Since this year, the virtual human industry has sprung up and become extremely popular. Film and television companies, brokerage companies, automobile companies, and even real estate companies have launched virtual people, or virtual idols, or spokesmen. But when the hot money of capital poured in crazily, it brought the entrepreneurs dawn, at the same time, risks and bubbles also followed.
A few days ago, several technology enterprises released the virtual digital human production platform, the software copyright of the "virtual digital human application platform" under Douyin was registered and approved, and Mango TV Innovation Research Institute jointly released the "virtual human live interactive platform" with Tencent Cloud. With the promotion of the concept of meta universe and the improvement of production platform capacity, virtual human products continue to penetrate into live broadcast, cultural tourism and other application fields, and the commercialization process is accelerating.
Continuous release of business value
According to the 2022 Virtual Human - The Indigenous People Report of the Metauniverse, virtual digital human refers to the non physical world, created and used by computer means such as computer graphics, graphic rendering, motion capture, deep learning, voice synthesis, and a comprehensive product of multiple human characteristics (appearance characteristics, human performance ability, human interaction ability, etc.), At present, it is mainly used in service, marketing and pan entertainment scenarios.
In recent years, the concept of the meta universe has become popular all over the world, and various virtual people have constantly entered people's vision. In 2021, Liu Yexi, a virtual beauty expert, released the first short video on Tiaoyin, which won more than 3 million praise and millions of fans; At the 2022 New Year's Eve Gala of Jiangsu Satellite TV, the virtual person with Teresa Teng as the prototype sang songs such as "Story of a Small Town" and "Walking on the Road of Life" with the live singer Zhou Shen, realizing the chorus across time and space; During the Beijing Winter Olympics, the AI sign language virtual anchor launched by CCTV News and Baidu Smart Cloud accurately and timely broadcast the event in sign language, becoming a partner of the hearing impaired group to listen to news "intelligently".
With the rapid development of live broadcast e-commerce and the need of enterprise brand marketing, virtual digital people are applied in more scenes, more enterprises and a wider range, and also attract more enterprises. According to Tianyan's data, there are more than 288000 enterprises related to "virtual human" and "digital human" in China. From 2016 to 2020, the compound growth rate of newly registered enterprises in five years was nearly 60%, and the industry entered a period of rapid growth.
It is understood that the mainstream technology driving route of virtual digital human is divided into artificial intelligence driving and motion capture driving. Due to different technical routes, their suitable application scenarios are also different. The AI driven virtual human is applied to news broadcast, customer service, explanation and other scenes, and the action capture driven virtual human is suitable for MCN institutional marketing, live broadcast, virtual anchor and other interactive scenes. The virtual digital human industry chain has gradually become mature, and has formed a complete ecological map of the virtual digital human industry chain composed of upstream production and rendering tools, midstream virtual human driving and operation, and downstream scene applications.
Today, with the support of virtual technology, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, virtual digital people continue to evolve, their images are more realistic, their applications are more and more extensive, and their business value continues to improve. According to the Deep Industry Report on Virtual Digital Human released by market research institute Quanti, the overall market size of virtual digital human in China will reach 270 billion yuan by 2030.
Plus layout production platform
Since this year, many Internet companies such as Tiaoyin, Fasthand, Tencent, Baidu, Bilibili and so on have launched virtual human production platforms. Listed companies such as Tianyu Digital Science, Fengyuzhu, Blue Cursor have also stepped up the layout technology and platform construction to create the virtual human IP image.
According to public data, recently, the copyright of the "virtual digital human application platform" software of Beijing Volcano Engine under Douyin has been registered and approved. At present, Volcano Engine Digital Man has the fast delivery capability of standard platform, providing a subdivision solution covering customer service, intelligent tour, intelligent assistant, virtual live broadcast and other scenarios for finance, mass consumption and other industries.
On August 23, Mango TV Innovation Research Institute and Tencent Cloud jointly released the "Virtual Human Live Interactive Platform". This broadcast level virtual content production tool based on real-time cloud rendering can help enterprise customers produce lightweight, off-site, professional virtual content and build virtual human broadcast rooms. At the same time, the audience can participate in the live broadcast room with a virtual image to gain an immersive live broadcast experience.
