Text | Game dimension
On July 9, 1982, Hollywood released a science fiction movie that had a great impact on future generations, "Electronic World Battle".
The film is about a hacker programmer who enters the electronic world and fights in a game he has developed. This story is not unusual in the moment when "Ready Player One" and "Out of Control Player" are everywhere, but at the time, it accurately opened an era.
Technically, "Electronic World Battle" is the first film in the world to use the "CG + live-action combination" method to complete special effects, which is considered to have ushered in a new era of CG production computers. From a textual or philosophical point of view, the film's influence is even more profound, and since then, the film's tracing of the origin of the world has never stopped.
Seven years after Electronic World Wars, Japanese manga artist Masamune created Ghost in the Shell, which was brought to the big screen by Oshii Mori in 1995 and became famous.
In 1999, the Wachowski brothers, who were deeply influenced by "Electronic World Battle" and "Ghost in the Shell", have now created "The Matrix", which is a collection of works based on the worldview of "reality + virtual", which no one can match so far.
Therefore, from the perspective of the history of film history, the text of the "metacosm" of the fire this year, although the text of neo Stevenson in 1992 in the novel "Avalanche", the specific concept should be more distant 1982.
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The image style of "Electronic World Battle" now seems to be very "five cents", which is a typical pixel style. At that time, CG technology could only support the action substitution of the joint parts of the human body, and there was no way to perform special effects on the face, otherwise it would become a thorough cartoon. Therefore, only the "CG + real person combination" method can be used.
In 2010, the film was remade, and after the remake, the audiovisual effects of "TRON: Battle Chronicles" were greatly improved, and it also won the Academy Award for Best Sound Effects that year, but it still continued the "CG + live-action combination" shooting mode.
Compared with "Ready Player One" and "Runaway Player", which have been released in recent years, the imaging technology has been greatly improved in the past decade. With the continuous development of Internet technology, the seemingly distant "metaverse" world is actually not as distant as a mirage, and to achieve it, digital imaging technology in the virtual world is the most difficult problem to be overcome.
Digital people may be the "Ren Dou Ermai" that opened the era of the metaverse.
From the most basic text interaction, to voice interaction, to multimodal digital human interaction that integrates visual, speech and semantic technologies, our communication needs in the virtual world are getting higher and higher, and the concept of digital people is gradually becoming hot.
So, what are the difficulties in the implementation of digital human technology?
As a "new digital species", the realism of digital people comes from the expressiveness of images. Compared with text and voice interaction products, digital people have added visual elements, which requires a more realistic and expressive image to meet the visual needs of users, so that users can have sufficient sense of interaction and immersion. Such expression needs to achieve the consistency of digital people's voice, image, mouth shape, and expression.
In addition, related operations and processing need to be generated in real time during the process of dialogue with users, and the performance of AI algorithms and computers is also higher. When the transmitted information changes from simple text information to complex audio and video information, only with the overall AI capabilities of natural language understanding (NLP), speech recognition and generation, and visual synthesis can we give users a natural and realistic experience.
For example, "pinching the face" is the most important part of the birth process of every digital person, and it is also the most time-consuming part of the birth process of the digital person for a long time. Epic Games provides a solution to this problem. With tools that allow for customization from lip expansion and contraction to eye distance, skin color, tooth shape, wrinkle morphology, capillaries and whiskers, creators can customize everything and freely "pinch" the desired face, such as raising or lowering eyebrows, changing the shape of the jaw and the height of the ears, and even the length of the eyelashes can be changed. Moreover, as the light changes, the light will show different effects on characters with different skin tones, different ages, and different genders.
How digital people behave like "humans" and provide more appropriate means of interaction is also an urgent problem to be solved. This is despite the fact that AI is now more and more commonly used on the Internet, including AI customer service, automated processes, automated tools, and even AI players like AlphaGo. It can be said that the development of artificial intelligence technology can basically meet the needs of users. But artificial intelligence has long been criticized by users because it is always presented with a cold text image, so that the experience of the two-dimensional world does not match the development of network technology and artificial intelligence, and this experience is the same as the "Electronic World Battle" we are watching now.
Therefore, it is crucial to realize the personification of digital people and make digital people behave and act "like a human being".
In this regard, there are also many failure cases in the industry. In 2018, a Swedish bank once "fired" a "underperforming" digital person. The most immediate reason is that Amelia's performance has not met expectations. Although Amelia is considered one of the best AI systems in the world and widely used in the medical and financial industries, the lack of personalization is also the reason why many users are abandoning digital people.
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In August, chip giant NVIDIA's true and false "leather coat cult event" pushed digital people to the highest point of heat. Some media said at the time that "NVIDIA deceived the world", and NVIDIA CEO Huang Jenxun gave a two-hour online speech, and the whole process of digital people came forward, from the home background to the characters, clothing, etc. are virtual AI capabilities display. Although Huang Jenxun's "digital person" only appeared for 14 seconds, and the rest of the speeches were live-action speeches, it still conveyed to the outside world that the future of digital human technology has unlimited possibilities.
In fact, digital people are not far from life, virtual anchors, virtual teachers, virtual stars, virtual customer service...
The image of digital people is becoming more and more three-dimensional and comprehensively displayed in our lives, making the business- and technology-oriented digital economy more warm and pyrotechnic.
According to the "Virtual Digital People In-depth Industry Analysis Report" released by qubit think tanks, by 2030, China will form a blue ocean market of up to 270 billion yuan around virtual digital people. This market is not a single one, and will revolve around more abundant fields including games/movies, service platforms, media platforms, and medicine.
