Per reporter: Yang Yu Ke Yang Per editor: Wen Duo
At the beginning of April, the "Internet Weekly" supervised by the Chinese Academy of Sciences released the 2021 virtual digital person enterprise ranking, and giants in the Internet, streaming media, games, music, communications and other industries have been on the list. To some extent, it has become a fact that virtual people "break the circle". At the same time, doubts about the high cost of virtual people, low-level repetition, and the fight for jobs with humans are also endless.
Xiaoice companies that have landed a number of successful cases have a more cautious judgment on the virtual person industry. Recently, Xu Yuanchun, chief operating officer of Xiaoice, said in an exclusive interview with the "Daily Economic News" reporter that from a technical point of view, virtual singers, virtual anchors and other application scenarios do not have much development prospects, virtual people into thousands of households, become the auxiliary of human life and work, is the future of the industry.
The more competitive the industry, the easier it is to accept and introduce new technologies, and the same is true for virtual human technology. Xu Yuanchun said that compared with reducing costs, enterprises pay more attention to how much benefit virtual people can bring, "the digital transformation of the next generation (of enterprises) is the transformation to virtual people."
Image source: Courtesy of respondents
Talk about the prospects: Rejecting people is much harder than rejecting a system
"The metaverse has not arrived, and the virtual people have gone first." This sentence is perhaps the best footnote to the popularity of the concept of virtual people nowadays.
In 2021, virtual beauty talent Liu Yexi made his debut and sucked millions of fans, and the founder behind it once analyzed the media that 50% of Liu Yexi's popularity was due to the concept of the metaverse.
Suddenly, the virtual IP represented by Liu Yexi has become one of the hottest business stories. Ai Media Consulting data shows that in 2021, China's virtual people will drive the industrial market size and core market size, which will be 107.49 billion yuan and 6.22 billion yuan respectively, and it is expected to reach 640.27 billion yuan and 48.06 billion yuan in 2025, showing a strong growth trend.
But the tide has receded, and the subsequent performance of "digital internet celebrities" has not been satisfactory. The difficulty of taking into account the production cost and quality, the shortage of operational capabilities, and the intensification of homogeneous competition have become the survival problems of virtual human IP. The question that arises is whether the prospects for the virtual person industry are overvalued.
From the production point of view, the current stage of virtual human production mainly involves three steps: modeling, driving and rendering. According to Xu Yuanchun, if you use traditional 3D modeling technology, and then perform live-action motion capture and post-rendering, a 15-second video consumes dozens of people or even hundreds of people, which is exactly the path chosen by many manufacturers at present.
"If virtual people need to spend several times as much time behind everything they do, it doesn't really make sense." Xu Yuanchun believes that the greatest significance of the existence of virtual people is to improve efficiency.
Hatsune Mirai Handmade Image source: Photo by reporter Tan Yuhan
In fact, from Hatsune Mirai to Yoo Ye-hee, to this day, many people talk about virtual people will still be defined as virtual singers and virtual idols. However, Xu Yuanchun believes that from a technical point of view, virtual singers, virtual anchors and other application scenarios do not have much development prospects, in contrast, he pays more attention to the types of virtual people who can bring practical value to human life and work, such as virtual employees, virtual experts, accompanying virtual people and so on.
"When everything goes to IP and publicity, it's because people only stand on the current technology and application scenarios, and if you look at it from a longer technical perspective, it must not be like this."
In his view, "the digital transformation of the next generation is the transformation to virtual people." Because the way people and machines deal with each other and between people is very different, the addition of "people" will add "natural", "warm" and "real" parts to digitalization. This partly explains why most of the Xiaoice are in traditional industries such as real estate, media and finance.
Taking Cui Xiaopan, a virtual employee of Vanke, as an example, when the system urges a matter, the employee may not give feedback until a few days, but when Cui Xiaopan comes to urge, the feedback of the employee may be more timely. "It's much harder to reject a person than to reject a system." Xu Yuanchun explained.
Talk about cost: the core value of virtual people is not to reduce costs but to increase efficiency
In addition to humanization, fans of virtual people often regard "cost reduction" as one of the advantages of virtual people.
According to the open source securities research report, compared with the real star, the virtual person does not need to consider the time, energy and other factors, film and television remuneration and endorsement costs may be greatly reduced, the overall cost or far lower than the real idol. In addition, service-oriented virtual people are mainly used in enterprises, and if virtual people are used instead of real people's services, they may effectively save personnel costs.
But in reality, the production cost of virtual people is one of the biggest headaches for enterprises. The founder of The Second Generation Culture revealed in an interview with the media last year, "At present, more than 90% of the companies that do virtual people are very difficult to make a profit. ”
This is directly related to the current virtual human production technology. Xu Yuanchun said bluntly that if you do virtual people through 3D modeling technology, high cost is an unavoidable financial problem.
Simply disassembling the cost behind the virtual person of the 3D modeling technology, involving face capture, motion capture, picture rendering, etc., in addition to the labor cost brought by the real actor behind the model, "You want to be a virtual person, the more realistic and natural it is, the longer the content you produce, the higher its cost will inevitably be." Xu Yuanchun introduced. After a one-pass operation, a 60-second video may cost more than 1 million yuan or even more than 2 million yuan.
