| Highlights for September 2024
Marketing and Brand Integration Hololive’s virtual influencer Usada Pekora collaborated with McDonald’s Japan in a marketing campaign, highlighting the use of VTubers in commercial branding and promotions. The campaign underscores how virtual characters can drive consumer engagement through brand affiliation. A related study from the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen emphasizes how fictional characters, such as virtual beings, shape brand identity and influence consumer perception. Meanwhile, the AI Avatar Creator Contest hosted by Avtr Meta Labs in partnership with MIB fosters innovation in the design of AI-driven virtual influencers, allowing participants to develop avatars using advanced AI tools tailored for brand and influencer use cases. Personalized AI-generated content is also highlighted in challenges promoting the ease of customizing digital brand ambassadors for targeted advertising. Enterprise and Customer Service Applications Deutsche Telekom partnered with UneeQ to enhance customer service through digital humans like Selena and Max, integrating AI-powered assistants to interact with customers in real time. UneeQ also participated in Dell’s AI and digital transformation presentations, suggesting broader enterprise interest in AI-human interface technologies. Shanghai Customs introduced a digital human named Xiao Zhi (??), deployed across customer service, legal consultation, e-commerce, government, and financial sectors, reflecting China’s institutional adoption of virtual agents in administrative functions. SoulShell, a Beijing-based company, develops hyper-realistic and interactive digital human systems for intelligent enterprise applications, especially in customer engagement and brand identity scenarios. Culture, Heritage, and Public Engagement The Dali government launched a digital human during the 2024 Dali National Film Week to promote local culture, designed using AI and digital production technologies. Similarly, China’s first Sign Language Museum opened in Nanjing, accompanied by the establishment of a research institute, indicating growing integration of digital tools in accessibility and cultural preservation. These cases show how digital humans and avatars are becoming tools for public outreach and heritage education. Technology Development Platforms and Tools Virbe 2.0 offers a platform for creating and deploying virtual beings, featuring tools like an AI editor to manage virtual identities. The “Avatar Physical Touch” SDK supports initializing, calibrating, and releasing VR avatars, optimizing their use in immersive applications. Meta’s hiring for its AI team within Horizon OS reflects ongoing development of interfaces for interactive digital environments, likely involving virtual beings in the Horizon ecosystem. Synthesis AI has built an automated workflow for generating digital humans using synthetic data, with an emphasis on ethical diversity. Entropy Function, based in Shenzhen, specializes in developing next-generation autonomous digital humans powered by large language models, focusing on agency and intelligence. Healthcare and Emotional AI Ava is an emotional AI assistant developed under Project PEARL, capable of live text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and sentiment analysis. Designed to interact with users emotionally and conversationally, Ava exemplifies how digital humans are entering caregiving, wellness, and companionship domains. Human digital twins are also highlighted as computational models that simulate human interaction with AI systems, indicating potential applications in personalized health simulations or behavior prediction. Virtual Identity, Metaverse, and Content Creation SecondLive, an AI-powered metaverse platform with over 5 million users and 1.81 million AI-generated digital assets, represents large-scale integration of virtual beings into immersive digital environments. The platform supports digital identity creation and asset management, contributing to the growth of AI-enabled virtual worlds. The Alibaba timeline entry reflects continued expansion of multimodal AI-powered digital humans enabling real-time emotional and conversational interactions. SyncWords provides real-time AI-driven captioning, translation, and lip-sync dubbing services, which may support virtual characters in global content delivery. Synthetic Data and Avatar Generation Synthesis AI’s work focuses on producing synthetic data for training virtual humans and avatars, incorporating traditional VFX and ML techniques. These datasets are essential for training AI avatars to function in varied environments and demographics. The post on personalized AI-generated content also aligns with avatar customization technologies that streamline the branding and personalization of virtual beings. |
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