Recently, Yu Liang, chairman of the board of directors of Vanke Group, expressed high-profile congratulations to Cui Xiaopan, winner of the best newcomer award of Vanke headquarters in 2021, and announced the real identity of the newcomer award winner - virtual human.
The outside world has been discussing virtual human for a long time. From the early beginning of Chu Yin future and Luo Tianyi to the recent explosion of Liu Yexi, ah Xi and Hua Zhibing, this kind of virtual image in digital form, with human appearance, characteristics and behavior and relying on scientific and technological display, has been sought after. Previously, a number of Internet companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, byte and station B have deployed virtual human, and Netease has invested in virtual human related enterprises six times this year.
The virtual man is always labeled with two yuan and Yuan universe. It looks like a bubble in the distance. However, after contacting several companies concerned in the industry and investors who pay attention to this track, we found that they have a more realistic thinking and layout of the market and demand by stripping off the cloak of public opinion surrounding their meta universe.
01 Virtual life is born with tasks
In 2009, Liu Huai, the founder of the virtual film industry, entered the animation industry and worked with his team to produce popular original works such as super Seminary and Xiongbing company. The first virtual actor "virtual crane chase" of the virtual film industry is the "actor" of the sun goddess "Lena" in the above works.
In the view of virtual film industry, guiding film and television works is the initial mission of virtual actors. After the launch of the "super seminary" series of works, Liu Huai found that fans love individual characters in animation works far more than the works themselves, which inspired the team. The virtual actor is the most critical element to help the audience build an emotional bridge with the character. If the audience can ignore the "dimensional wall" and directly establish an emotional connection with the character represented by the virtual actor, the vitality of the work can be opened.
So the team gave "Tina" a three-dimensional virtual life - Virtual crane chase. Since then, virtual crane Chase has "participated in" animation works such as long sword wind and cloud, and warmed up for the new work on the social platform like a real actor. "Long sword wind and cloud 2", "mountain and sea meeting" and "blue net upgrade plan" are animation works planned to be launched by the virtual film industry in the next two years. Virtual crane chase is also constantly promoting the new play.
Image source: microblog screenshot
Virtual human ecological company second world culture also has a clear purpose to build virtual human. Before founding the second world culture, Chen Yan had more than ten years of working experience in Taihe music, light media and front-line advertising companies. He hoped to find a new carrier to carry his good entertainment products and content creativity, and finally chose the "cross dimensional" content that is scarce in China.
In 2016, Chen Yan led the team to produce the cross dimensional online drama "play hidden in the Jianghu". This work, which combines two-dimensional, three-dimensional, real person, animation interaction, dynamic cartoon and other animation production methods, soon attracted Jiaxing Reba team. The two sides quickly finalized cooperation to create a virtual image of "Dili lengba" for Dili Reba.
Chen Yan's expectation for this cooperation is to enhance the case popularity of the company and obtain the supply of capital flow, but from then on, she has gradually established various types of virtual human matrix, such as star separation, brand customized virtual human and original virtual human IP, such as Huang Zidao's virtual image "taosman", Ido jewelry virtual image "beco" and huaxizi's virtual spokesperson "huaxizi", Super realistic virtual personification "Ling Ling", etc.
The development of the industry is not achieved overnight. Since the 20th century, with the innovation of motion capture and artificial intelligence technology, the industry has developed from start-up and exploration to the current growth period. Every company has a very realistic consideration when entering this track, but mistakenly hitting and bumping has been wrapped into the upsurge of meta universe.
Similarly, although investors have the courage to imagine the meta universe, they are very practical in dealing with virtual human projects, and market demand and landing scenes are indispensable.
Nie Dongchen, a partner of CCV of Genesis partners, invested in projects such as virtual human ecological company "second world culture" and virtual human technology provider "Yunbo technology" at the virtual human track this year. He said that in fact, CCV has been watching in the field of virtual human for five or six years and has not sold until it sees the distinct changes in the b-end market and C-end Market:
In the b-end market, internationally renowned luxury brands allocate part of their advertising budgets to virtual people. According to the statistics of Huali think tank in 2020, in the previous four years, the cooperation cases related to virtual characters around the world covered 110 virtual characters, 100 luxury goods, fashion, beauty brands and fashion retailers.