It is worth noting that the competition of the virtual human race track is fierce, and the product homogenization is relatively serious, but there are not many institutions with original intellectual property rights. According to incomplete statistics, by the end of 2021, Chinese institutions had applied for 1322 digital human patents in China, including more than 200 applications from universities and more than 110 applications from Internet enterprises. By the end of 2021, a total of 58 institutions had obtained patent authorization, mainly involving technology companies, universities, banks and other enterprises.
According to the records of the State Intellectual Property Office, as of August 30, there were 173 patents containing the keyword "virtual person" this year, while 78 patents were published in the third quarter. From the disclosed patent information, Alibaba has released a new patent "multi anchor virtual live broadcast method and device"; Bilibili's new patent "Virtual image broadcasting method and device" emphasizes that the rendering process can be started according to the user's facial data to load the virtual image; Baidu and NetEase regard voice as an important element for triggering virtual images. The former technology can generate images and corresponding facial expressions according to the user's voice characteristics, while the latter can control virtual images with voice.
Broad prospects for future development
Since 2021, relevant departments have issued policies to vigorously support the development of artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data and other industries, and the virtual digital human industry is an important part of these industries. On October 20, 2020, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) issued the "Fourteenth Five Year Plan" for the Scientific and Technological Development of Radio, Television and Network Audiovisual, which clearly pointed out that virtual anchors and animated sign language should be widely used in news broadcasting, weather forecasting, variety arts, science and education and other program production. On November 16, 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Fourteenth Five Year Plan" for the Development of Information and Communication Industry, which emphasized that the state supports all kinds of enterprises to apply new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, 3D printing and so on to build a variety of online consumption scenarios.
Recently, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology officially released the Beijing Action Plan for Promoting the Innovative Development of Digital Human Industry (2022-2025), which is the first special support policy for digital human industry in China. According to the plan, by 2025, the scale of Beijing's digital human industry will exceed 50 billion yuan, initially forming a technical system, business model and governance mechanism with Internet 3.0 characteristics, and becoming the innovation highland of the national digital human industry.
Capital is the catalyst of industry, and virtual human industry is no exception. According to the data from Tianyan, in 2021, there will be 2843 financing of virtual human related enterprises, with a total amount of 254 billion yuan. In 2020, there were 1713 related corporate financings, including Sequoia, IDG, Shunwei Capital and other first-line funds, with a total financing amount of nearly 800 million yuan.
So, how far are we from the large-scale application of virtual human? Li Shiyan, head of Baidu Intelligent Cloud AI human-computer interaction laboratory, said that at this stage, domestic digital people still face some difficulties in large-scale industrial landing: first, each node of the digital people industry chain is relatively fragmented, lacking efficient collaboration, leading to high barriers in the production and optimization of digital people, At present, most companies in the industry are only one or several links in the whole process of making and operating digital people. Secondly, the service scene and the performance scene are not effectively connected, which shows that the performance oriented digital people do not have the business capabilities required by customers, while the service oriented digital people lack staffing, and it is difficult to communicate with users emotionally. Finally, the cost of digital people to meet the needs of high mobility and high frequency is still high.
Tang Yuanqing, director of Mainstream Media Research Center of Communication University of China, said that there are three major trends in the development of virtual human industry in the future. First, with the application of AI technology in the virtual human industry chain, low-cost and rapid generation of digital people will become a reality; Second, in the next five years, the whole body dynamic capture driving equipment of virtual digital human and the commercialization of virtual human will remain at the PGC (professional production content) stage, and ordinary people will enter the virtual social space as cartoon characters; Third, the demand for value-added services such as scenes, clothing and props involved in virtual human ushered in an outbreak of opportunities, and the virtual fashion industry will develop rapidly.
