With the continuous breakthroughs in technology and the accelerated evolution of artificial intelligence, the digital human industry has ushered in unprecedented development opportunities. Digital humans are deeply involved in various industries, reshaping the business ecosystem and user experience through diverse forms such as content/IP (such as virtual idols), functional service (such as digital employees), and virtual avatars (such as real person virtual avatars). It has not only become a key tool for enterprise innovation services and efficiency improvement, but also demonstrated enormous application value in promoting industrial digital transformation.
Digital Human Industry · Application News Reporter Sun Zhao
With the continuous breakthroughs in technology and the accelerated evolution of artificial intelligence, the digital human industry has ushered in unprecedented development opportunities. From film and television entertainment to marketing, from e-commerce live streaming to financial services, digital humans are deeply involved in various industries with diverse forms such as content/IP (such as virtual idols), functional service (such as digital employees), and virtual avatars (such as real person virtual avatars), reshaping the business ecosystem and user experience. It has not only become a key tool for enterprise innovation services and efficiency improvement, but also demonstrated enormous application value in promoting industrial digital transformation.
Major companies accelerate their layout in the field of digital human live streaming
How far digital humans can go depends on their industrial applications. From the market situation, digital humans in China have been applied in multiple industries and scenarios. However, in terms of universality, digital humans are currently more widely used in the field of marketing. It is mainly divided into two categories: one is virtual digital people who already have IP value and fan base to endorse and promote brands and products. A typical representative is the virtual idol AYAYI launched by Ranmai Technology, which joined Alibaba as a digital employee and collaborated with brands in various fields such as beauty, jewelry, 3C, and food to promote new products. Another type is the exclusive customized virtual personification image of the brand. Among them, the application of digital humans in the e-commerce industry is more representative.
In the live broadcast of the official flagship store of a sports brand on a certain platform, the digital human anchor held the product introduction while providing relatively accurate answers to the question of “can I wear it in summer” raised by netizens, achieving real-time interaction.
The biggest advantage of digital person live streaming compared to real person live streaming is that it significantly reduces the operating costs of merchant live streaming and enables 24-hour broadcasting, bringing incremental GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume), “a digital person business agent told the China Economic Times reporter.
JD.com is one of the companies accelerating the layout of digital live streaming services. JD Cloud Yanxi has been exploring digital human applications in multiple scenarios such as live streaming, short video generation, and customer service. The relevant person in charge of the JD Cloud Yanxi team told the China Economic Times reporter that it continues to explore the idle live streaming mode of relay with live streamers, optimize live streaming operation actions, extend live streaming time, effectively fill the blank time when live streamers cannot live stream, and release the pressure of live streaming. In terms of technology, JD Cloud Yanxi continues to improve the conversion ability of digital humans, and the newly launched large-scale digital humans have enhanced their expressive power, with both anthropomorphism and naturalness rising by one level.
Data shows that JD Cloud’s Yanxi digital influencer has settled in over 4000 brand live streaming rooms, replacing live streamers to fill vacant slots and drive over 1 billion yuan in GMV. During this year’s Spring Festival, Yanxi Digital People settled in multiple brand live streaming rooms, selling cross-border beauty, jewelry, 3C digital, home appliances, medical and health, food and beverage, low-priced explosive products, covering multiple categories and SKUs, with a cumulative GMV of over 40 million yuan and a conversion rate increase of over 30% during leisure time.
In addition to Jingdong, the major Internet giants are also accelerating the layout of digital human live broadcast. Baidu launched the digital people live broadcast platform “Xiling”, and its digital people family settled in Kwai live broadcast. Alibaba has also explored digital live streaming and is about to launch its first “digital person+terminal” product. With live streaming e-commerce entering the era of stock competition, lower operating costs, more refined and specialized live streaming operations have become key competition points for businesses. Emerging technologies such as AI digital humans have gained favor in the industry due to their low-cost broadcasting and unmanned operation.
