01
Recently, a piece of news has attracted the attention of many young people who are working and working hard - the digital employee "Cui Xiaopan" won the 2021 Vanke Headquarters Best Newcomer Award.
From the photos, this newcomer named "Cui Xiaopan" looks at the hibiscus like a willow eyebrow, and a spring water shines on the cold.
In our impression, such a wonderful person is a gift from heaven, a collection of thousands of pets, will not go to work at all, how can it be an excellent employee?
As Vanke's first digital employee, Cui Xiaopan became a master of performance as soon as he joined the company. With the help of the system's algorithms, she quickly learned how to find problems in processes and data, and played a role in various receivable/overdue reminders and work anomaly detection with a thousand times more efficiency than humans.
It is said that with the assistance of the virtual task image rendered by its deep neural network technology, the write-off rate of overdue documents prepaid receivables urged by Cui Xiaopan reached 91.44. What 91.44 means, we don't quite know yet, but it's certainly outstanding.
That's what makes digital people extraordinary. She is the jade of immaculate beauty and wisdom.
Cui Xiaopan is not a real person, but rather a virtual working machine. However, she is different from intelligent production equipment such as self-controlled machine tools, and is set up as a non-physical "virtual person" with human attributes.
▲ The picture comes from the Internet
She easily wins the competition with real people, and the real "people" are eliminated.
02
To put it bluntly, a virtual person is a realistic 3D mannequin. It starts with a realistic image of the human body, using newly developed high-end features to produce realistic effects in terms of appearance (skin coloring or hair grooming) and movement (accurate rigging and animation). Have human appearance, movement, language ability.
In addition, of course, it is not enough to have such a model, she also has to have the same brain as someone.
With the maturity of computer graphics technology, AI technology, real-time rendering and other applications, virtual people have become ubiquitous. Virtual people are becoming a new economic phenomenon, a new means of expanding circles and absorbing powder.
Baidu launched its own digital person Xiaopu in the field of financial customer service.
AYAYI, the "hyper-realistic digital person" who has spread all over the Internet, once became an idol sought after by many netizens, and her perfect image made people feel self-conscious, and raised her hands and feet to cause fans to worship wildly.
Tsinghua female student Bahua Zhibing, who has not participated in any entrance examinations, has not won any competitions, and has been "admitted" by the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University.
Douyin beauty artist Liu Yexi let people appreciate the "charm of the meta-universe", and led a new trend of short video content creation for a while.
The virtual Teresa Teng lijun who appeared in the 2022 New Year's Eve concert of Jiangsu Satellite TV, the virtual idol group Vsinger, and the digital host Xiao Yang, who was launched by Hunan Satellite TV's new variety show "Hello, Saturday", represented the trend of digital people entering the TV network platform.
It can be said that the large number of virtual people has come with the background of the concept of metaverse. In the all-encompassing ultimate world of the metaverse, the core element may be the virtual person.
Since in the natural world, man is the spirit of all things, in the metaverse world, the virtual person naturally becomes the core of the number. People shouted that the era of human-machine coexistence is coming. Virtual people may become the best means of connecting real people with virtual scenes.
03
In the future, as more virtual people appear in all walks of life, what core competitiveness do they need to have?
I think the core competitiveness of different types of virtual people is also different. For example, the core competitiveness of virtual anchors and virtual idols may lie in who looks better, who dances more gracefully, and needs to make their details more realistic and flexible through technology; if it is a virtual customer service, the key lies in whether it can really help people solve problems, so it pays more attention to its natural language processing capabilities and other artificial intelligence core technologies.
As for Hua Zhibing of Tsinghua University and Cui Xiaopan of Vanke, virtual people such as Hua Zhibing of Tsinghua University are all virtual people who concentrate all the possibilities of intelligent technology.
04
In fact, as long as we look back, we can salvage human beings' vision of virtual people and the figure of early virtual people from life and memory.
For example, the robot cat in the cartoon, although it is a character, this character has the characteristics of a virtual person, has a form, a name, has an intelligent advantage, and can solve many troubles and problems in the plot of interacting with children.
Moreover, the virtual character does seem to appear first in the children's program, in addition to the real host, and then substitute a cartoon character, although it is a pre-set dialogue and plot, but from the effect, it shows people's desire for the intelligent tendency of virtual characters.
With the development of artificial intelligence technology, many things that used to be hypothetical are becoming a reality.
Therefore, from the reasoning behind the role of "virtual person", after solving the visual 3D modeling technology of the human body, the most basic feature of the virtual person is of course the algorithm behind the "learning ability" of its chip. As the saying goes, a good-looking skin bag is the same, and an interesting soul is one of a thousand. For virtual people, this is the same requirement.
05
In the future world, people and the world will live in the reflection of the metaverse, and real people will enter the simulated world - middle school students who play games do this, and virtual people will enter the real world of people - as evidenced by Cui Xiaopan, a new employee of Vanke.
So what kind of mutual relationship will real people and virtual people have, can they be compatible with or even replace each other, or will they always be separated by a wall that cannot be broken?
In 2019, Kevin Kelly, author of the best-selling book "Out of Control," described his vision of the digital world in his keynote speech on "Digital Twins, Mirrored Worlds": at that time, everything in the real world would have a corresponding chip, the entire world would be digitized, and everything would have a replica in the virtual digital world, like a mirror of the real world.
This is reminiscent of the Buddhist logic of the illusion of selflessness, because we would first think that the digital world corresponding to the real world must overflow the real world indefinitely.
The digital world may be greater than or equal to the human world after the emergence of virtual people. So there is a huge question, should people believe in the real world, or believe in numbers? In the absence of reliable entities, is the creation of a purely fictional world an effective act? If a virtual person says to me that you are late for work, you are fired for being late, will I leave or stay?
06
For the real world, the digital world may contain unpredictable crises, but we also know that all opportunities and hopes are the accompaniments of crises.
Far away, back to the present, my most urgent wish is: there is a virtual person Liu Xingliang, every day to help me light three points, to help me do short videos to do live broadcasts; and the real Liu Xingliang, just need to be responsible for lying down to make money on the line.
When will this simple wish be realized?