After leaving the circle, how can "virtual digital people" walk steadily
Are virtual digital people really the more real people the better?
In order to make the image of the virtual musician "Lil Miquela" living in the United States more realistic, the design team specially added some "freckles" on his cheeks.
However, this situation of "even imperfections are deliberately designed" may instead trigger the "uncanny valley" effect of human beings.
—————————
Through the helmet device, people connect their consciousness with the virtual world, and manipulate the virtual characters representing themselves to experience. All kinds of perceptions such as hearing and smell are very real... The plot in a science fiction movie vividly shows the "metaverse". a possible scenario.
The virtual digital people in the scene are considered to be the aborigines of the metaverse, the digital avatars of natural people in the metaverse.
"If 'metaverse' is a leading concept and vision, then 'digital human' is an important bridge to the future digital world," said Chen Duan, director of the Digital Economy Integration Innovation Development Center of Central University of Finance and Economics.
The "2022 Virtual Human Industry Research Report" released by the Sutu Metaverse Research Institute pointed out that virtual humans are essentially virtual images that exist in digital form, with human appearance, behavior, and even ideological characteristics.
In October 2021, the virtual beauty artist "Liu Yexi" released the first video and immediately became a hot search, and received over 30 million likes in less than a year; the first virtual human talk show host "Mei Shitian" , was hired as the Digital Human Promotion Ambassador of the "Chinese Bridge" Global Chinese Language Conference for Foreigners... Why is the virtual digital human frequently out of the circle and so popular?
In the future, will it be possible to achieve large-scale implementation and realize the "freedom of digital people"?
The virtual digital human goes out of the circle with "strength"
On the first day of the college entrance examination this year, an argumentative essay for the first volume of the National New College Entrance Examination, answered by Baidu digital person "Du Xiaoxiao", was screened on the Internet.
It is generally believed that composition writing for the college entrance examination is a great challenge for digital people, requiring logical coherence, clear theme, and high readability and creativity. Catch up with about 75% of the college entrance examination candidates, and can create more than 40 articles according to the title in just 40 seconds.
"The productivity and creativity of digital humans are self-evident." Chen Duan believes that in some fields, virtual digital humans may even "smash" most humans, whether in terms of production efficiency or creative quality.
Not only that, the literary and artistic works created by him also carry great economic benefits.
At the beginning of June this year, 4 paintings of "Du Xiaoxiao" were made into digital collections and sold online, and the 24-hour sales exceeded 170,000 yuan.
Chen Duan believes that the value achievements created by virtual digital people will not be short-lived, but may achieve sustainable development with the iteration of technology.
"Once the IP of the virtual digital human is successfully operated, it will form a great effect of breaking the circle, traffic and attracting gold. As long as new functions are continuously injected into the IP, it will have a social vitality that transcends time and enter a kind of near-eternal life. state."
At this stage, virtual digital people have come out of the circle with "strength" and have begun to "land and blossom" in many fields such as education, entertainment, and elderly care.
Shen Yang, executive director of the New Media Research Center, School of Journalism, Tsinghua University, believes that in terms of function and value, it can be roughly divided into communication media categories such as virtual idols, professional service value categories such as virtual housekeepers, and virtual children who will enter thousands of households in the future. There are three application scenarios for life companionship.
"The essential logic is to reduce costs and increase efficiency, so that AI can better serve human beings." Tang Yinchen, head of marketing at NetEase Fuxi, said that virtual digital people can be replicas of real-life occupations and cooperate with people.
For example, the 24-hour AI virtual anchor can fill the blank time when the real anchor cannot appear on the camera. "Our test found that the flow of live goods brought by virtual people at the same time period can reach 30% of the flow of goods brought by real people!"
In the financial field, virtual digital people are also very popular.
According to Cheng Zhuo, Marketing Director of Hangzhou Xiangxin Network Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Xianxin"), most of the bank's business processes are automated and standardized, and the use of "digital employees" to provide digital services to replace a large number of repetitive work is not only able to Reduce labor costs, avoid human errors in refined work, and shorten feedback time.
The number of companies entering the virtual digital human race is increasing, and many large factories with intelligent voice technology capabilities are in the layout.
Shenyang and his team found that in the past year, the number of related industry companies engaged in virtual human has increased by 20 times.
According to the "Virtual Digital Human Depth Industry Report" released by the qubit think tank, it is estimated that by 2030, the overall market size of my country's virtual human will reach 270 billion yuan.
Solve the dilemma of large-scale landing and realize "digital freedom"
According to the research of Sutu Metaverse Research Institute, the upper reaches of the virtual human industry chain are mainly technology providers such as Microsoft, which are the cornerstone of the development of virtual human technology; the middle reaches are mainly platform parties such as Xiangxin, which are the pioneers of virtual human technology scenarios; Mainly for operators such as Bilibili, it is the main builder of the virtual human content ecology and the main explorer of the business model.
"Most companies are only one or a few of the entire process of digital human production and operation, and there are high barriers to production and optimization." Li Shiyan, head of Baidu's digital human and robot business, pointed out that the current large-scale implementation of digital human It also faces the problems of relative fragmentation of each node in the industrial chain, the scene has not been effectively opened up, and the high cost of meeting high-frequency demand.
"Currently, digital human production in the industry requires a lot of manual operations, which is slow, inefficient, and expensive," said Lu Yangming, director of Huawei's Cloud Media Service Product Department.
Liu Yexi's production team once stated that "the cost of a short video of Liu Yexi is about several hundred thousand yuan".