Users' demand for the "authenticity" of digital experience will never stop, in the field of digital culture industry, the most basic application of digital people lies in the improvement of the immersion of games, film and television works. Epic Game's Unreal Engine is widely used, and on Unreal Engine's website, Epic Games defines the impact of digital human technology on the gaming industry this way: A world of possibilities. Through technology, Epic Games has achieved "high fidelity" of the game's characters. With the continuous evolution of artificial intelligence technology in recent years, some new technologies emerging in the game industry have effectively simplified the production process of digital people, making digital people successfully enter the public eye.
Digital people have even been used in many non-entertainment industries, showing their strong "functional" value.
The expansion of virtual interaction technology has allowed digital people to play a role that ordinary people cannot reach.
For example, medicine, mining, aerospace and other fields. In addition, by customizing the host image, it is also possible to achieve fast and automated production of content and optimize the viewing experience. For example, shortly after the successful launch of three astronauts from Shenzhou 12 to the space station, the digital astronauts jointly created by Xinhua News Agency and Tencent and specially developed for space themes and scenarios, and the first digital person in China to enter the multi-scene operation, "XiaoYi", appeared and took users to roam the three major space stations. Up to now, XiaoYi has completed many space reports, covering the "Tianwen-1" Mars exploration mission and the Chinese space station. This efficiency shows from the side that the maturity of the current digital human technology has reached a certain level.
In addition to functional applications, digital people also have the function of "humanistic care". By creating a multimodal AI assistant-type virtual digital person with a high sense of care and realism based on a real person image. This kind of virtual digital person can provide services such as consultant, care, companionship, and transaction processing in specific care scenarios and even generalized interactions. The existing landing scenarios of foreign manufacturers include personalized financial consultants, psychological consultants and shopping assistants.
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Nearly forty years after the release of "Electronic World Wars", the discussion of the binary opposition between "reality and virtual" has almost never stopped, and reached its peak after the release of "The Matrix". However, the previous discussion has focused more on the philosophical level, and whether and how the technical level can be achieved has been concerned by the industry in recent times.
In 2020, Ma Huateng mentioned the concept of "fully true Internet", and he believed that the next step of the Internet is to fully open the door of the virtual world and the real world. An economic rise of games and virtual spaces.
In terms of matching and development paths of related technologies, game companies will play a crucial role in the rise of the metaverse. The most critical step is to continue to expand the content ecology of the metaverse, that is, to grasp the development of digital people.
In other words, if the metaverse is regarded as a 3A masterpiece, even the most powerful AAA game cannot keep up with the consumption of players, only in this way can we keep up with the freshness and then promote the whole society into the era of the true Internet.
Now, the ultra-rapid development of the Internet and social platforms has greatly expanded people's social relations. The development of existing forms of social platforms and user growth have hit the ceiling, and new growth paths are urgently needed to help the Internet industry regain its rapid growth rhythm. Metaverses and digital human technologies are key points in this path. However, if you want to truly realize a game world similar to that in the "Runaway Player" and "Ready Player One" movies, the metaverse still has a long way to go.
But the investment and decisions we make about the metaverse now will determine the future of the metaverse. An article from Medium mentioned that the composition of the metaverse is closely related to the "hardware", "content" and "the underlying framework that constitutes the world", covering the seven elements of the metaverse' experience layer, discovery layer, creator economy layer, spatial computing layer, decentralized layer, human-machine interface layer and infrastructure layer. At the current stage of development, despite the entry of major Internet giants, the hardware level of the metaverse has not yet undergone qualitative changes; therefore, the content and the underlying framework that constitutes the world have become the current driving force point for entering the metacosm.
There is no doubt that the "immersion" of the metaverse is the highest standard of experience. To create this "immersion", a "high-fidelity" game environment is needed.
Therefore, digital human technology + breakthrough hardware is a prerequisite for entering the metaverse era, digital human technology can empower the various elements that make up the metaverse, breakthrough hardware can connect human consciousness from the external world and the virtual world, and the combination of the two can build a virtual world that is indistinguishable from the real world.
Up to now, the high-fidelity technology of digital people is becoming more and more mature. From the perspective of the shape and structure of digital people, both Epic Game and NExT Studios have made many progress in the detail restoration of digital human faces, and have reached a practical level. With the rapid development of camera array scanning reconstruction, it can currently achieve millisecond-level high-speed camera scanning, which has become the mainstream way of character modeling and has been successfully applied to games, movies, media and other industries. At the same time, the real-time motion capture system restores the actions of the characters, which also makes various types of interactive experiences possible.
The "high fidelity" of digital people is also reflected in the deep restoration of the overall environment and interactive experience: using Unreal Engine, real-time ray tracing technology, etc., to create more realistic and immersive simulation effects and visual experiences.
As a new thing, although digital people have entered the practical stage, they are still "naïve". More thought is also needed about the future direction of digital people. No one can predict the final outcome of the digital and metaversic universes. Many of our current imaginations of the metaverse are only based on the imagination of film and television works.
The realization of the metaverse requires artificial intelligence to carry out a steady stream of content supply, using AI to promote all walks of life to complete the link between the real world and the virtual world; it also needs the continuous progress of VR/AR technology to continuously strengthen the user's sense of immersion and experience; psychological knowledge is needed to make the metaverse transcend the concept of "the cold world composed of numbers", and the number also has a temperature; even, the realization of the metacosm also needs a blockchain to ensure identity, assets, and social relations in the new world to establish the credibility of the metaverse.
For now, what we can do about the metaverse is to first build the foundation of the elements that make up the universe.
But one day, we'll meet in the world depicted in Electronic World Wars.
Source: Titanium Media APP