Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In June, Shoto, an Asian-American virtual anchor, first appeared in bilibili's studio and sang 14 songs in two and a half hours and received more than 1 million rewards. Despite the delay caused by the power outage, the comment area is still full of fans' love, and some fans are enthusiastic about the new fan Amway, introducing the virtual anchor's growth from obscurity to prosperity.

Also in June, the 12th Beijing Film Festival brought in the new national trend intelligent virtual idol "Mei Xitian", which attracted onlookers as the promotion officer of the metamosmos and the skin and intellectual setting of the local style of Mei Xitian Hall. However, after watching Mei's astringent and sweet self-introduction, netizens had mixed feelings: "after watching your modeling, I decided not to scold Arena of Valor."

Following the hot wind of meta-universe, the virtual human under the blessing of technology is like a traffic password, which can always attract the attention of the audience and make enough gimmicks as soon as it takes the stage.

Is virtual human really popular? In the eyes of consumers, is virtual human a technology product or a perfect idol? We want to find out.

Who are all the popular virtual people? In the past year, many virtual people have emerged in front of the public. Some of them are singing and dancing love beans, some are company employees, and there are even students from Tsinghua University.

We collected the active dummies on Weibo to try to find out their characteristics and commonalities.

It can be seen that the virtual people we have come into contact with on the social platform are mainly virtual idols and virtual employees. Virtual idols present content through the leather covers of virtual images for the audience to enjoy, while virtual employees are virtual "beater". Responsible for anchors, endorsements and other tasks.

Among them, most of the active virtual humans are positioned as virtual idols. Among the top 25 Weibo followers, 19 are positioned as virtual idols.

Virtual idols continue to update photos, songs, and even dance and other entertainment content, attracting high popularity. Of the four dummies who have reached millions of fans, Luo Tianyi is a singer, A-SOUL is a women's group, reddi is a fashion blogger, and only CCTV Xiao C is an anchor employee who "works" at CCTV. Although no virtual human has tens of millions of top fans, Luo Tianyi also has more than 5 million Weibo followers.

Among the six virtual employees on the list, there are three spokesmen, two anchors and one employee. The brand attribute of the spokesperson is very strong. Qu Chenxi, the exclusive spokesman for Watsons, and Ha Jiang, the virtual human of Harbin Beer, not only got a contract with Warner Music to become a virtual artist, but also appeared in GQ magazine at the end of last year.

The situation of the two anchors is different. CCTV Xiao C hosts the program conscientiously and talks with experts on the CCTV network, while bilibili's Bingtang IO is personally to the anchor and interacts with the audience through video and live broadcast.

Another Hua Zhibing on the list has a more special identity. He is a virtual student of Tsinghua University, studying hard in the knowledge engineering laboratory of the Department of computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University. The goal is to become a smart (robot) person with knowledge and communication skills.

It is not difficult to find that virtual idols are similar to real-life idols, attracting and entertaining the public with content, while virtual employees undertake a variety of tasks, but also live advertisements for brands and institutions to get involved in cutting-edge technology.

Seemingly "perfect" virtual human many virtual people are active, and there must be a large number of corporate players behind it.

Companies that launch virtual humans include technology companies, media companies and consumer brands. Players from various industries join the virtual human for three reasons:

1. With the help of the topic of virtual human, when the new technology appears so closely in cyber life, it is bound to attract onlookers.

The surreal mimicry effect and the interaction of breaking through the dimensional wall are always a little more interesting than familiar real people, even passers-by will stare at them and express their feelings about science and technology. All kinds of companies behind virtual human can also draw attention with the help of traffic flow.

two。 Strong plasticity, closer to the "ideal person" is another characteristic of the non-real person, is infinite plasticity. The hairstyle, facial features and figure of the virtual human can be adjusted at will, breaking the limitations of the real person. through modeling, the virtual human appearance can be infinitely close to perfection, and constantly adjust iteration. Digital features allow them to neither get out of shape nor collapse. Compared with the flow stars who frequently set off public opinion, the virtual human's "holster" is almost impeccable.

3. Make gimmicks, but also make money flow and solid image, and eventually return to profitability. Although the virtual human has just started, the ability to make money has begun to make people jealous.

In June, bilibili's virtual anchorman's total revenue reached 87 million, with more than 500000 payers. In addition to the soaring popularity of Shoto, members of the virtual women's group A-SOUL, the late Devil King, broadcast live for nearly 10 hours in June, earning more than 2 million in revenue.

Virtual artists can bring revenue, and it is high-profit revenue.

Lehua Entertainment, which is behind A-SOUL, disclosed in this year's prospectus that revenue from the pan-entertainment business module to which virtual artists belong increased by 79.6% to 37.9 million yuan in 2021. Due to relatively low operating costs, the gross profit margin of the pan-entertainment business also rose at the same time, from 56.5% in 2020 to 77.7% in 2021.

Virtual humans, who have perfect physique such as "flow", "do not defeat people" and "attract money", seem to have a bright future in "creating momentum" and "making money". This is not the case in reality. The real world is puncturing the bubble created by virtual human beings.

The gap of the virtual human, the gap of the audience reverses the interaction of the virtual human content active in various platforms, we find that they all have varying degrees of popularity fluctuations, including idol with a serious decline in popularity.

