This year, there are many virtual people, but even if manufacturers join the market, capital increases, and policy support, they have not been able to produce a virtual person IP or top virtual person who has broken the circle in a truly sense. ——Liu Yexi co-founder and CEO of Chuangyi Technology and "Liu Yexi" trader Liang Zikang
is just a cloud automation tool, or even an image, even though it is given its character and story, it cannot form a virtual person in the complete sense. ——Zhang Jianghong, CEO of Beijing Lanxi Investment Management Co., Ltd.
As virtual people penetrate into production and life in all aspects, future applications may increase exponentially, and R&D costs will be further diluted and reduced. ——Chen Duan, director of the Center for Integration and Innovation of Digital Economy, Central University of Finance and Economics,
, the original universe has not arrived, and the indigenous virtual people are popular first. According to the "Virtual Digital Human In-depth Industry Report", the overall market size of my country's virtual digital humans will reach 270 billion yuan by 2030. The popularity of the virtual human track is in the words of Feng Zheng, vice president of , Shunwei Capital: "It is better to enter early than to enter late, and it is better to enter heavily than to enter lightly."
On October 13, at the virtual person online salon held by Nandu Bay Finance Society, Nandu reporters interviewed researchers from industries, investors and academic circles, and discussed with them the "virtual reality" of virtual people. Liang Zikang, co-founder and CEO of Chuangyi Technology and trader of "Liu Yexi", an internet celebrity virtual man, observed changes in the market, "The track is indeed hot, but none of them seem to be out of the circle this year." Another guest who participated in this salon, Zhang Jianghong, CEO of Beijing Lanxi Investment Management Co., Ltd., said bluntly, "Fire is false fire, heat is false heat, because the current virtual people cannot solve the urgent needs in work, life, and industry."
Chen Duan, director of the Digital Economy Integration Innovation and Development Center of Central University of Finance and Economics, said in the salon that although with the help of the east wind of the metaverse, virtual people are currently "human on the enterprise side and curious on the user side", and there are also benchmark application scenarios, due to factors such as technology climbing, insufficient scenario development, high cost to meet high-frequency demands, and relatively fragmented industrial chain nodes, virtual people are still in the early stage of development, "especially in the ideal of "the entrance to connect the virtual world and the real world"," the performance of its industrial linkage effect depends on the support of its own technological evolution rhythm and the support of the external ecological system.
Current situation
"There are many virtual people this year, and none of them break the circle."
More and more virtual people are coming. "At the beginning of last year, when we first entered the Metaverse track to build Liu Yexi, there were about 30,000 virtual digital people worldwide, and now there are countless. The data I see is that there are about 200,000 new domestic companies related to virtual people," said Liang Zikang, Chuangyi Technology. In addition to the Internet giants trying to build a metaverse platform,
has spent a lot of money on layout, such as content production companies such as Digital Kingdom, tool companies related to modeling, rendering, and motion capture, as well as IP planning, operation companies, AI manufacturers, etc., players from different links in the industrial chain have also entered the market. Even if the unrelated companies do not prevent the launch of virtual people as their image spokespersons, no one wants to miss this rare new trend.
investment market is no exception. According to incomplete statistics, since the beginning of 2022, a total of 24 related investment and financing events have occurred in the "virtual human" field. In terms of financing amount, Shiyou Technology, a virtual human technology provider, and Mofa Technology, which is committed to "building virtual world infrastructure", have both completed financing of over 100 million yuan this year. At the end of September, Chuangyi Technology, which Liu Yexi belongs to, received investment from Dachen Caizhi; in October, Hillhouse Heshunwei Capital jointly invested in Huiye Technology, a virtual life AI-driven technology service provider, with an amount of tens of millions of yuan.
From the market feedback, with the emergence of virtual people in the fields of finance, culture and tourism, entertainment and public welfare, user acceptance has increased significantly. At the same time, virtual people have also become the darling of major brands. According to incomplete statistics, in the first half of 2022, there were nearly 30 virtual brand commercial cooperation, such as Liu Yexi holding hands with Clarins , Ah Xi collaborated with Lancome , and A-Soul as Keep product ambassadors, etc.