The reason why virtual people can "break the circle" and become traffic passwords is that they have the appearance of near people and a high degree of interaction ability at the same time, which is in line with people's fantasies about scientific and technological achievements in the near future. In the future, virtual people may become the main force to break the boundary between reality and virtual world, and be more widely used in daily life. (Yuewen)
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How "Virtual Human+" Supports the 100 Billion Market
The application field of virtual digital human has moved towards diversified development. According to the consulting data of Ai Media, the industrial market scale driven by virtual human in China will reach 107.49 billion yuan in 2021.
On the basis of increasingly mature picture presentation mode, with the improvement of 5G, computing power, AI and other technical capabilities, the landing scene of virtual human is increasingly rich, no longer limited to film and television, animation and character modeling The application of CG and other aspects in virtual image building has also realized the identity function of the virtual avatar of real human beings in social networking, games, office and other scenes, and gradually realized commercial realization in the fields of AI virtual digital people such as live broadcast e-commerce, idol making, and accompanying services.
Virtual human+media
The application of the media industry represented by the virtual anchor has well met the business needs of the media communication field in terms of content generation, and has become a media weapon in the era of financial media.
Nowadays, virtual news anchors and virtual hosts have become highly anthropomorphic and intelligent. With the support of AI system, they can not only achieve the synchronous output of voice and picture through text input, but also be realistic in image. They can choose posture, action, clothing, etc. according to different scenes, bringing the audience a good aesthetic experience. With the support of real-time rendering technology, virtual hosts can participate in the program recording or live broadcast to complete real-time interaction. On the stage of the 2019 CCTV Network Spring Festival Gala, the AI virtual host "Xiaosa", which was made with Isaac Benin as the prototype, took up his post for the first time. This is also the first time that the host and his virtual twin digital person co host large-scale national cultural activities in China.
Virtual human+finance
Virtual digital people can effectively help financial institutions achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase. All major financial giants scramble to deploy "digital employees", and use financial technology to respond to market competition has become the consensus of financial industry development. The competition orientation with science and technology as the core also makes the investment in information technology of financial institutions increase year by year.
Virtual digital people have anthropomorphic facial expressions and actions, can carry out intelligent dialogue, and can be naturally combined with the financial industry with many service scenarios. Many financial institutions are using virtual digital human technology to create "digital employees", which has become an important direction of technological innovation, cost reduction and efficiency increase. Taking Industrial and Commercial Bank of China as an example, the digital human bank staff launched by ICBC can display digital pseudo images on mobile terminals, large screens and other media, and can realize visual interaction with users in multiple business scenarios such as product marketing explanation, financial business handling, information broadcast, consultation and Q&A, so as to bring personalized services to users, improve user experience and residence time, Let digital services "hear" and "see" at the same time.
Virtual person+endorsement
The virtual spokesperson helps the brand "break the circle" through in-depth insight into the new consumption demand of Generation Z (the generation born between 1995 and 2009).
The brand creates a virtual image spokesperson that conforms to its own culture and brand tonality, and becomes a breakthrough in establishing communication with young people. From Qu Chenxi Wilson, Watsons' first virtual idol spokesperson, to L'Oreal's first virtual spokesperson, "Sister M", to cater to young people and enter the circle of Generation Z, Then Huaxizi launched the first brand virtual image "Huaxizi" to lead the new fashion of Chinese products. The virtual image spokesperson is helping the brand quickly attract the attention of young consumers and help the brand capture more target users.
Virtual human+film and television
Film and television is a field with the highest requirements for visual effects and the greatest impact on the society's image cognition and brand of digital people. Arita: Battle Angel, which was released in February 2019 in China, is a typical application case of the combination of virtual digital human technology and film and television. Arita, the heroine in the play, is a character made entirely with digital human technology. The movie uses special face capture instruments to accurately capture the face details of real actors, and then uses them as the motion basis of virtual characters in the computer, so that the actions and expressions of virtual characters can be as natural and realistic as real people.
The acceptance and use of new technologies such as virtual image creation can enlarge the space for imagination expression of science fiction creators. With the development of digital technology, new technologies such as real-time rendering and interactive image are constantly added to film and television creation. How to use digital technology to serve good stories and improve film and television narrative and role emotional experience has become an important topic in the film and television industry. (Zong He)
