China's Virtual People Industry Booms as Companies Turn to Digitized Employees

Virtual people, or digitized human beings that can perform and interact on live streams, are becoming increasingly popular in China's entertainment industry.

The virtual human industry in China is primed for significant expansion, with applications in broadcasting, entertainment, shopping, banking, and education.

Tech company Baidu has reported that the number of virtual people projects it has worked on for clients has doubled in the past year, with prices ranging from $2,800 to $14,300 per year, according to a recent report from CNBC.

The same report tells us that the cost of creating a three-dimensional virtual person has fallen by around 80% in the last year and now stands at around 100,000 yuan ($14,300) per year, while a two-dimensional virtual person costs around 20,000 yuan.

A Booming Industry

After the boom of virtual currencies and real estate, companies in China are exploring more ways to create revenue streams from virtual people. Amid skepticism, these virtual people, which are a combination of animation, sound technology, and machine learning, are taking Chinese cyberspace by storm.

Li Shiyan, head of Baidu's virtual people and robotics business, expects the virtual person industry to grow by 50% annually through 2025. In August, Beijing city announced plans to build an industry worth over 50 billion yuan by 2025, while the country's five-year plan, released last year, called for greater digitalization of the economy, including in virtual and augmented reality.

Many Chinese tech companies are already developing products in the virtual human industry. Video and game streaming app Bilibili was one of the first to bring virtual people mainstream, acquiring the team behind virtual singer Luo Tianyi.

This year, the developers focused on improving the texture of the virtual singer's voice using an artificial intelligence algorithm. Launched in 2012, Luo Tianyi has nearly 3 million fans and even performed at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing this year. Bilibili also hosts many virtual anchors or avatars of people using special technology to reach their audience.

The same CNBC report tells us that Tencent's Next Studios has developed a virtual singer and virtual sign language interpreter, while Tencent Cloud AI Digital Humans provide chatbots for sectors such as financial services and tourism for automated customer support.

According to recent global market research, the global digital human market is predicted to reach $527.58 billion in 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 46.4 percent.

Threat to Human Workforce

"Exposure to robots had negative effects on employment, leading some workers to drop out of the labor force and increasing unemployment," wrote Osea Giuntella of the University of Pittsburgh, Yi Lu of Tsinghua University, and Tianyi Wang of the University of Toronto in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper published back in December.

Employing data from over 15,000 families, the economists evaluated the effects of industrial robots on the Chinese labor market and discovered that the workforce struggled to "adjust" to the substantial changes driven by robotics.

According to Fortune, the emergence of robots has not always been helpful to Chinese workers. Apple's main iPhone manufacturer, Foxconn, replaced over 400,000 human jobs with robots in an automation push between 2012 and 2016.

Stay posted here at Tech Times for more of the latest news.