Is virtual people really popular? In this regard, in Liang Zikang's view, "There are many virtual people this year, but even if manufacturers join the market, capital increases, and policy support, they have not been able to produce a virtual person IP or top virtual person who has broken the circle in a truly sense."
As for whether the market is hot or not, Liang Zikang believes that the core lies in the participants' understanding of the market. "If we follow the strategy of the Web2.0 era, no matter how many virtual people appear, it may still not be enough to support market demand." He said that from the perspective of the metaverse, virtual people are still in a very early stage, which is not enough to describe it as hot. "In the future, everyone may have their own digital clone, and the number of virtual people may become tens of millions or even the same as the number of real people." In the eyes of Zhang Jiang, an investor who invested in many successful innovative enterprises, the ideal virtual people product includes software and hardware, combined with artificial intelligence , domestic virtual people products are more used in entertainment, marketing, games and other functions. The functions used to solve physical needs are basically not in place, and the virtual fire is strong. "It is impossible to truly solve the urgent needs of industrial, production and life scenarios, and cannot meet the market demand, which leads to continuous operating income and continuous profits. For example, it cannot complete a complete set of actions to take care of disabled elderly people in for eating or living," Zhang Jianghong explained, "I think the word scene is quite fashionable. To put it bluntly, it is not able to meet a truly extensive demand and has not truly walked out of the cloud. Of course, some virtual people are indeed quite popular in brand marketing at present, but this is the most superficial, including the virtual people of digital twins. Although they have been implemented in games, social and other scenarios, they do not have hardware such as smart wearables, physical forms of automation functions, and support from powerful computing power. Their use and commercial value are limited."
Regarding the financing boom and the current situation of virtual human 2VC (for venture capitalists), Zhang Jianghong said that if a startup company builds a concept to facilitate financing, just "follow the trend" and tailors a business model for VC without considering sustainable operations, then "2VC is just a false proposition, because no one will pay the bill."
defines
"With the advancement of technology, virtual people will show different characteristics."
In fact, before discussing whether virtual people are fired and whether they are worth spending money, we must first figure out what virtual people are, is a star who will never collapse, an IP that can be continuously developed, a " perpetual motion machine " worker, or a digital identity that everyone in the future has mastered?
At present, since virtual people are in the early stages of industry development, there is no consensus on their definition in the industry, but there are multiple classification methods. Among them, according to the technical classification, virtual people can be divided into algorithm-driven (AI real-time or face-pinching, etc.) and real-life-driven ( motion capture ); according to the visual dimension, they can be divided into two-dimensional and hyperreal types; according to the business model classification, they can be divided into IP virtual people, including KOL type, singing and dancing type, brand type, idol type, celebrity clone type launched by entertainment companies, as well as non-IP virtual people with functional, academic and identity type.
Chen Duan, director of the Digital Economy Integration Innovation and Development Center of Central University of Finance and Economics, pointed out in the salon that virtual people are not a separate track, but will penetrate into traditional industries in all aspects, becoming an auxiliary means and scenario optimization tool in the transformation and upgrading of traditional business formats.
In Chen Duan's view, virtual humans are a highly integrated technological innovation cluster. It is not only a product, but also a traffic entrance and interactive interface. In the future, it may also become an application-oriented traffic diversion tool combined with new computing platforms. "With the advancement of technology and the expansion of its own application scenarios, virtual people will show different characteristics and the concept may also change, such as from the beginning, Hatsune Miku's idol-type virtual people who mainly use IP operations, followed by companionship, functional and even digital clones, etc.," Chen Duan said.
Liang Zikang admitted that every participant in the market may have a different understanding of virtual people.Web2.0 practitioners think it is a virtual idol more; brands will think that virtual people are the apps in the meta-universe era, which are the way to communicate with users in the future and are also the symbol of future brands; Web3.0 companies may think that virtual people are an important channel to the meta-universe, "because there are only a few entrances to the meta-universe, including identity systems, value systems, immersive experiences, digital people, digital products, and digital space."
