Real people love beans "pour", virtual idols "stand"?

At present, virtual idols mainly appear in the form of virtual anchors, star virtual avatars, and brand spokespersons. For example, virtual idols can upload videos on social platforms, interact with users live, and have their own exclusive person settings to meet users' needs for interaction.

——When Chen Jianwen University of Electronic Science and Technology School of Information and Communication Engineering Professor

Recently, Jia Leguan, one of the members of the virtual idol group A-Soul, entered the live broadcast, which caused a wide public discussion for a while.

As a combination of entertainment and technology, virtual idols can organize performance activities, brand endorsements, and participating in live broadcast and goods, etc., have become a new ecosystem of the entertainment industry.

According to the "Virtual Digital People Deep Industry Report", the overall market size of virtual digital people in my country will reach about 270 billion yuan by 2030.

What are the technical logic of virtual idols? What kind of business operation models are behind? How should I regulate the virtual idol -related market? This emerging wind has gradually become the focus of attention.

The wave of the universe promotes the development of the virtual idol industry

At the end of November 2016, Japanese idols Kizuna.ai opened channels on the YouTube video website, and about 400,000 fans were obtained within 4 months. However, unlike other anchors, tripod is a virtual idol produced by computer technology, and she has also become one of the early virtual idol representatives recognized in the circle.

In recent years, with the rise and continuous development of the concept of the Yuan universe, the attention of virtual idols has been mentioned a new height.

"At present, virtual idols mainly appear in the form of virtual anchors, star virtual avatars, brand spokespersons. For example, virtual idols can upload videos on social platforms, interact with users live broadcast, and have their own exclusive person settings to meet users' needs for interaction. "Chen Jianwen, a professor at the School of Information and Communication Engineering of the University of Electronic Science and Technology, said that the live video has the characteristics of low thresholds, the audience, and diversity. Its popularity provides a wide range of application scenarios for the initial development of virtual idols and the technical verification of virtual digital persons.

From a technical point of view, the development of the virtual idol industry has benefited from the continuous progress of technologies such as voice synthesis and virtual figure simulation. The core technologies involved in many fields such as computer graphics, computer vision, deep learning, optimized algorithm, etc. It also includes characteristic modeling, identity -action characteristics, feature -driven, high -precision drawing, etc.

"The production of traditional virtual idols generally use mature action capture and facial capture technology for 2D or 2.5D rendering of cartoon image, which has the characteristics of low cost and easy implementation. In recent years Virtual idols of real -life appearance. "Chen Jianwen explained that such technologies generally follow the following processes, that is, digital virtual idol figure models as data foundations, virtual idol dynamic driving methods as links, through various algorithms to synchronize the expressions and movements of real people and movements. Move to digital virtual idols to achieve "activation" of virtual idols.

In fact, behind every virtual idol, there will be a real person who drives them to "activate". Such real people are usually called "people in the middle" in the industry.

Since it is a virtual idol, why do you need a real person to drive?

Chen Jianwen said that the core point of real -life driver is still needed, because the interactive ability of virtual idols has not yet reached the corresponding level. "Virtual idols are not only a virtual image that can exercise and sing and dance. His/her key core is to interact with the audience like a real person. Tasks that are challenging and cannot be reached under open conditions. "

Therefore, for the needs of open interaction, virtual idols still need real people to drive to meet the needs of fans' intelligent idol intelligence. However, in some scenes with fixed script and weak interaction, such as stage performances, it is possible to make a virtual idol without a live -driven.

"In addition, if you want virtual idols to be more" anthropomorphic ", you need to continue to break through the related technical bottlenecks of natural language processing (NLP) and knowledge maps." Chen Jianwen said that the current technical breakthrough of virtual idols is mainly concentrated in computers In the field of visual, that is, virtual idols can be very similar to real people in appearance, but when virtual idols interact with users, expressions, language, and actions still have no real people. These are important factor that virtual idols can become more and more "anthropomorphic" in the future.

