Xu Yuanchun, chief operating officer of Xiaobing company and head of artificial intelligence creativity laboratory, said that the primary reason for the rapid warming of the virtual human market is not because everyone is talking about the meta universe making virtual people hot, but more importantly, the rapid development of industry related technologies. "In your opinion, the suddenly popular track, in fact, we have been moving in this direction in the past seven years. For us, it is the technology iteration from generation to generation that has come to today. It is not a sudden change from zero to one, but a continuous quantitative change process." For the public's curiosity about "how to produce a virtual human", Xu Yuanchun explained in detail what technologies are needed to build a virtual human at present, and how to overcome the difficulties of technology at this stage. Taking Xiaobing's products as an example, the roughly required steps and production cost of making virtual human are disassembled. He said that the current use of 3D modeling and other similar technologies to produce super realistic virtual personification, only a single image part, the cost of 3D model is about 300000-450000, and the operation may cost five or six million a year. The following is the fourth issue of Netease technology 2022 please answer, 2022, how to play with "virtual people" Xu Yuanchun, chief operating officer of Lianmai Xiaobing company and head of artificial intelligence creativity laboratory, part of the dialogue: Moderator: we all know that Xiaobing has Xia Yubing, n Xiaohei, etc. please first introduce what virtual human matrix Xiaobing currently has? Xu Yuanchun: Xiaobing currently has several different types of virtual people. The first is the type of digital employees, such as "Cui Xiaopan" developed by us for Vanke; The second type seems to us to be an expert virtual human. For example, the referee system "Guanjun" for auxiliary training developed by the State Sports Administration also includes "n Xiaohei" produced by our daily economic news; The third is partial entertainment and partial star type, including the tiktok, a digital virtual artist who is just working on the line of voice and we are working with China Central Academy of Fine Arts. She has just released a single song and her works also attended World Expo, Dubai. Moderator: what is the reason why domestic virtual people can be "hot" in 2021? Xu Yuanchun: in my opinion, the primary reason for the rapid warming of the market is not that the meta universe makes virtual people hot. The most important reason is the rapid development of related technologies. The whole 3D modeling includes 4G technology, which has been used for a long time. All kinds of special effects films in Hollywood have been adopted. However, even today, the cost of being a super realistic virtual human may be relatively high, but the cost has been greatly controlled and reduced compared with before, Therefore, we can see that many domestic companies have begun to vigorously develop virtual people with hyper realism or 3D modeling. Take our own example. Xiaobing has been accumulating various technologies over the years. From the beginning of text interaction technology, Xiaobing has accumulated experience in various hardware car interactions since she became a chat robot, including supernatural voice technology and artificial intelligence creativity technology. Until now, we have assembled the last module, Neural network rendering technology is used to complete the creation of high-definition natural image without 3D modeling logic. In your opinion, the suddenly popular track, in fact, we have been moving in this direction in the past seven years. For us, it is the technology iteration from generation to generation that has come to today. It is not a sudden change from zero to one, but a process of continuous quantitative change. Host: everyone is curious about how to make a virtual human. Please take a virtual human under Xiaobing as an example. What are the steps to make a virtual human? Xu Yuanchun: we have just released the digital human driving platform of "separation and skill" in cooperation with blue cursor, and produced the digital virtual human of Zhao Wenquan, chairman of blue cursor. If you see this video, you can find that we haven't done interaction yet, only image and sound. In this case, we first need chairman Zhao to shoot in the studio for more than an hour and collect about 30 minutes of effective data as video training materials, which is enough for our model to complete the whole training in about a week. Next, after inputting the text information, the video will be automatically generated, and chairman Zhao will vividly express his ideas in front of you. This is the simplest process. On this basis, if you want to reproduce the person's voice, then add a voice training model. If you want him to have certain abilities, such as financial knowledge, we will equip him with appropriate knowledge map and continuously integrate ability modules one by one. Moderator: how long will it take to build a formed virtual human, and what is the scale of the production cost? Xu Yuanchun: from the perspective of image alone, if you use 3D modeling or this similar technology today, you can see from the market that making a 3D model is about hundreds of thousands, 300000-450000, which is the average price on the market. Then you can do actions, bind and make this kind of poster. The quotation on the market is basically 10000-20000. If you want to do weekly shift, it will cost more than 1 million a year. If you want to make video again, it will take about 1 million for an average of 15 seconds. If you want to use 3D modeling technology to operate such a virtual human, if you don't pursue special high quality and only seek the average level, it may cost five or six million a year, and this is only the image part. Xiaobing is now using neural network rendering technology to make virtual human, because it is always driven by generation. Such a virtual human may cost hundreds of thousands of yuan a year. In addition, in terms of voice technology, many manufacturers can also provide customization. This is a relatively mature market. IFLYTEK, Baidu and us are basically within the fair price range of one market, and you can choose different voice customization capabilities according to your requirements. In fact, the most difficult thing to measure is the professional ability of virtual people. The professional ability of a virtual person refers to what you want him to do. For example, if you want the virtual human to quickly complete the summary of financial news, you have to train him to do text summary, or even financial text summary, which is actually a very professional problem. Therefore, when discussing this matter with many partners, we will first introduce the last part to you, that is, we need to plan and figure out in advance what the virtual human wants to have and what his boundary is. Because it directly depends on the predictable range of the investment cost of this matter. Of course, the more important thing is to see where the benefits brought by this virtual person to you. You can't be a virtual person in order to be a virtual person. You should find your own appropriate ability and value application. Moderator: in the operation of virtual people, how to give virtual people a different "soul"? What kind of virtual personification can be "red"? Xu Yuanchun: there are two dimensions. If today's virtual human you operate is a singer and entertainment type, your goal is that he should be popular and have traffic. On the other hand, if your virtual human is born to serve a specific field, then red is not his main measure. Let's talk about the latter first. Whether it's Cui Xiaopan, the virtual employee we do for Vanke, or we do "Guanjun" for the Winter Olympics, the most important value of these virtual people is that they produce values that human beings can't replace and generate greater benefits. In fact, many people have asked me whether Vanke is a digital employee because of saving wages. In fact, it is not his greatest value, but creating a value that employees could not realize in the past. Another type is the entertainment type we see. Xiaobing also has virtual people like Xia Yubing. How do we operate? In fact, there is a type of company called virtual anthropomorphic operation company in the virtual human track. For example, the operator of ayayi is actually doing well. We have been working with such partners in the past two years, and we have been discussing deeper cooperation with many entertainment film and television companies recently. But at present, the market is more like everyone is exploring and groping. No one has a very successful experience to share with.