However, in Liang Zikang's view, "The core of virtual people is companionship, which is a new way to accompany humans in the future. Now, whether young people or the elderly need a higher spiritual companionship, and this demand will continue to magnify." He believes that with the iteration and maturity of digital twin technology, our virtual human image will be able to communicate and contact with friends and family in the metaverse in the future. The way humans move towards immortality is not carbon-based , but silicon-based.
Liang Zikang said that when their Chuangyi team entered the metaverse, they chose the virtual human track. When they created Liu Yexi, they thought it clear that what they wanted to create was not an idol or a live broadcast room seller, but a virtual human who could bring emotions closer to users. "What we want to bring into the metaverse is not only digital assets, but more importantly, the connection and emotions between people."
At the same time, he always believes that the metaverse should start with content, because the content represents the user's perception of your IP. In the future, when everyone's technology and presentation methods are converging, the connection point between the user and the metaverse platform will be the content and the IP itself. "The user will follow your IP or content to choose hardware, or go to a certain metaverse."
In the current definitions, virtual people have always been separated from physical reality. However, in the view of Zhang Jianghong, who has tracked and investigated and invested in many hardware, semiconductors, chips, and AI companies over the past seven years, virtual people must be combined with physical forms and are an artificial intelligence that combines software and hardware. Simply put, virtual people are representatives of the visualization of artificial intelligence, and physicalization is a high-simulation robot. "If it is just a cloud automation tool or even an image, even if it is given a character and story, it cannot form a virtual person in the complete sense. It must have a physical form, a simultaneous intelligence, perception, action and communication, which can solve the tasks of human production and life scenarios." The current virtual person may be just an early embryonic form, and the market's understanding of it is still relatively one-sided.
She believes that there are currently only three real virtual human companies in the world, namely Tesla, Nvidia and AMD, "because their chips, computing power and hardware form the basis of virtual humans."
Dilemma
Scenarios are scarce, technology is upward and cost is downward. Although with the help of the "east wind" of the meta-universe, the financing and operation of the virtual human industry at home and abroad are in full swing, and it may open up a new development model of the digital economy , it is still facing many difficulties as a new technology and new business model.
According to the general saying in the industry, virtual people are divided into three stages: "creating people, raising people, and employing people". Among them, "creating people" refers to creating virtual people, and "raising people" refers to incubating virtual people to have traffic and influence, and putting virtual people into real application scenarios to create value is the so-called "employment". At present, there are problems that are difficult to solve in the short term in these three stages.
Chen Duan said that the biggest bottleneck at present is the technology level, and the industry is facing the problem of "technology upward and cost downward". "The contradiction in the virtual human market is still the science fiction sense of marketing and the backward reality at the bottom of the technology." She said that this is particularly obvious in practical virtual humans - natural and realistic interaction experience and natural communication methods all take longer to iterate technology to finally achieve it. At the same time, if a pure idol-type virtual person wants to maintain long-term social and commercial vitality, its later operation and maintenance costs are also quite high.
It is understood that rapid generation and AI drive are also technical difficulties in the current virtual human industry.Only by achieving rapid generation of virtual people, solving the two major problems of low-cost large-scale copying and high-frequency content output, and at the same time getting rid of the constraints of "the person in the middle" (Editor's note: professional terms refer to people who manipulate virtual people for live broadcasts and other performances, and generally refer to any worker who provides a source of sound), the commercial value of virtual people may be better stimulated.
From the perspective of technical construction, the production of virtual humans involves a variety of underlying technologies such as computer graphics, graphics rendering, motion capture, deep learning, and speech synthesis. Chen Duan said that due to the technical distinction, virtual people are currently exploring the two tracks of idol type and service type, and the service scenes and performing arts scenes are not effectively connected. For example, performing arts digital people do not have the business capabilities required by customers, or service-oriented digital people are difficult to have emotional connection with users.
"The high R&D cost is also one of the factors that restrict the large-scale implementation of virtual people, and this is also related to the limited application scenarios." Chen Duan pointed out that only some typical benchmark scenarios have been developed now, but with the comprehensive penetration of virtual people into the production and life end, future applications may increase exponentially, and R&D costs will be further diluted and reduced. If they are reduced to less than 10,000 yuan or 1,000 yuan, then the digital clone may become a rigid demand, just like everyone is creating their own image in WeChat Moments.