In the C-end market, the number of virtual anchors in station B has increased sharply. In the keynote speech on the 12th anniversary of station B in June this year, Chen Rui revealed that virtual anchors have become the fastest-growing category in the live broadcasting field of station B. more than 30000 virtual anchors have been broadcast on station B in the past year, with a year-on-year increase of 40%.
Liu Cheng, an investor, is interested in the role of virtual people in improving efficiency, so he invested in the virtual anchor company. "Live broadcast can only work for 8 hours a day, but the rest of the time is not without audience, so this part of the traffic is wasted. Using virtual anchors can continue to serve the audience and improve the user experience.".
Chen Zhe, vice president of Fengrui capital, also found that the acceptance of virtual idols in the live broadcasting industry is higher than expected, "Before Taobao's live broadcast, it had nothing to do with the second dimension. This year, a lot of traffic support was given to the virtual idol to bring goods. One of the virtual idols started broadcasting for four hours on the first day without any market awareness, attracting more than 1 million users online."
02 What do you rely on to get a foothold in the virtual human track
For start-ups pouring into the virtual human track, technology, operation capacity and commercial realization are indispensable.
Most of the invested enterprises in the past two years are technology providers in the upper reaches of the virtual human industry chain and content and IP operators in the middle reaches, including MCN, entertainment brokerage companies, marketing companies, etc.
The technology providers Zhongke intelligence and Yunbo technology, which received investment this year, initially provided motion capture, AI and other technologies for game animation. Later, because of the same technology, they expanded their business to the field of virtual human. In Liucheng's view, such companies can "attack and defend", which can not only join the army of the meta universe, but also come back to continue playing games and animation.
Midstream operators are similar. For example, Lehua company, which is jointly invested by byte beating and Ali, created a virtual women's group a-soul at the end of last year. The advantage of the company lies in the operation experience of artists and rich Chinese resources with excellent singing and dancing. The second world culture team has the genes of advertising marketing and entertainment economy. The team's advantage lies in its insight into demand and understanding of business.
The virtual human maintains long-term vitality. The amazing appearance is on the one hand. For example, the Guofeng virtual human "Ling Ling", the "Liu Yexi" integrating Guochao and punk elements, and the fresh and cured digital human "Axi"... Their common point is that they are at the forefront of the industry in technology, adopt super realistic style, give the audience a more amazing visual experience, and their modeling styles also have their own characteristics.
The connotation of virtual human is the key factor. Liucheng believes that part of the connotation of virtual human comes from people in the world. In the virtual women's group a-soul, Bella was once a professional ballet dancer. She was forced to quit the ballet because of a low back injury. Later, she insisted on rehabilitation training and joined the a-soul. The experience of the people in the middle makes the fans very touched. The feelings for Bella are actually the feelings for the people in the middle.
Image source: microblog screenshot
According to wikie, the co-founder of virtual film industry, the image of virtual human should match the human design, and constantly output the content that can enrich the human design and world outlook, so as to become more credible. Virtual crane Chase has its own personality characteristics, and has established emotional links with fans through many works and time precipitation. "Virtual crane chase was enabled in the animation of" Xiongbing company "in 2016. It has been more than five years now, so the audience has been growing up with this character."
"Virtual human can not be seen as a simple image, but a high-intensity combination of art and technology," Nie Dongchen analyzed. "This requires the team behind it to have the ability not only in content aesthetics, but also in technology integration and application, which is very difficult."
Commercialization ability is also an inseparable topic. Although at present, virtual human does not have a particularly clear and mature business model, with the improvement of market attention and the enrichment of application scenarios, everyone is also looking for a more suitable commercialization path.
The commercialization path of virtual human can be divided into C-end and b-end. For the C-end, it focuses on the fan economy, such as IP peripheral sales, brand advertising, live broadcast reward, etc., of which the shortest business path is live broadcast. According to the revenue data of BiliBili's virtual anchor in November this year, the total revenue of virtual anchor in that month reached 54.66 million yuan, and the number of paying people reached 255000. The first virtual anchor "Jiale Carol" recorded a monthly revenue of 2.14 million yuan.