Digital people can do more things, such as animation, movies, music, games, and other rich digital application scenarios, which will be places for digital people to showcase their skills, “Liu Chen, a researcher at the Bank of China Research Institute, told China Economic Times reporters. However, as digital humans land in various industries, they will face various complex scenarios and situations. Only attractive appearances are not enough. They must “evolve” more realistic, intelligent, and humanized real-time interaction and expression abilities to adapt to more business needs.
Stability and convenience are key to development
The metaverse, which is breaking through boundaries year by year, not only drives the development of industries such as VR/AR, but also the digital human race track is particularly sought after. For example, the virtual idol Luo Tianyi launched by Shanghai Henian has continued to be popular in recent years, not only appearing on major TV stations and singing with celebrities, but even on the stage of the 2021 Spring Festival Gala and the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics Cultural Festival; Su Xiaomei, born in 2022, loves poetry, songs, and traditional Chinese dance. She has participated in the cross dimensional reality stage show “Star River Dreams” on the “2022 Beijing Radio and Television Spring Festival Gala” and is also the digital spokesperson for Meishan, Sichuan. These virtual digital figures not only bring new opportunities for brand promotion, but also gain recognition and love from more and more audiences.
As people increasingly rely on and frequent use of the Internet, real life is migrating to the digital world on a large scale, AV、VR、 The advancement of technologies such as cloud computing and 5G has nurtured the soil for the development of digital humans and virtual spaces, making it an important application scenario for human digital avatars to participate in and experience various activities in virtual spaces.
At present, the common methods for creating human digital avatars, such as handheld scanners, have the advantage of low cost. However, they require the scanned person to remain motionless for a few minutes, and the user experience needs to be improved. The presented models are also not realistic enough. The advantage of using a DSLR camera array for shooting is the high quality of the human body model, but the disadvantage is high cost and complex operation. How to create human digital avatars at low cost and quickly has become the key to industry development.
In the intelligent display area and media village of the Asian Games Village International Zone at last year’s Hangzhou Asian Games, Hangzhou Youlian Era Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Youlian Era”) placed a Youlian 3D cloud array camera, and some athletes and media from home and abroad have truly experienced the real person 3D digital avatar technology. It can automatically complete the reconstruction of the 3D model of the human body in one second and 5 minutes at the fastest, creating a real 3D digital avatar for the athletes and media of the Asian Games. After that, the experiencer can receive personalized videos of the real 3D digital avatar and three Asian Games elements exactly like himself on the mobile phone. The experiencer can also use the real 3D digital avatar to participate in sports competitions, enjoy the beautiful scenery of Hangzhou, and feel the unique technological and cultural charm of the Hangzhou Asian Games.
Jiang Yahong, founder and CEO of Youlian Era, told China Economic Times reporters that promoting the development of digital humans can be approached from three aspects: first, making the digital humans captured “articulate” and allowing users to leave them as memes, just like taking photos. In the future, everyone will take their own digital humans as memes every year. Secondly, use digital humans to generate various interesting and fun videos. If using digital characters from the entire family, write the plot and create a generative movie. Thirdly, collaborate with metaverse application providers to implement and popularize more metaverse applications related to digital humans, in order to promote more and more users to capture their own digital humans.
In the future, digital humans may become our avatars, serving as the entry point for interaction in the digital world, bringing us a smarter and more immersive “presence” experience. In order to achieve this application scenario, many industry enterprises are constantly innovating in the field of digital human applications, conducting extensive research and investment in digital human algorithms, technical architecture, performance optimization, and other aspects, with the aim of promoting better stability and convenience of digital human products.
Technological innovation helps build a digital human ecosystem
Artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing technologies provide digital humans with a “smart brain” and massive data processing capabilities, enabling them to simulate real human behavior and thinking, and provide users with a more natural and intelligent service experience. However, to truly bring digital humans to life, it involves numerous complex technologies such as 3D reconstruction, driving, physical simulation, and rendering. Therefore, the technical support system behind digital human companies is particularly crucial.
