Digital Humans: From Attractive Skins to Interesting Souls: Preface to the Digital Human Industry Development Trend Report
The digital human is the most cutting-edge and fashionable technological product at the moment: it not only has a realistic human appearance, but it can also simulate human behavior well and has a certain degree of human thinking. Digital Man is also a perfect fusion of technology and art. In technology
The digital human is the most cutting-edge and fashionable technological product at the moment: it not only has a realistic human appearance, but it can also simulate human behavior well and has a certain degree of human thinking. Digital Man is also a perfect fusion of technology and art. From a technical perspective, digital humans are masters of a variety of cutting-edge technologies; from an artistic perspective, the production and performance of digital humans also require extremely high aesthetics. Digital Humans: From Attractive Skins to Interesting Souls: Preface to the Digital Human Industry Development Trend Report
Digital humans originated in the film industry. Already at the beginning of this century, digital human-related technologies were widely used in films such as "The Lord of the Rings" and "Avatar". With the development of game technology, some modeling, rigging, motion capture, rendering, AI voice recognition, image recognition, and other technologies within the game have begun to empower the digital human industry, greatly improving the production efficiency of digital humans. Since 2020, a large number of digital Internet celebrities have appeared, especially at the 2022 Winter Olympics. Digital people appeared in sign language commentary, live broadcasts, and many other occasions, which has promoted public awareness of digital people and further promoted the development of the industry.
To fully understand the cutting-edge trends in the development of the digital human industry, Tencent Research Institute, Tencent Cloud Intelligence, and Entrepreneurship Dark Horse jointly interviewed dozens of innovative companies dedicated to digital humans, from the perspective of value positioning, core technology, industrial applications, and C-side development. It analyzes ten different dimensions, such as industrial agglomeration and future challenges, and provides an in-depth analysis of the current state, driving forces, challenges, and future trends of industrial development. During the research process, the project team also discovered a large number of excellent products, solutions, and industrial applications. We have found that the digital human industry is maturing day by day and has entered a new stage of development, which is manifested in the following: different types of digital humans are clearly positioned, generation tools are gradually improving, the production process is streamlined, and AI-driven digital humans have been widely used in the industry.
In the process of writing the report, we are also thinking more. It is true that the development of the digital human industry inevitably involves broader industrial and social issues, such as: Are digital humans a rigid necessity for users? Does it help people relieve loneliness and bring more warmth? Are there potential problems such as portrait rights, ethics, and morals of digital humans, a product of new technologies? How should we view it? Do we need to let the bullets fly for a while?
Looking to the future, the Digital Human Society is accelerating iteration in several directions:
Firstly, the appearance is more refined, the image is more realistic, and the movements are more natural, that is, "the skin looks better." After crossing the uncanny valley effect, people will feel that digital people are no different from real people, which favors the establishment of a good psychological connection;
Secondly, with the continuous improvement of artificial intelligence technology, the multimodal perception and interaction capabilities of digital people will significantly improve. Digital people may have memory and judgment in the future, which will make them more intelligent and closer to humans in behavior and thought. "interesting soul".
In addition, the accelerated development of the digital human industry also requires further improvement of industry development tools, such as rendering and motion capture, and technical support systems such as cloud rendering, thus greatly improving production efficiency and effectively reducing production time and costs.
Currently, many technologies are approaching the critical point of commercialization and large-scale promotion, and it is expected that the digital human industry will enter a new stage of true interconnection. In the future, digital humans will likely serve as our avatars and become interactive portals to the digital world, providing us with a more intelligent and immersive "presence" experience.