Liang Zikang had previously told Nandu reporters that in the more than half a year before the launch of Liu Yexi, the investment in R&D costs, personnel costs, and technical costs was about one million yuan. Last year, the cost of the first Liu Yexi short video was hundreds of thousands of yuan.
In Blue Cursor "Metaverse Marketing Manual", the cost of creating a super realistic virtual person's image is about 1 million, the video is about 200,000-800,000 yuan per piece, and a picture is tens of thousands of yuan. It costs more than 100,000 yuan to create a virtual Q version image or a two-dimensional image. It costs thousands of yuan per second to create a video, not counting operations, subsequent content production and intelligent driving research and development. This also leads to most virtual person projects being on the road of continuous "burning money".
Taking advantage of the hot concept of the meta-universe, although virtual people have appeared as "baby boom", only a very small number of people can become popular. In October 2021, Liu Yexi was released. In just two weeks, the total number of exposures on the entire network reached 5 billion. Liang Zikang summarized Liu Yexi's breaking circle as "50% is a grasp of the algorithm content, 30% is a breakthrough in the technical level, 10% is an operational system and logic, and the last and most critical 10% is luck, because of the fire of the Metaverse, Facebook has changed its name."
A large number of virtual people "reported" on major platforms and then fell into the sea. Liang Zikang emphasized that although the wind has arrived, the threshold for creating a virtual person who can become famous is also very high. Content production, operational capabilities and technology are indispensable. "If you don't have content production capabilities, you can't solve the traffic problem and can't reach the minds of users. The continuous traffic and revenue depend on operational capabilities. At the same time, without good technology, you can't achieve lower cost and higher efficiency than others, and you can't create high-precision virtual people to achieve continuous content production, etc.."
"In addition to technology, the core of virtual people is application scenarios. Some corporate laboratories have good technology and good modeling, but entrepreneurs must have the ability to commercialize and use virtual people in scenarios that can be widely used." Zhang Jianghong said that although some business models have been explored, virtual people still lack sufficient influence on implementation.
For the investment in meta-universe and innovative and creative enterprises, Zhang Jianghong has a set of investment logic called PPC, including three dimensions: Personality, Product, and Cycle. Among them, the product dimension mainly considers three factors: whether the product has large-scale market demand, which is the most basic factor; whether it has achieved exceeding the existing technical level; whether the supply and demand state is in short supply or seeking application scenarios. She said that the companies she is optimistic about are "the order volume exceeds the production capacity", "this is also the reason why virtual people and VR have been popular for so long but I haven't taken action," Zhang Jianghong explained.
Liang Zikang pointed out the possible problems in the future virtual human industry from another perspective."Like Unity and Nvidia have made UGC editing tools. In the next one to three years, everyone may be able to obtain their own digital clones more easily, but the core is how to make the digital clones better applied." Liang Zikang said that from traditional marketing to Internet marketing, social media marketing and then to algorithmic marketing, the next era will become NFT marketing and meta-universe marketing. Every time this medium is changing, its people, goods and goods, and product and sales will also change. In this process, companies or brands need to master a brand new ability to acquire users and traffic. "It is easy to make tools, but how to detonate this virtual person in a scientific and effective way and turn it into a symbol of the enterprise is difficult."
path
3 billion industry explodes?
With the change of technology, the application scope of virtual people is expanding, the industrial chain is gradually enriching, the business model continues to evolve, and the monetization methods are gradually diversifying. The "Virtual Digital Human In-depth Industry Report" predicts that by 2030, the overall market size of my country's virtual digital humans will reach 270 billion yuan. Among them, identity-type virtual digital people (virtual idols, digital clones) account for about 175 billion, and service-type virtual digital people develop relatively steadily, with a scale of about 95 billion yuan.
At present, virtual people are on the 2B side, mainly used in the fields of finance, culture and tourism, education, and retail e-commerce. The monetization model allows demanders to purchase virtual people to replace real people, such as virtual customer service, virtual tour guides, virtual mentors, virtual goods hosts, etc., that is, the "digital workers" bought by enterprises for money, which are now mainly simple interaction.
