‘Our goal for the next two years is to make digital humans free for everyone by opening up Baidu Intelligent Cloud’s XiLing platform,’ said Li Shiyan, head of Baidu Intelligent Cloud’s AI human-computer interaction lab, at a recent tech salon.
News anchors, livestream sales hosts, corporate staff, entertainment stars – more and more industries are building their own virtual human images. The metaverse has opened limitless imagination, and a trillion-yuan market may start from a virtual figure on a screen.
Virtual reality technology keeps maturing and spreading across industries; the metaverse arrived on the scene, and virtual humans are seen as its hottest entry ticket. Powered jointly by VR, AI and other emerging technologies, anime-style virtual humans have caught on across sectors and drawn growing attention.
As early as 2017, a talent show put a ‘virtual contestant’ on stage to compete with human performers – before ‘virtual human’ or ‘metaverse’ were terms of art. It appeared as an anime character, and the songs and voice it performed were electronically synthesised.
Today’s hot virtual humans fall into two types: idol-type, whose value lies closer to anime and whose core is the IP behind them and its derivative potential; and functional-type, whose core is technical capability, demanding more from modelling, driving, rendering and AI than the idol type.
Many attention-grabbing virtual humans only satisfy entertainment needs and will soon face questions about their sustainable development. Some companies, though, are building digital humans with genuine social functions that serve society in practice.
Li sees three hurdles before large-scale industrial deployment. First, the industry chain is fragmented at each node and cannot collaborate efficiently, so making and tuning digital humans carries high barriers – most companies can only handle one or a few steps of the full production and operations cycle. Second, service and performance scenarios are not effectively connected: performance-type digital humans lack the business capabilities clients need, while service-type ones struggle to engage users emotionally. Third, production efficiency keeps costs stubbornly high for agile, high-frequency demands.
The metaverse hype of 2021 is cooling into reflection as 2022 opens: no unified definition of the metaverse exists, and the technology behind it is complex – not a pile of buzzwords but something that needs long refinement. Virtual humans are not real people, but if their functions land in real use they carry social value – and that may be when they become the metaverse’s true entry point.
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