With the virtual anchor and the Winter Olympics sign language digital human anchor “out of the circle”, the application route of the digital virtual human industry is gradually clear, and triggered the overweight layout of listed companies.
Industry insiders said that there are still some pain points in the virtual digital human industry, such as relative fragmentation of the industrial chain, low matching between products and demand, high content production cost and long cycle. Enterprises should clarify the human positioning and operation logic of virtual digital human and plan the realization path in the future.
listed company overweight layout
The booming virtual digital human business is triggering the overweight layout of listed companies.
On April 19, Wuxi Boton Technology Co.Ltd(300031) announced that it had recently invested nearly ten million yuan in the virtual digital human business and reached a strategic cooperation with 8.8 technology to open up the full link service of virtual human products from IP R & D to industry solutions to SDK cloud rendering technology authorization.
Trs Information Technology Co.Ltd(300229) said at the performance briefing held recently that for the field of virtual digital people with goods, the company provides customized virtual digital people services for well-known c2m companies and listed companies in the field of online live broadcasting of goods. The recording has been completed and will be launched soon.
Bluefocus Intelligent Communications Group Co.Ltd(300058) recently said that the company signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Qile infinite, and the two sides will jointly promote the application expansion and commercialization of XR experience in key industries; In AI technology, Bluefocus Intelligent Communications Group Co.Ltd(300058) and Baidu xirang reached a strategic cooperation to jointly promote the combination of meta universe technology and marketing.
In the layout of virtual digital people, Internet giants are more responsible. Following the strategic investment in Lehua entertainment with Alibaba in 2021 to create a virtual idol women’s group a-soul, byte beat invested and created the AR technology trend brand named “Li Weike” and Hangzhou Li Weike Technology Co., Ltd. with the virtual IP image of the same name in January 2022, with a shareholding ratio of 20%.
Tianfeng Securities Co.Ltd(601162) believes that the virtual human industry chain can be divided into foundation layer, platform layer and application layer. The users of the basic layer and platform layer are mainly enterprises, while the main users of the application layer are consumers. The development of Chinese manufacturers in the basic layer, platform layer and application layer of the industrial chain is relatively balanced, and the system of virtual digital human from development to landing is gradually becoming complete.
Among them, the related manufacturers of the basic layer mainly provide software and hardware support; The platform layer focuses on artificial intelligence, motion capture, modeling and rendering and technical services of virtual digital human, such as Iflytek Co.Ltd(002230) , Shangtang technology, etc; The application layer focuses on providing solutions and marketing. Virtual IP images such as Mango Excellent Media Co.Ltd(300413) , Bluefocus Intelligent Communications Group Co.Ltd(300058) , Zhewen Interactive Group Co.Ltd(600986) , Hylink Digital Solution Co.Ltd(603825) and Inmyshow Digital Technology (Group) Co.Ltd(600556) have been launched or are about to be launched.
industry application accelerated landing
According to the industrial layout and application scenarios, virtual people can be divided into service-oriented virtual people and identity oriented virtual people. Among them, identity virtual people mainly focus on the field of Pan entertainment and social networking, represented by virtual idols, star real person digital doubles, etc. For example, Gu ailing, a Winter Olympic athlete of China Mobile, became popular during the Beijing Winter Olympics.
According to AI media consulting report, the virtual idol industry maintains a stable growth trend. In 2021, the core market scale of virtual idols will be 6.22 billion yuan, and it is expected to reach 12.08 billion yuan in 2022. Industry insiders said that identity virtual people have a younger audience, stronger willingness to pay, high commercial value and occupy a dominant position in the industry market.
Tianfeng Securities Co.Ltd(601162) said that with the application and development of AI technologies such as NLP (natural language processing) and xnr (deep neural network rendering technology), virtual digital human expanded from early pan entertainment to finance, culture and tourism, medical treatment, retail and other fields, developed towards intelligence, portability, refinement and diversification, realized the identity function of real human virtual avatar, and gradually realized commercial realization.
JD virtual digital human “Yanxi” is a digital human product that can provide intelligent consulting services. At present, “Yanxi” has become the first VTM digital employee in China from “cross-border” in the field of e-commerce, social media and finance, and can complete the whole process of bank transaction business in an independent closed loop.
In the field of education, Shenzhen Kingsun Science & Technology Co.Ltd(300235) recently said on the investor interaction platform that the company plans to launch application products related to teachers’ virtual digital image this year. At present, relevant business and technology reserves have been formed, including virtual teachers and virtual teaching environment Trs Information Technology Co.Ltd(300229) in the previous performance presentation, the company said that it will give priority to professional service scenarios in finance, media, government, marketing and other industries by using the technical advantages of Chinese natural language processing core technology and knowledge map to enable service-oriented virtual human.
According to the in-depth industry report of virtual digital human released by qubit, the market scale of virtual human is expected to reach 270 billion yuan in 2030. Among them, the market scale of service-oriented virtual human is about 174.7 billion yuan, and the market scale of identity virtual human is about 95.5 billion yuan.
development pain points to be solved
Faced with the development of the industry, Li Shiyan, head of Baidu Intelligent Cloud AI interactive lab, said that China’s virtual digital people are still facing many difficulties in landing large-scale industries.
\u3000\u3000 “First of all, the nodes of the digital human industry chain are relatively fragmented and can not cooperate efficiently, resulting in high barriers to the production and optimization of digital human. At present, most companies in the industry are only one or several links in the whole process of digital human production and operation. Second, the service scene and performance scene are not effectively connected, which shows that the performing digital human does not have the business ability required by customers, while the service digital human is lack of staffing and difficult to operate Emotional communication with users. The third is that the cost of meeting the needs of high mobility and high frequency is still very high. In the final analysis, this problem is still the production efficiency of digital people. ” Li Shiyan said.
Industry insiders said that now the content production cost and cycle of virtual human has become one of the pain points of the whole industry. The R & D cost of a short video of millions of Yuan hinders the development of the industry and limits the growth of b-end customer demand.
In response to the pain points in the industry, Baidu said Baidu Intelligent Cloud Xi Ling, on the one hand, has enabled more and more virtual digital people to enter the platform to share the cost of investment in advance by means of platform. On the other hand, build a complete ecological chain service based on the platform to truly reduce the high threshold and high investment of digital people. For example, when users upload a photo on Xiling platform, they can quickly generate a 2D digital portrait that can be driven by AI. The 2D digital portrait that originally took a week can now be shortened to the minute level; 3D hyper realistic digital people, which used to take two or three months to produce, can now be compressed to a week or two.
Anxin Securities said that overseas enterprises operate virtual digital people as digital assets, but at present, many service-oriented virtual people in China are invested as a cost to reduce costs and improve operation efficiency in the short term. Most of the realization methods are limited to short-term traffic dividends such as live e-commerce, or in industries such as intelligent shopping guide and customer service, resulting in the low ceiling of this track.
In this regard, Anxin Securities believes that before making virtual digital people, we need to think about the human positioning and operation logic of virtual digital people. Different operation logic will bring different utility value. We should roughly plan the realization path in the future.