According to Chen Junhong, founder and chairman of Xiamen Black Mirror Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Black Mirror"), the reason for the high cost is the scarcity of cross-border talents and the demand for continuous improvement in expressiveness. Technology, but also the integration of aesthetics, psychology and other knowledge, beyond the realization of technology, the pursuit of moving performance, this is an interdisciplinary challenge."
Taking the sign language commentary digital human "Listening Language" who participated in many gold medal events on CCTV Central Video during the Winter Olympics as an example, in order to achieve smooth interaction, Tencent has established a special sign language consultant team, and based on the "National Common Sign Language Common Vocabulary" A sign language translation system has been developed to generate high-accuracy sign language representations with low latency from the language content of the listener.
According to reports, at present, the coverage of listening words and sentences has exceeded 1.6 million.
Meng Fanbo, head of the digital human project team of Tencent AI Interaction Department, believes that with the continuous breakthroughs in 5G, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the industrial ecology of virtual digital human has been initially formed, and the production and application processes have also been effectively simplified, making it possible to achieve large-scale implementation. .
According to Lu Yangming, the digital human platform built by HUAWEI CLOUD combines a large number of cloud and AI technologies to move local rendering to the cloud, shortening the rendering time by more than 50%, shortening the production cycle and reducing costs. The threshold for development allows digital people to enter various industries." In fact, many practitioners are making efforts to enable enterprises and ordinary users to achieve "digital freedom".
Upload a high-definition ID photo to the "MetaMaker Studio" system independently developed by Black Mirror, and in less than 1 second, a reporter's own realistic-style digital person or "Disney"-style digital person will be generated, and only a few clicks of the mouse. , you can freely change facial features, hairstyles, clothing, etc. This is Black Mirror's "universal digital human" solution.
Chen Junhong told reporters from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily that manufacturers can create an enterprise-exclusive digital human with one click, generate virtual content based on digital human with one click, and configure interactive digital human services with one click.
This disintermediation approach allows all enterprises to have the opportunity to build their own IP system, "so that everyone can become the creator of the future virtualization era."
How to go well in the future
In October last year, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued the "14th Five-Year Plan for Scientific and Technological Development of Radio, Television and Online Audio-visualization", which pointed out that it is necessary to promote the widespread use of virtual anchors and animated sign language in the production of news broadcasts, weather forecasts, variety shows, science and education programs.
"With the predictable trillion-level market size and the promotion of policies, we are very optimistic about the development prospects of the virtualization field." Chen Junhong said.
According to data from Qixinbao, in just one month in 2022, nearly 100 financings in the field of virtual humans will be raised, and the cumulative financing amount will exceed 400 million yuan.
In the context of technological upgrading, compared with the early two-dimensional virtual idols such as "Hatsune Miku", the national style virtual idol "Nanmengxia" produced in September last year has undergone a leap-forward upgrade from appearance to interaction. Facial expressions, movements, and voices make them closer to real idols, bringing users a more natural and realistic immersive experience.
"Although the digital world is virtual, its content must have a realistic foundation, which is the source of immersion." Cheng Zhuo said, "Making virtual people more real and natural will always be the direction of the industry's efforts."
However, is the virtual digital human really as real as possible?
Chen Duan doesn't think so.
She mentioned that in order to make the image of the virtual musician "Lil Miquela" living in the United States more realistic, the design team specially added some "freckles" on her cheeks.
However, this situation of "even imperfections are deliberately designed" may instead trigger the "uncanny valley" effect of human beings.
This theory was proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970.
He believes that at first, humans will have positive emotions for robots that are similar in appearance and actions to humans, but when the similarity reaches a certain level, humans will have a stiff and terrifying feeling when they perceive the subtle differences between them and real people, resulting in extremely negative. and disgusting reactions.
Therefore, enterprises do not have to demand the "authenticity" of virtual digital humans. "The evolution of virtual humans will be from anthropomorphic, to homohuman, and then to superhuman," Shenyang said.
"Although the virtual human is not an independent subject of civil conduct, as far as the team behind it is concerned, there are real interest demands." Chen Duan believes that the virtual digital human may cause some new types of disputes at the legal level in the future.
Shenyang pointed out that issues such as privacy and content compliance require urgent attention.
Although virtual digital humans are digital avatars or holographic images that exist in the metaverse, the privacy issues they bring are real.
On the one hand, there is the problem of permanent retention of deep physiological privacy data of users, including eye movements and brain waves. On the other hand, the innovation and creation activities of a large number of users are currently carried out on the platforms constructed by companies operating the virtual digital industry, which means , Metaverse technology giants will master the digital traces of massive users’ intellectual activities, and the current law has not yet made clear regulations regarding the privacy concerns brought about by the Metaverse and virtual digital people.
In this regard, some experts suggest that the development of the Metaverse should strictly adhere to the traditional boundaries between the private and public spheres, protect personal privacy as much as possible, and pre-design a retirement mechanism for individuals to withdraw from the Metaverse based on national conditions, so as to reduce the risk of Metaverse privacy to a minimum. Absolutely controllable range.
According to the prediction of the Speedway Metaverse Research Institute, in the future, if virtual humans violate laws and ethics in the metaverse, their identity owners will be the main responsible persons and will be judged separately by the virtual and real societies.
China Youth Daily, China Youth Daily reporter Wei Wan intern Chen Xinmei Source: China Youth Daily
June 21, 2022 Version 06