Our reporter Guo Jingyuan
On the evening of December 31, 2020, as many as 8 New Year's Eve party appeared on the screen, many of them were "distorted" figures: the digital girl "What If" was interspersed with Zhejiang Satellite TV’s New Year’s Eve party in the next four trailer VCR, Incarnate as a virtual assistant in the AR world and perform heart-warming stories; Dragon TV’s New Year’s Eve party, the virtual idol "Ling Yuan" with millions of fans, also performed the song "Nine Nine Eighty One" with singer Feng Timo...
In recent years, thanks to breakthroughs in deep learning algorithms, virtual anchors, virtual employees, virtual idols and other virtual characters have successfully entered the public eye, and the intelligence-driven digital human industry has gradually improved.
The "2020 White Paper on the Development of Virtual Digital Humans" led by the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute of China Academy of Information and Communications pointed out that the application of virtual digital humans has brought changes to traditional fields.
Through the integration of virtual digital human products with production and life, its large-scale, customizable, and reproducible capabilities can promote the improvement of traditional link processes, increase efficiency, and reduce costs, and greatly enhance business experience.
"As the market value of virtual digital humans continues to be released, it will be more comprehensively and deeply integrated into all walks of life, and give full play to its application value and potential." Shi Lin, deputy director of the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Institute of Cloud Computing and Big Data, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology Said that with the continuous advancement of artificial intelligence technologies such as computer vision, speech and natural language processing, virtual digital humans will gradually have the ability to see, listen, speak, and understand, so as to achieve integrated applications in multiple scenarios and multiple fields.
High-quality "virtual idols" attract countless eyes as soon as they appear, but is it enough to have beautiful avatars?
“It’s far from enough. It’s meaningless to have an image but cannot create an emotional connection with users.” Said Xia Bing, general manager of Hangzhou Wanxiang Culture and Technology Co., Ltd. The only way to combine image, technology, content and landing scenes through in-depth operation , In order to create a true "idol" and reach users.
Therefore, virtual idols must not only have human appearances, but also human behaviors and thoughts, from digital appearance to interactive behavior and intelligent thinking.
Industry experts said that as the technology matures, the time for the birth of virtual idols will become shorter and shorter, coupled with the increasingly picky tastes of the audience, virtual digital people also need to master the "18 martial arts" and spend a lot of time learning and improving.
"Users cannot intuitively feel the technology, but can perceive the content that is accurately delivered through technological innovation and targeted operations." Xia Bing said that in addition to cutting-edge technology and high-quality content, they also need to find the market and user needs.
With the development of technology, the "cake" of virtual idols is getting bigger and bigger.
Since 2019, under the joint efforts of game companies and technology companies, the upsurge of "star making" for virtual digital humans has come.
In this regard, Wang Qing, senior technical manager of Huya Live, said that the competition for the creation of virtual digital humans is intensifying, which puts forward higher requirements on content quality and accuracy and digital recognition technology. "We hope to develop towards a more automated production method and rely on algorithms. The improvement of technology allows every user and content producer to create easily." Wang Qing said.
It is worth noting that the development of the virtual digital human industry still lacks upstream and downstream collaboration and communication.
In this regard, Yang Yi, vice president of Lingyun Optical Technology Co., Ltd., said that at present, the number of open source databases in China is small, the scale is small, and the continuous update motivation is insufficient. It is difficult for small and medium-sized developers to have large computing power support.
Therefore, it is urgent to enhance enterprise technology collaboration, product interconnection and active interaction between upstream and downstream, and build an open source ecological community with standards, specifications and open services for industry applications and developers.
Experts call for strengthening the overall planning and top-level design of virtual digital human standardization work through the establishment of a virtual digital human technology and product standard system, based on domestic and international references, and accelerating the development of key standards and basic standards around common problems in industrial development .
It is not only necessary to protect high-quality digital human manufacturers, but also to use standardized means to improve the marketization efficiency of technological innovation and promote the healthy development of the industry.