Virtual idol business ability should not be underestimated

From the rise of the Bubble Mart Blind Box series to the hot sales of Disney Lingna Belle's surrounding products, people have seen the strong realization of intellectual property (IP) in today's era. With the gradual maturity of technology, the application of virtual idols has gradually been promoted from online to more abundant scenarios such as film and television dramas, online concerts, etc., and gradually began to rely on IP traffic monetization to achieve business model operations.

"From the perspective of the company's operation, virtual idols have a strong operability and can significantly reduce operating costs for the company; very few adverse consequences such as crisis public relations and defaults caused by negative news. There are certain public relations risks; and the IP of virtual idols can become a company's permanent asset. "Chen Jianwen said that in this model, the effect of the head IP is significant, but the development of the IP at the end of the waist is relatively difficult. Therefore The model of IP traffic monetization is niche, and more business model lies in the production of "accompanying products". The supporters of virtual idols are mainly pan -dimensional users. With the gradual deepening of the second dimension culture, the number of pan -two -dimensional users in my country is increasing, especially in the Z generation (usually a generation born from 1995 to 2009). As the main target group of virtual idols, generations Z are pushing this market into the Red Sea.

"Real idols have limited energy, and most virtual idols can be replaced and replaced by the" person "in the" person "to achieve the effect of '24 hours online companionship '. No matter who drives behind the screen, from the perspective of the user, the same is always the same in front of the eyes. A image. "Chen Jianwen said that as a crowd in the new era, the underlying demand of Maslo in generation Z has been met. It is not tired of the road to pursue top -level needs. Derivatives that wrapped the image of the IP image are more like a sense of belonging for them. Eating food with the feeling of companionship, and the online companionship of virtual idols at any time, just fills their needs.

The virtual idol market needs to be strictly supervised

With the advancement of 5G, AR, VR and other technologies, virtual idols will provide users with a better experience in the application of live broadcasts, VR concerts and other scenarios; the increasing maturity of virtual IP will also improve the brand and virtual virtual IP linkage. In addition, enterprises can also product virtual idols, virtual idols can be used as virtual assistants, virtual teachers, virtual customer service, etc. to more scenarios, achieving diversification of landing scenes and monetization paths.

With the continued popularity of virtual idols, especially the booming development of the Yuan universe related industries, a large amount of capital has poured into the market. The Yuan universe has a large number of digital assets and requires asset vouchers to promote the economic cycle of the Yuan universe. The intangible homogeneity (NFT) is a manifestation of digital asset vouchers in the Yuan universe. Some freshmen universe projects are creating virtual idols with NFT attributes, displaying on various digital media, and the value of NFT is linked to the popularity of idols.

However, because the market system has not yet been improved, all parties such as domestic trading platforms and NFT project creators are still in the stage of cautious exploration.

"The virtual idol industry is still in the stage of starting and development, and related technologies are constantly breaking through and mature. Although the market size of virtual idols is small, people worry about digital financial fraud, copyright disputes and other issues do not often occur often. But at the same time, market supervision and regulation are also weak. "Chen Jianwen said.

In the online live broadcast and film and television drama production, there are clear regulations for the hairstyles, wearing, and language of the characters. Related rules and terms and laws and regulations also have obvious constraints on the behavior of anchors and actors, but there are regulations on virtual idols existing With blank and loopholes. Therefore, virtual idols will appear on the "wiping ball" behavior that walks outside the rules.

"For virtual idols, there is no specific behavioral norms. In the long run, virtual idols may develop towards the 'gray zone'." Chen Jianwen believes that although virtual idols are virtual, they have not existed in the virtual environment, but survived, but survive In the reality of the rule of law, we should formulate relevant laws and regulations and terms of virtual idols as soon as possible to enter the track of standardized and healthy development.

Text: Science and Technology Daily Luo Hongyun Chen Ke

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