. On the 2C side, virtual people are mainly concentrated in the fields of media, games, entertainment, e-commerce, etc., focusing on creating virtual idols (IPs). Similar to the Internet economy, first expand fan traffic, and then monetize through traffic.
For the three guests participating in the discussion, virtual people must not just stay at the fan economy level. Virtual people cannot become a substitute for internet celebrities or KOLs, but should be assistants in the real world or digital twin identities that everyone has. The prerequisite is that technological progress can achieve low-cost mass production, personalized customization and full-intelligent interaction of virtual people, which can promote virtual people to multiple industry applications, help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency, and become an entrance to connect the virtual world and the real world in the form of digital clones, AI symbiosis, etc.
Chen Duan pointed out that the key factors driving the development of the virtual human industry are actually to return to technological progress, because the implementation of many commercialization paths cannot be separated from the support of the technical layer, and the other is the effective identification of the market. She believes that virtual people are not a simple alternative product, it is an empowering product. Through some advantages and characteristics of virtual digital people, it can empower the original scenarios and existing industries. This market demand originally exists, but it only uses new elements and new carriers like virtual people to better meet old needs. For example, live streaming, brand marketing, fan economy, which can be regarded as an attempt to resolve problems such as head dependence and external risks by the idol industry. However, such idol-type virtual people need to make efforts in IP creation and operation. "It is difficult to imagine a situation where a virtual digital person is lukewarm but suddenly becomes popular after one or two years of operation."
In Zhang Jianghong's view, if it is an idol-like virtual person, the encryption art virtual person born on the blockchain may be closer to the metaverse, and virtual persons like "people in the middle" will definitely be eliminated. She said that in addition to IP operations, virtual people must always highlight their use value, that is, they need to be applied to real jobs, such as digital surveying and mapping, high-risk work, life-oriented scenarios such as care, etc., and use artificial intelligence to bring changes to the B-end of traditional industries.
As for the prospects of the C-end and B-end, Zhang Jianghong gave his answer from the perspective of corporate operations, "Companies like Tesla that have barriers from capital and technology can start from the C-end, so that virtual people can fly into ordinary people's homes. However, for startups, entering the B-end and steadily solving the specific pain points of the market demand can instead allow the company to quickly generate operating income and achieve sustainable development. As long as you can find universal applications with high frequency, multiple scenarios and low cost."
, Liang Zikang believes that no matter when the next phenomenon-level virtual person appears, there are roughly two paths to become the top stream. In the Web2.0 stage, high-ROI and sustainable content can be reached at high frequency, allowing users to experience companionship, growth, cultivation, acquisition, consensus, etc. in their IP cognition, so that users can reach, form resonance, and achieve co-creation. "Of the 5 billion exposures of Liu Yexi, 4.2 billion are based on the second creations of hundreds of thousands of users." In the Web3.0 stage, new representative encrypted native cultural digital human IP can be designed and released in the form of NFT, or Liu Yexi can be divided into AI fragments, and the frequency of IP reaching users can be increased through authorization. If offline, users can be presented with VR, holographic images and other devices. More immersive interactive experiences, etc.
, whether it is 2B or 2C, from technology to scenarios, to profitable business closed loop, the virtual human industry actually has a long way to go. Although there are various monetization methods now, as a new thing with high technical threshold and low production costs, virtual humans seem to have not yet explored a business model that belongs to virtual humans.
industry insiders said that when it becomes a reality for the rapid and low cost of generating virtual humans, it may usher in value-added services such as hairstyles, clothing, props, etc., it may usher in development. Perhaps NFT is no longer just "JPEG", but a real virtual consumption, such as buying a virtual luxury for your digital clone, bringing VR/AR glasses, may also inspire new immersive scenarios.
Coordination: Zhen Qin Shi Li He Bei
Editor: Nandu Wancai Society reporter Ye Lu
live broadcast: Ye Lu Ruan Zenghao Zeng Junhao Intern Chen Baoliang
Design: Yin Jielin
