Recently, the chairman of China Vanke Co.,Ltd., congratulated ‘Cui Xiaopan’ on winning the Vanke Outstanding Newcomer Award on social media. In fact, this ‘Cui Xiaopan’ is not a real human, her identity is vanke’s first digital virtual employee, it is understood that she officially took office in February this year, has been working quietly in vanke’s finance department for 10 months. This isn’t the first virtual employee, however. Just a few days ago, Baidu launched ‘xi ling’, a digital life-transforming platform. In Baidu 2021 developer conference, Baidu’s CTO Wang Hai feng claimed that in order to further reduce the application threshold of digital man, Baidu smart cloud officially launched digital-man platform – Baidu Smart Cloud Xi ling, to provide users with 24-hour services.
The virtual human is in a full swing
Due to metaverse’s trending, the ‘virtual man’ technology also gradually awakened under the promotion with the concept of the metaverse. Now virtual people have become very realistic. The AI anchor from Xinhua News Agency had very first conversation with a virtual human, and the world’s first AI anchor interviewed a virtual anime face to face. Liu ye xi, a virtual celebrity who is also a make-up blogger; ‘AYAYI’, the digital person of Alibaba, has become the digital manager of Tmall Super Brand Day. Hua Zhi bing, a virtual student at Tsinghua University, has gained a large number of fans on social media. Under the concept of the metaverse, ‘virtual man’ represents the avatar of the real individual in the virtual world.
At present, the comparative official definition comes from the ‘2020 White Paper on the Development of Virtual Digital People’ report, which was first released by the China Artificial Intelligence Industry Development Alliance. Avatars are digital avatars that rely on display devices to exist and possess a person’s appearance (looks like a person), behavior (can talk, raise hands) and thoughts (can talk), the report said. Such hyper-realistic virtual people have begun to make their way into people’s social lives. Industry reports show that the market size of China’s virtual digital person industry in 2020 is about 200 billion yuan, and with the widening of market acceptance in the future, the market size of China’s virtual digital person will reach 270 billion yuan in 2030.
The appeal of virtual people is growing, and young people are spending more and more time in virtual space, with China’s Generation Z numbering 264 million, about 19 percent of the country’s population, according to statistics. As the ‘Internet natives’ in the true sense, they generally started to contact smart phones and the Internet earlier than the post-1980s generation, and in the process, they also continuously show unique generational characteristics. For the majority of Gen Z, virtual experience has become a way to open a new social circle and a tool to interact with peers, and a good and interesting virtual scene is favored by Gen Z. With the continuous breakthrough of advanced technology, the concept of meta-universe is popular, and the rise of Generation Z consumer group, also brings a good market for virtual people.
In the long run, digital man is an important application of artificial intelligence technology in the metaverse, as well as an important part of the ecology or society of the metaverse, which will continue to evolve with the development of the metaverse. It is believed that the future of more intelligent, more real-time interaction of virtual people will undoubtedly be an important development direction of the metaverse. There is no doubt that virtual digital people not only become one of the blue ocean markets for technology companies, but also become a new direction for the entertainment industry to ‘connect’ with the metaverse. A number of Internet enterprises, listed companies and investment institutions have started or arranged virtual human projects, while some big players in the domestic market have also started to take action, in order to strive for the first place in the new industry. For example, WIMI, a listed technology company, is well prepared in terms of virtual human rules and metaverse related technologies.
WIMI AI and the fusion of virtual reality
From the perspective of investment layout, the investment layout of domestic capital in virtual human industry technology in recent two years pays more attention to virtual human technology manufacturers of AI and technology platform. WIMI is a hologram full stack service provider, and as a representative of domestic visual AI enterprises. At present, the holographic application scenario commercial mainly gathered in home entertainment, light field cinema, performing system, business distribution system and the advertising display system and so on five major areas, through many years of technical research and development, create the holographic animation, virtual live, including virtual idol and virtual social, nearly 5000 alive is user experience can be used to describe a simulation. The market is constantly changing, and WIMI hopes to develop in more industry areas, and lists holographic virtual stage and holographic virtual character as one of the core industries in the virtual reality industry.
Technical barriers to competition on the consolidation, so a large number of costs of the major technology companies in the virtual technology, more advantages on resources, but also has the ability to build polymerization technology platform, either short or medium term B end is given priority to, in the C and future yuan universe full penetration, can achieve great authors efficiency of virtual people link. Compared with a single layout, WIMI is an Internet giant with a comprehensive format and a wider layout of virtual human technology. It can aggregate a series of sophisticated hardware, technology, algorithm and software. Such a platform is more likely to evolve into an open virtual world. WIMI focused full-stack real-time animation and virtual live broadcasting technology, from 3D modeling and rendering to motion capture and AI, from the customization of a single virtual person to the creation of virtual live broadcasting room, the technology has developed comprehensively.
WIMI actively pays attention to AI technology and hardware equipment, and has an early layout in AI, quantum, semiconductor, automatic driving and other frontier science and technology fields. This year, it also established the metaverse Business Department, focusing on the exploration of the next generation mobile computing platform research, and continues to pay attention to AR, VR, XR and other hardware platform technology related to the metaverse.
Based on the above technological accumulation, WIMI is expected to take the lead in the realization of hardware equipment in the future to break the virtual and real boundary. With the gradual development of virtual cultural industry, consumers’ demand for virtual entertainment products will continue to rise. In the future, WIMI will fully expand the surrounding virtual industry around film and television, animation, games and other IP, and achieve a more high-speed and high-quality development.
Virtual reality industry will also take advantage of the development, with the diverse and changing tastes of generation Z, WIMI continues to capture and find more certain business opportunities. It’s worth noting how quickly the market is changing, with the popularity of the ‘metaverse’ concept making virtual digital people seem to have the potential to change the world. But there is no denying that there are many issues that need further consideration. What are the legal issues involved in virtual people in the metaverse? Can real people have multiple avatars? These ethical and privacy issues need to be guided for discussion, which is a huge challenge and requires the concerted efforts of practitioners in the upstream and downstream industry chains.
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