Judging from the number of broadcasts of bilibili and the likes of Weibo and Xiao Hongshu, virtual humans on different platforms are facing a decline in popularity. In Luo Tianyi's descendants of the same company-Yanhe, Li Weike, owned by AR Trends, and AYAYI, who has worked for Alibaba, there is even a sighing scene of "debut is the peak".

Comparing the data of various platforms, it is not difficult to find that compared with light content platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu, the virtual human active in bilibili is relatively hot. Looking through the content carefully, we also found that whether it is video, picture, first appearance, dimension-breaking and other content, it can be more favored by the audience.

The peak of the popularity of virtual makeup blogger Liu Yexi was the first note in Little Red Book: "officially settled in Little Red Book!" This video note received more than 490000 likes. A video of Luo Tianyi singing "Dala collapse Bar" with Xue Zhiqian in 2019 has become his most popular video to date, with 6.686 million views; a photo taken by virtual man Vince with sports blogger Zhao Yinong is also his most popular original Weibo post, which garnered 13000 likes.

The crowd of onlookers who felt new and new to meet for the first time gradually left, which seemed to show that the virtual human was perfect, but not perfect. The gap of the virtual human is the psychological gap of the audience.

From the audience's point of view, we found three handicaps.

1. Whether the imitative reality is real enough and whether it can be pleasing to the eye is the first step for the virtual human to be recognized. In the controversial Weibo comment area of the sweet plum video, there is no lack of comments on the "modeling", "action" and "art" of the sweet plum. Some people complain about the aesthetics of the appearance design, and some put forward suggestions for optimization.

From the high-frequency words that appear in the notes related to "Virtual Man" in the little red book, we can more directly see people's attention to the "degree of simultaneity".

Further analysis of high-frequency words, we can find that the most high-frequency words are about appearance: "good-looking", "cute" and "beautiful", and virtual people are paid attention to by virtue of their perfect appearance.

Apart from appearance, everyone's attention has fallen to the "level of authenticity". Young people admire the similarity between virtual people and "real people" and pay attention to the restoration of details such as "clothes", "eyes" and "skin". It is worth noting that "terror" also appears in high-frequency words. The partially distorted virtual human brings the "horror valley effect".

In addition, there is the problem of "technology". How to "scan"modeling" and use "3D", the technology behind virtual human has also attracted everyone's attention.

When the virtual human appears as a human, everyone naturally wonders whether the virtual human really replicates the real person's every move and whether it can be refined to the wrinkles of clothes and the texture of the skin. The virtual human, which is not real enough, looks like a non-human being, not only can not be regarded as an idol with "technical content", but makes people fear.

two。 The decline of the popularity of the virtual human, which continuously attracts the eye, to some extent shows that when the freshness and senses shock past, there is no continuous content, and the perfect leather case of the virtual human can not maintain its charm.

Plastic perfection at this stage can still let virtual people win love with their appearance, but this perfection is not impossible to replicate. Almost every virtual human visible today has smooth skin, deep facial features and a symmetrical figure. When more and more "perfect" virtual people appear, this perfection becomes commonplace, even taken for granted, and can not become the foothold of virtual human.

If virtual idols want to become popular, they may be able to refer to the future of the first sound of their debut in 2007. Since his debut, Chuyin has released albums one after another, singing anime and game theme songs, and "Song of throwing Onions" once became a brainwashing divine song.

Virtual humans may have technological advantages and temporary traffic advantages, but in terms of content, they have no extra halo. Good content is still needed to get the audience to pay the bill.

3. Once the emotional gap falls into the trap of the virtual idol, fans will devote themselves to real feelings and spend time and effort on the idol. For example, the top virtual singer Luo Tianyi, a large number of fans make it even more popular.

Out of love for idols, fans will naturally pay attention to everything related to idols. At present, the operating mechanism of virtual idols does not stand the test.

In May, fans of the virtual group A-SOUL terminated their contracts early and earned a meagre income, collectively denouncing Lehua Entertainment. Although Lehua Entertainment was quick to explain the incident, the high gross margin of its pan-entertainment business in its prospectus and the salary structure of only 10 per cent of its live broadcast income are bound to be difficult to satisfy fans.

A-SOUL once advertised as "never collapse", but the accident caused the official account of bilibili of A-SOUL to lose 50,000 fans on May 11 after the incident.

It is true that the human setting did not collapse, but the emotion that fans devoted to the virtual idol collapsed.

It is always eye-catching to write at the end that cutting-edge technology brings new experiences and possibilities to people. "virtual human", a word full of sense of the future, is even more imaginative.

Look back in front of the eyes, the virtual human itself, is still not hot.

At present, the virtual human we are most directly in contact with is more used as a signboard or a content carrier. Its own degree of intelligence, the richness of content, the improvement of the mechanism, and even the possibility of more participation in our lives in the future, wait for time to tell us the answer.

As more and more virtual people integrate into life, maybe we will have a new understanding of emotion, the so-called perfection, and even the real and virtual.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: DT Finance (ID:DTcaijing), text: Ah Wen data: Xiao Tang Editor: Qi Tongyi

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