Ascendant virtual humans are taking over for pop idols in China, but the expensive technology has risks for Big Tech
- Start-ups like Musiness and StarHeir Technology are joining the Big Tech race to develop virtual idols after Japanese avatars rose to fame in China
- Virtual human development got a boost from Chinese policymakers, but high costs and maintaining momentum are long-term risks
Before six female employees from Musiness, a commercial music copyright platform based in Shanghai, started taking turns as a customer service specialist to answer questions from clients through a company social media account, none of them expected that they would be appearing on users’ screens as the same virtual woman.
The brown-haired, fair-skinned girl, garbed in a black camisole, goes by the name Metamuse and has been the animated representation of Musiness online for most of this year. Metamuse not only represents the company as a “chief customer service officer”, but also as a singer who can serenade users with tunes like Gongxi Gongxi, a traditional Chinese song celebrating Lunar New Year.
The company’s founder and CEO Tong Xiaoyan morphed Metamuse into a virtual human because she believed that metaverse-related concepts would blow up after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg rebranded the company as Meta last October. She also sees virtual humans as carrying much lower risk than real-world celebrities.
“You do not have to worry about ‘rollovers’ of their public image,” she said, referring to the Chinese internet slang that describes the sudden fall of public figures due to moral, relationship or tax issues. “And their schedule would be much more flexible than real humans.”
“Simply speaking, a new space or area [like the metaverse] first needs people, that is why our current goal is to lay out a matrix of virtual human intellectual property,” said Todd Hessert Jiang, the founder of Beijing-based virtual human developer StarHeir Technology who previously worked in luxury fashion.
The market size of virtual humans was about 107.5 billion yuan (US$16.9 billion) in 2021 and is expected to reach 333.5 billion yuan in 2023, rising along with the sophistication of related technologies and broader consumer acceptance, according to a recent report from market research firm iiMedia.
The reception to virtual humans in business and social environments is partially a generational issue, according to James Cheng, a senior project manager for the telecommunications, media, and technology sector at global consulting firm Roland Berger.
