital people is no longer only on the two-dimensional image, but towards the development of ultra-realistic human images, MetaHuman came into being.
On May 20 this year, a hyper-realistic digital person named AYAYI greeted the real world on the Little Red Book with a beautiful photo of light and shadow and announced his arrival.
This photo quickly swept up the major network platforms, AYAYI's little red book debut post read nearly 3 million, an overnight increase of nearly 40,000 fans. Some of the melon-eating masses marveled at the little sister's prosperous beauty, some imitated her makeup, and even some people began to question her true identity because they were too surprised.
After the explosion of the whole network, AYAYI's commercial map was also rolled out. Joined Alibaba and became the digital manager of Tmall Super Brand Day; planned the exhibition with many artists as a digital curator, and planned to open a fashion brand physical store; signed many brand endorsements to become KOLs. It can be said that the arrival of AYAYI has brought more imagination space to the domestic commercial market.
In foreign countries, more hyper-realistic digital people are active on various online platforms.
Lil Miquela, who has more than 3 million followers on Instagram, is a 20-year-old Brazilian, Spanish mixed-race girl living in Los Angeles who works as a model and singer. Like AYAYI, Lil Miquela is a fashion darling, and you can see all kinds of international big names in her, Chanel, Supreme, Fendi and Prada, and even appeared on the cover of the print media as a full nude to call for equality. Compared to AYAYI, Lil Miquela has been on social media as a digital person for longer and has created a richer and fuller personality. Whether it is a real person or not even caused a lot of turmoil on the Internet, until a hacker hacked into Lil Miquela's IG account, and the dispute over Lil Miquela's real identity was settled.
In addition to AMIYA and Lil Miquela, digital people who are active on social media such as black supermodel Shudu Gram and Japanese virtual idol Imma Gram are quietly rewriting the rules of real-world business with their virtual bodies.
Shudu Gram
Imma Gram
Behind the hyper-realistic digital people is the increasingly powerful technological productivity.
At the beginning of this year, Epic Games announced a digital person creation tool called MetaHuman Creator, according to the introduction of the official page, MetaHuman Creator includes a large number of real skin, textures, facial features and other information, even if it is a technical white, it can also create a super realistic digital human image in a short period of time.
On August 13, NVIDIA CEO Huang Jenxun staged a secret at the GTC conference, successfully fooled the audience around the world with a perfect 14-second virtual scene, and no one found that the speech was interspersed with 14-second virtual images, the old Yellow of the speech was fake, and everything in the scene, kitchen, furniture, toys and so on, was fake.
It is foreseeable that with the continuous development of technology, there will be more and more scenes where digital people can land, and the impact on human life will become more and more profound.
Big factories are entering one after another, what tricks can digital people play in the game scene?
Tencent is one of the earliest game companies in China to lay out digital people. Back in 2018, its own NExT Studios unveiled a virtual digital person called Siren. With real-time rendering technology from Epic Games and motion capture technology from Cubic Motion, motion capture gear can mimic anyone's expressions and movements, and any real person can become the next digital person.
In April this year, Tencent released the world's first digital astronaut xiaoyi, which is responsible for carrying out news coverage for major Chinese aerospace projects such as manned space engineering, lunar exploration engineering, and deep space exploration projects, and carrying out space science popularization.
NExT Studios' years of real-time, high-fidelity digital human technology has been concentrated this time. First of all, the high-precision material map of 8192*8192 fully restores the gloss and delicate expression of the skin; secondly, by scanning the expression details of the model and post-modeling, more than 5,000 Blendshape expression databases are created; finally, the overall action framework is composed of 143 bones. In addition, NExT Studios also restores the dynamic effect of clothing, with self-developed plug-in modification, making XiaoYi's every move more natural.
With the official advent of the small slander, the concept of "super digital scene" depicted by Tencent has also surfaced. According to Ma Xiaoyi, the "super digital scene" of games is a large-scale migration of culture, technology and imagination accumulated by human beings over thousands of years to the virtual world... Continued technological revolutions and innovations in thinking will surely allow games to better connect virtual and real.
Another major manufacturer, NetEase, established Fuxi Studio in 2017 to focus on the research and application of AI in games and pan-entertainment, including virtual people, reinforcement learning, image action, natural language and cloud computing platforms. At present, Fuxi has made many attempts at the combination of digital people and games. For example, in November last year, NetEase took the character image in "Against the Cold Water" as the prototype, and concentrated a group of virtual digital people in The China Silk City in Hangzhou, creating a more interactive and immersive experience scene for tourists through virtual explainers, virtual poets, virtual dancers and other forms.
Virtual Companion Reading Digital Man "Cocoa"
Recently, NetEase has also completed a strategic investment in the second world culture, which is a cultural product company focusing on the ecology of virtual people, and has created a number of hyper-realistic digital people such as Ling, Nan Mengxia, a young girl with national style, and "ASK", a virtual male model of iQIYI Deyang Studio.
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In September this year, Huawei created Huawei's first virtual digital person "Yunsheng" based on the digital content production line, and joined HUAWEI CLOUD as a new employee through automatic modeling of AI, voice drive of AI, and rendering acceleration of AI. Although Huawei has not announced too many details of application scenarios, its imagination space is considerable backed by cloud technology and Huawei's strength in hardware.
In general, although the Internet and technology manufacturers continue to move, whether it is limited by technology or landing scenarios, the digital son of man is still in its infancy in the game industry, only as a concept for popularization and promotion.