The b-end market focuses on providing virtual human technology, incubation and operation services. For example, the star virtual image product line, brand and IP customized product line of sub world culture, virtual human IP agent operation and other businesses. It is revealed that the virtual film industry has also received the demand from Internet companies, consumer brands or banking institutions to create a virtual human image. For example, aiya, the AI virtual brand officer built for aibank of Baixin bank, has been launched recently.
03 Explore the future of virtual human
Although virtual human has broad application prospects in the future, it still faces some challenges and factors restricting industrial development.
On the one hand, the influence of virtual human is still very small, and we need to continue to improve the acceptance of the public; On the other hand, there are too few application scenarios in the virtual human industry, and the business model stays at the level of virtual idols.
"Shop volume" is a simple and direct method. Nie Dongchen observed that this is also a major trend in the virtual human industry at this stage. Virtual human companies hope to cover more application scenarios and influence users imperceptibly.
A further idea is to create an IP matrix and launch virtual IP suitable for users' preferences of subdivided tracks. This is what the creative one culture behind Liu Yexi is doing. Liu Yexi is facing the beauty track. Liang zikang, CEO of the company, recently publicly said that he would launch 5-10 virtual people and digital people in different tracks and fields in the next six months to one year. This is also the idea of sub world culture. In addition to "Ling Ling" with the label of "national style and national tide", sub world culture has also recently launched a virtual DJ purple for the electronic music and trend culture market.
Figure: virtual DJ purple
Platformization is also a direction of sub world culture exploration. It has created a localized virtual avatar platform, genies, "By the end of this year, Cishi culture will release a new virtual human project plan, which can be understood as a class of tools and platform products that can be to B and C, making it an incubator for more original virtual human IP, so that a wider range of consumers can access virtual people and virtual objects, so as to truly move towards a more intelligent era of virtual reality interaction," Chen Yan said.
The reason for the lack of virtual human application scenario is the imperfect industry infrastructure. Nie Dongchen explained that this mainly includes two parts: technology and virtual ecology.
AI technology is still relatively rudimentary. Although the appearance of virtual human is very close to real people, it still gives people the feeling of "out of sync between sound and painting" when speaking. In addition, AI's perception of emotion has not been well solved, and there are still various problems in multiple rounds of dialogue with AI. So in fact, technology limits the breakthrough of many scenes, such as emotional companion virtual human, virtual doctor and so on.
Domestic AI teams have been trying to make technological breakthroughs. Last year, Microsoft Xiaobing team launched a small-scale test of the artificial intelligence framework avatar framework, providing a group of emotional companion female lovers for human users. Finally, the average number of single conversation rounds between Xiaobing and users remained at 23. Zeng min, senior technical director of Microsoft Xiaobing, said that this requires two key components: empathy and social skills. The synaesthesia model used by Xiaobing is a dialogue engine based on the generative model, which can further improve Xiaobing's control over the content, field and rhythm of the dialogue, from "equal dialogue" to "dominant dialogue".
The construction of virtual ecology is also very important. "In fact, when we can really take the virtual world as a part of our life, the energy of virtual people can be brought into full play," Nie Dongchen said. For example, the virtual face pinching software zepeto was once popular, but it did not bring more interactive motivation to users, and soon died.
Second world culture is trying to create virtual entertainment scenes. Chen Yan believes that simply generating a virtual image is not enough. Users need a virtual scene that can meet the entertainment experience and interactive social interaction in the future. In this scene, users can drive characters to have more virtual behaviors, such as creation and trading. "Virtual products will become more valuable only if there are better scenes to complete the recognition of virtual identity." Building a virtual entertainment center is the next attempt of sub world culture.
According to wikie, the virtual human industry is still in the early stage of development. We are still exploring what virtual images can be used for and how to operate in the future. The virtual film team has always held the mentality of working together with everyone, and will also do some linkage and publicity with other virtual people. Because many participants bring more presentation methods, "when the content is richer, the audience's acceptance will be higher, which is actually a good thing.".
Wikie also takes a normal view of the possible competition. She believes that the virtual human track may not be a particularly strong competitive state in the future. We still need to work together to build the infrastructure of the industry and cultivate the concept of the audience.
This article is from WeChat official account "VCPE reference" (ID:vcpecankao), author: Li Zixuan, editor: Mario, 36 krypton authorized release.