Of course, not all virtual people in all scenarios need to be so "high-ended", but if virtual people can enter thousands of households at a price close to the people, it is inseparable from the development of underlying technology.
The consensus in the industry is that intelligent-driven virtual people are the more potential development direction. This technology path reduces the involvement of live actors by introducing deep learning techniques, bypassing much of the labor costs behind 3D modeling. Taking the deep neural network rendering technology being developed Xiaoice as an example, it can reduce the production cost of virtual people to one-tenth or even one-twentieth of 3D modeling technology.
However, the virtual people who currently Xiaoice provide deep neural network rendering technology have not yet realized real-time interaction with people, and can only complete specific work in a certain field.
But in Xu Yuanchun's view, at least compared with the technology that exists on the market, deep neural network rendering technology has improved a lot compared with traditional 3D modeling technology, and it has undergone very big changes in terms of efficiency, quality, follow-up time, and financial costs. "At the moment, if you look at this point in time, I actually have greater hopes for the potential space for deep neural network rendering technology in the future, because I think it will be larger than the current technical space for 3D modeling, and it is more likely to break through - both in terms of quality and cost."
On the other hand, Xu Yuanchun also believes that compared with reducing costs, enterprises pay more attention to how much benefit virtual people can bring. "In a way, if your technology has such a high price, it must be able to help the organization greatly improve production efficiency, which means that the organization will gain more influence and produce more products." Xu Yuanchun said.
He used the example of the successful case launched by Xiaoice in the past year, Vanke's Yu Liang sent a circle of friends to say that Cui Xiaopan improved the efficiency of the entire finance; and the daily economic news of the AI TV station content distribution and live broadcast volume grew very fast, which is not something that a few people's operation team can do. "From that point of view, it produces real value, and this is a testament to the fact that the market demand is very large and long-standing."
In Xu Yuanchun's view, the company's budget is often a comprehensive consideration of risks, costs and future benefits, and the landing of good cooperation scenarios is a positive cycle process. In other words, companies may first invest a sum of money to test the performance of cooperative products, and then continue to follow up on the investment if there is a good effect. If a company says that in order to do the digital transformation of virtual people, it is okay to give how much budget, but he feels unreal.
Talking about industry: Virtual people are not a one-time business
However, as the virtual human market gradually develops, there are more market participants, and new players tend to start from the easier technology stack. Xu Yuanchun noted, "Today's market supply is very popular, there are many suppliers, this is not a very complex technology, many people can do one first." I even saw a few friends around me who started to do virtual people because of this matter, find someone to make a 3D model, and then give him a name and say I'm going to be a human being. ”
Xu Yuanchun believes that this is only one of the very small fragments for the industry. Falling into a longer development cycle, what kind of ability and value does the virtual person have? Do I need to interact with people? What techniques are used to achieve this if interaction? These problems ultimately need to be solved by the industry. "These problems are all real, but people ignore or ignore them from a certain angle."
On the other hand, with the popularity of the meta-universe, many players have emerged on the virtual human track, the fish and dragons are mixed, the market quotation span is large, and the market in the cultivation period has not yet formed a standardized quotation scheme. In this regard, Xu Yuanchun feels that from another point of view, the quotation of virtual people is becoming more transparent. Customers know that different quotes represent different suppliers and can also know the projects they have done in the past. "Everyone he quotes this price is not only measured based on the man-hours of the software model he uses, but also includes some of his aesthetic and other design efforts."
Xu Yuanchun further suggested that when purchasing virtual people, enterprises should consider several dimensions: in the first place, it is necessary to be clear about the scene and business core purpose of creating this virtual person. Secondly, it is necessary to examine the completeness of the supplier's technology, the more complete, the ability to provide the overall solution and the ability to integrate will be better, and the future scalability will be stronger. It's also risk-controllable, "because it's better than you don't know how many layers he's subcontracted to do it." He also suggested that the virtual person not only creates this step, but also includes subsequent maintenance and optimization, and is not a one-time expenditure.
Xu Yuanchun Image source: Per reporter Zhang Jian photographed (data map)
Facing the industrial side, Xu Yuanchun believes that "in an industry and scene where there are many innovations and new technologies are constantly highlighted, it is inevitable to find that some of its laws and regulations are lagging behind, because it is a new thing." He called for more tolerance for emerging technologies, and at the same time, both countries and enterprises should discuss and solve relevant normative and legal issues to help the industry comply with and develop healthily.
"For companies or individuals in the industry, we recommend that you still recognize that this is an industry that requires technology." It is not an industry that everyone can stand on by gimmicks and publicity points. Xu Yuanchun believes that virtual people will not be a one-time business, and virtual people enterprises also need long-term development, so it is inevitable to obtain the market, and the market will have positive feedback on the value of the enterprise.
"This track is also big enough, there are enough scenes, I think we definitely hope more, there are technology, content, scenes, ecological companies to join the industry together", from the ideal point of view of a technology, Xu Yuanchun feels that the virtual person thing, need many people to participate in, jointly realize, will not be just a company can achieve such a big vision.