Digital content needs to be driven by digital people, but landing scenarios need to be continuously explored
As you may have discovered, there is not yet a need for today's game companies to create a hyper-realistic digital person. You may even think that for players who are accustomed to cartoon or two-dimensional images, whether they can accept it is a problem, if you have to look for application scenarios, maybe you should do marketing to do product promotion like AMIYA.
But if you pay attention to the full-fledged demand for Gen Z and the significance of virtual characters for the new generation of users, you may put digital people in a fairly important position.
Some practitioners believe that the virtual idols and bubble marts of the fire actually represent that the consumption power of Generation Z has matured, and the digital people on the big concept are obviously a broader outlet. Since video and live broadcasting need to be diversified, as a new form of virtual idols, digital people must be the traffic highland that everyone must seize, otherwise it will be difficult for you to catch the next generation of users.
What's more, as far as the objective laws of science are concerned, the development momentum of cutting-edge science and technology is unstoppable.
In the view of a hardware developer, the development trend of the current digital wave is very obvious, and digital content must need digital people, whether it is virtual idols, virtual customer service, or animation content production, virtual social networking need digital human technology. Then as a practitioner, you need to grasp the final demand and basic values and drive it in a lightweight way.
A senior practitioner also said that many people's attention is attracted by hyper-realistic digital people, mistakenly thinking that it suddenly appeared this year, but in fact it has been showing a trend of accumulation and has been going up. From a larger concept, digital people have actually been slowly evolving. For example, the earlier two-dimensional avatar, coupled with the maturity of everyone's technology, will slowly mature, and the industry will see this thing this year.
However, due to technology and cost, even if digital people are very good at appearance, it is difficult to move like a real person.
In the case of Huang's "virtual stand-in", in order to create this 14-second virtual video, NVIDIA used hundreds of digital cameras to shoot thousands of photos of Huang From multiple angles, and hired a professional actor to imitate Huang's speech and perform 8 hours of motion capture. According to Nvidia, they used a total of 34 3D designers and 15 software engineers for the virtual conference.
Therefore, for most Internet manufacturers, whether to enter the digital sphere should fully consider their own positioning and user needs before making a decision - whether there is an urgent need, whether there is a suitable application scenario, what content can be carried... These factors require careful consideration.
From AMIYA to cyberpunk, why are we so passionate about digital people?
Since the industrial age, human beings have unlimited expectations for science and technology. The steam beasts that resounded throughout Europe and the black smoke that filled Britain made mankind realize for the first time that he had mastered the power to transform the world and the earth; the cosmic exploration fever in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made human beings fascinated by extraterrestrial life, and a large number of interstellar colonial works emerged in the golden age of science fiction; the booming computer technology and high-speed information highways brought science fiction writers and readers into the cyber world early; and atomic energy made human beings expand unprecedentedly, and some people even began to wonder whether we had been infected with divine power.
Once upon a time, people naively thought that beneath the thick clouds of Venus was a wet swamp
Technology has changed your and my lives countless times, extending human imagination of future lives. However, in the past two or three decades, human beings have rarely seen the emergence of new scientific concepts, so that many people joke that the basic technology of human beings has been locked up by the wisdom of the Trisolarans.
It's not hard to explain why we see "magical" hyper-realistic digital people so excited, and then immersed in the shock of technology can not help themselves - and this is still an infinitely close to the real person avatar, it is incomparable to other forms. If such a "person" were to fall to the Internet one day, no one would be able to curb their curiosity.
In a sense, the creation of a digital person may realize the "divine desire" in the depths of human beings: we are incomparably eager to become the Creator, to create a virtual image close to the real person, and we hope that he will have an ideal image, a perfect human design, in order to pin his subtle emotions. We even expect TA to appear around us, to be able to move freely, and even to truly have AI intelligence to communicate with people.
Movie "Machine Butler"
What is even more curious is what kind of impact it may have on the real life of human beings when it enters our real life. Imagine this: now that you are wearing a smart watch in your hand, you only need to press it, and an image will appear in the watch out of thin air - you can interact with the TA, although there is no touch, but visually you can no longer tell whether the TA is a hologram or a real person.
Such images sound too far away, like Blade Runner 2049 and Cyberpunk 2077, as if they should only appear in cyberpunk movies and games.
But it is precisely because of its dreamlike illusion that human beings dream of being immediately in a world surrounded by digital people. Ding Yu, chief expert of NetEase Fuxi AI virtual person, once defined the future of digital people in the keynote speech of "The Past Life and Future of Digital People": When the technology of digital people is infinitely powerful, at that time, the future of digital people must serve mankind infinitely and fully.
He also further envisioned the future of the digital person:
When EEG technology is further developed, the communication between biological humans and digital people may no longer be communicated in the form of vision and hearing, but through the signals of EEG. Our perceptions, sensations, emotions, personalities, hobbies, habits, memories, these biological signals that cannot be seen or heard, but are real, can all be transmitted. In the farther future, digital humans may also help humans travel through life, so that people who have lost physical life can continue to live in the digital world.
What exactly does digital man mean to humanity? The answer may not matter if it is the ultimate pursuit of virtual technology by human beings, or just chasing a dream bubble, after all, Marie Curie said: The invisible world of mankind is not a utopian illusion, but a real existence illuminated by the brilliance of science. What is noble is the power of science.