Press the button, and in just a few seconds, a real person transformed into a virtual singer, singing and dancing on the real variety show stage.
3 On September 22, after the singing variety show "Alter Ego" launched by Fox (21st Century Fox) in the United States was premiered, the above scene of "transformation" immediately attracted a large number of audience discussion.
translation: This feels like "Black Mirror"
translation: So Apple and Facebook joined forces to make a TV, allowing society to begin to adapt to the metaverse
virtual image singing on stage, real contestants retreated behind the scenes, and the judges on the scene commented in real time. After careful adjustment by the special effects artists on the scene, the stage content and form appeared completely different from the previous variety shows.
No matter what, one fact is: through backend motion capture, AR/VR and other technologies, the audience's perception of variety shows is changing, but sometimes this cognitive change is not always positive.
Virtually enters reality, opening the meta-universe variety show
Compared with traditional variety shows, the biggest difference of "Alter Ego" comes from its virtual characters and the artistic expression form it extends.
In the first episode of the program, FOX invited a total of 20 contestants to participate, with an age span ranging from 17 to 60 years old. From the perspective of effect, the three-dimensional appearance of virtual characters is presented to the judges. Apart from the obvious difference between the painting style and appearance, it is almost the same as the real-life contestant.
Take one of the contestants Jack Thomson as an example. What surprised Beidou Scott was not his textured singing, but rather his mobility capture precision.
In the program, Beidou Scott's hair scratching action before singing shocked the judges and audiences. The reason is that on the one hand, this action is performed in real time and has high requirements for delays; on the other hand, fine details such as the fluttering of virtual people's hair are also captured and restored to the greatest extent.
In addition to hair, virtual people still express it well in some micro-expressions and actions. For example, when the judges make a more harsh evaluation, the virtual people will follow the changes in the expressions of the real person and even include crying. Combining the different appearances of the live-action contestant and the virtual characters, the whole performance is full of freshness.
But to say the latest and strange thing is the unique presentation of virtual characters in the form of performance.
Thanks to the support of motion capture, AR/VR and special effects technologies, virtual people can also achieve magical operations that real players cannot do, and virtual people can do, such as making the patterns on the character's arms flow like water, or sending small love from their chests during communication.
And during the performance, the expression of virtual characters is much richer than that of real people, such as some characters who can achieve the effect of taking off in the air during the performance, or splashing gorgeous stars and ripples on the stage, etc. The addition of these amazing stage effects can be said to greatly extend the expression of variety shows.
It is worth mentioning that according to the image of the virtual character, the "skill special effects" on them will also be different. Perhaps the previous character is to show love, and the next is to discharge the eyes of the judges and the audience, but all skill special effects have a common purpose, that is, to increase the fun and expressiveness of interaction with the judges and the audience.
actually took a lot of thought to the team.
According to Rolling Stone, in order to complete this program, the production team not only used 14 cameras to shoot, eight of which had camera tracking technology, but also arranged countless short-pitch infrared marks on the top of the studio to track and locate the characters with high precision and low latency.
In addition, the height, pupil color, character special effects and other data of virtual characters, as well as motion capture data and lighting data will also be transmitted to the processor in the background, and the camera's picture is combined with the Unreal engine for real-time rendering. Under a series of complicated work, the program that was originally expected to be filmed within 3 weeks finally took 6 months. The Fox team's research and development of the technical level, including the combination of image and special effects technology, took more than one year to achieve the above results.
FOX said in an interview, "The appearance of virtual people breaks the limitations of appearance, figure, and even gender. With this shell, everyone can hide behind virtual people and release their talents to the fullest. With this form of artistic expression, contestants can avoid anxiety and do not need to pay too much attention to their appearance."
Although it took a lot of effort to produce this program, sometimes the results do not necessarily match the effort - unexpected situations still happen.
ratings plummeted, the lies of the Metaverse Variety Show
At present, "Alter Ego" has been aired for two episodes, but this novel program, which claims to "break the boundaries between reality and virtuality", has not received the praise that most people imagine.
public data shows that the debut of "Alter Ego" only won 2.93 million viewers, with a rating of only 0.65, while the debut of "The Masked Singer" played on the same day in Fox reached 1.11. On YouTube, the show is even more terrible, with only about 40,000 views in a week.
After playing the second episode, the audience now seems to be more keen to focus on criticizing the program compared to the freshness at the beginning of the article. On IMDb, "Alter Ego" scored only 3.1 points, and the comments almost one-sidedly believed that the show was not as cool as imagined, and many media even turned on ironic mode for this.
American entertainment magazine Variety commented, "The inspiring contestants showed their hearts, although they obviously didn't want it. This show really reminds me of the earlier " American Idol ", and did not bring anything new on this basis."
English The evaluation of " Guardian " in China is even more ruthless: If the purpose of "American Idol" is "Let's tell you whether you are a good singer", then the purpose of "The Voice of China" is "Let's tell you whether you are a good singer, but we don't look at your face". When it comes to "Masked Singer", the purpose becomes "We don't care whether you are a good singer, because you are a little famous and dressed strangely."
