The metaverse hype of 2021 pushed digital virtual humans into public view, and they keep appearing — from New Year platform events to the Winter Olympics. By rough count, 20 ‘digital human’ financing rounds closed in 2021 for more than RMB 2 billion, and the market is forecast to reach RMB 270 billion by 2030.
What a virtual human is
Strip the concept down and two cores remain: identity and assets. The applications arrange around them in three types — a real person’s avatar, such as a celebrity’s virtual image; a reconstructed identity, like a game character; and the virtual idol that exists as a commercial asset.
AI is the enabling technology: natural movement takes strong hardware and better algorithms. Costs have fallen over years of iteration, but a good virtual human still runs to the millions of yuan.
Where the money goes
Hair is the classic example: an adult head carries about 100,000 strands, and high-end virtual humans model 200,000 to 300,000 for rendering realism — which takes serious compute. Millisecond-accurate motion capture is the other hard part.
Today’s virtual humans are still not mistaken for people — looks, motion and interaction all fall short of photoreal, and everyday use is a long way off. But the application space they open, for technology and for business, is the reason the investment keeps coming: the virtual human is the metaverse’s first tangible product, the point where a concept starts becoming real.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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