Materialist (Hangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Materialist Technology”) is a technology company specializing in 3D hyper realistic digital humans. It mainly provides technical support tools and services for domestic customers and the digital human industry, and is known as the “company behind digital human companies” in the industry. In the past two years, NextHuman, a self developed hyper realistic 3D digital human creation and application engine, has attracted much attention in the industry. This digital human creation platform, consisting of a character creation engine, a Zhongzhiren live streaming engine, an AI live streaming engine, a short video editing engine, and an interactive digital employee engine, covers the mainstream business needs of individuals and enterprises throughout the entire lifecycle of 3D digital humans.
NextHuman has three characteristics compared to other similar products: high quality, low threshold, and one-stop service. These three characteristics together constitute the competitive barriers for NextHuman and also solve the common problem of ‘high cost and difficult application of 3D digital humans’ in the industry NextHuman founder and CEO of Materialist Technology, Wu Jingqiu, told China Economic Times reporters that technically speaking, NextHuman utilizes its own AIGC technology to upgrade the work of modeling, driving, interaction, and other aspects from traditional production pipelines to a new model driven by AI. For example, through Face2NextHu? The man algorithm is used for automatic modeling, the NextHuman Gene algorithm is used for automatic binding, the Audio2Mouth algorithm is used for automatic generation of mouth shaped expressions, and GPT technology is used for multimodal automatic interaction. NextHuman has a complete toolchain, which can meet mainstream application needs, such as virtual entertainment live streaming, e-commerce automatic live streaming, IP creation and operation, intelligent digital employees, personal assistants, etc. NextHuman has also had excellent application cases in various industries, such as developing the virtual presenter “Justice” for the National People’s Court’s Two Sessions Work Report in 2023, providing underlying SDK support for Alibaba’s “Taobao Life 2”, providing virtual live streaming technology services for Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, providing technical support for the “Prosperous China, Why Zhejiang” virtual town mayor event for Nanxun Ancient Town, and providing commercial services or technical cooperation for many state-owned enterprises, university organizations, and enterprises.
At present, NextHuman engine has over 100000 registered users, making it the largest registered user engine in the field of 3D hyper realistic digital humans in China. These users are mainly composed of 3D and metaverse practitioners, enterprise live streaming or new media, creative and marketing personnel, and have high commercial value. More than 2000 3D designers have registered with their real names. We have served over 120 enterprises.
Materialist technology hopes to become the application support base for global 3D digital humans, which is the goal and ultimate product form. Therefore, we attach great importance to ecological construction and hope to attract more partners to enter NextHuman’s ecosystem through the open design of our products, “said Wu Jingqiu. For example, we have established deep cooperation with motion capture equipment manufacturers, large model manufacturers, and digital human art companies on interface specifications and industry standards for a long time. Can digital assets be accessed through Nex? T Human achieves better liquidity, making NextHuman the digital human hosting platform for the industry, establishing long-term win-win cooperation with everyone, and empowering industry partners with technology.
In the future, we will further strengthen the ecological construction of the engine, open up more technical standards, and support digital human enterprises across the industry to access NextHuman, “Wu Jingqiu told China Economic Times reporters. The next step will be to continuously innovate the application scenarios and support capabilities of digital humans, and to realize the output and input of digital human assets through open platforms, helping customers and users manage and operate digital humans throughout their entire lifecycle.
The breakthroughs in technology and the continuous improvement of the ecosystem are leading to the advancement of “digital humans” towards “intelligent humans”, and the combination of “interesting souls” and “good-looking skins” is forming a perfect new productivity. Behind this is the development, accumulation, and maturity of multi domain technologies such as rendering modeling, content generation algorithms, computer vision, and new terminal/interaction technologies over the years, as well as the further improvement of the industry chain ecology from technology development to practical application. As “digital humans” continue to sail into the ocean, their application fields will inevitably penetrate into thousands of industries in all aspects.