But obviously, progress is not all good. Now the singing competition has evolved into the form of "Alter Ego". This show is an absolute nightmare in concept and execution. It should be buried in concrete and then hidden at the bottom of Mariana Trench . I promise that people will talk about this show in the next few decades, because this show should be a tragedy of all mankind within half a century, and people will always ask - how did this thing be made?
What triggered the first avalanche of the metaverse?
"Alter Ego" took half a year to shoot. For this reason, FOX also specially learned the technology for a year. Why did the results presented make the audience burst into pieces? In the view of GameLook, there are two reasons: one is the outdated role model, and the other is the lack of interactivity.
Although the performance of the program is presented in real-time rendering, in fact, the audience and judges on the scene still cannot directly see the virtual characters, but need to use a large screen on the scene to observe. When it comes to the comments, the judges and hosts have to perform from time to time, and the audience on the scene also pretend to see it. In this way, "Alter Ego", which originally focused on emotional orientation and claimed that it would give social terrorists the opportunity to speak out, has added a layer of incongruity and a little less realism. What's worse is that the modeling level of these virtual images really makes people return to the PS2 era.
In response, the Guardian commented that it was "too ugly" and said, "In a parallel world, the characters in "Alter Ego" will be beautiful, vivid and realistic CGI characters, which will make the appreciation and dramatic performance of the performance reach another level. But in the world we live in, watching "Alter Ego" is watching a row of dull eyes in PS2, shaking NPCs singing the most easily forgotten songs in the past 15 years."
From a time perspective, FOX is not the first company to think of doing virtual character variety shows. In fact, as early as October last year, iQiyi launched a virtual character talent competition program " Cross-dimensional New Star ". From choosing boys and girls to choosing "paper group", iQiyi has once again set a precedent for integrating virtual characters into large-scale variety shows.
But unfortunately, this program has also been criticized by many viewers due to the modeling span. On Zhihu, some netizens said that the original paintings released by the program are too different from the actual modeling. Such modeling cannot awaken emotional resonance. It not only cannot attract the core group of the two-dimensional group, but also makes it difficult for the three-dimensional group to grasp.
I have complained so much, are there any positive examples? The answer is yes.
At this year's Nvidia product launch conference, CEO Lao Huang ( Huang Renxun ) successfully played the gamers around the world with the help of hyperrealistic digital people. After Nvidia took the initiative to announce the truth a month later, players not only did not get angry, but instead applauded and praised it. It is not difficult to find that only by making the modeling of virtual characters more refined and more in line with modern aesthetics can we truly integrate into reality and resonate with players.
modeling is only the first step. As a program, interactivity is the key to determining its success. As mentioned above, the main reason why the audience thinks "Alter Ego" is inconsistent is that those deliberate performances have caused the audience to feel that they are not interactive.
In another reality show that also centers on virtual characters, "Rival Peak", even though the modeling of the show is slightly insufficient, its strong interactivity has won the feat of "600,000 people participating at the same time".
The program's approach is to place 12 AI contestants in a snow-capped area where they must solve the puzzles they encounter through solidarity and collaboration in order to survive to the end. The program adopts a 7×24-hour uninterrupted live broadcast, and over the full 12-week period, viewers can observe, help or hinder one or more AI contestants and generate points through dedicated interactive live video streams.
By comparing the number of role points, the program will eliminate one contestant every week. Users can switch between different roles’ perspectives at any time to watch the current status and activities of a specific role. In other words, the actions and staying and leaving of characters depend entirely on the behavior of the audience. This interactive nature similar to playing games also made the show famous.
As of the end of the first season, the show's playback time has exceeded 100 million minutes. In the first six weeks, the program was viewed over 30 million minutes, with a maximum of 600,000 people watching the actions of AI characters, and the players generated more than 400 million points in the live broadcast.
Observing the development of virtual characters in recent years, interactivity has become a weather vane in the industry. No matter which entrant is, most companies are beginning to move towards a more interactive direction. For example, the A-Soul girl group under ByteDance not only opened live broadcasts, but also participated in concerts, communities, etc., aiming to use advanced technology to strengthen the connection between roles and people and reality.
In the context of the metaverse, virtual characters have entered a new chapter. Let virtual characters interact with real people is the key to truly breaking the boundaries between virtual and reality. Therefore, whether the virtual characters are controlled by a group of people or played by individuals, their essence is that individuals as audiences find a sense of collective identity through interactions with virtual characters.
In this process, especially in the moment when holographic projection is not widely used, how to strengthen this collective identity and avoid incongruity, such as the empty stage in "Alter Ego" and the empty dialogue among the host should become a focus of manufacturers in the next stage.
With the continuous progress of technological research, deepening social group cognition, and continuous advancement of social digital transformation, meta-universe will continue to stand above the trend. As the lead person, the virtual character will also become the first key for the entrant to open the door to the meta-universe. But what to do next may need to be more cautious.
