The Digital Human is Becoming Prevalent
From time immemorial down to our own day, we humans have had the power to imagine unrevealed possibilities. And ‘digital human’ used to be a common topic of futuristic sci-fi fictions of all times including nowadays. The only difference from the past would be that we now have the technology such as Artificial Intelligence to realize our longing imagination. We’ve been witnessing that the digital humans are now unveiling its appearance in different forms, over different industries.
The movie industry has been a frontier to bring widely cross-pollinated imagination of digital humans into visualization. For some, a digital human is realized as an AI robot. HBO recently presented Westworld, for example, a show about robotic ‘hosts’ throwing questions about artificial consciousness.
Turning over, Hollywood also approaches a digital human as a virtual avatar. Hollywood created virtual characters with advanced CGI technology convincing the public to believe something obviously fake as real. James Cameron recently brought us Alita from his movie Battle Angel: Alita, a CG-created virtual photorealistic character, who blends naturally with other ‘real’ actors/actresses filling up the same scene.
Netflix also experiments on the different animation styles on their latest original ‘Love, Death, And Robot.’ The style differs just as the topics each episode deals with — from the 2D anime style to photorealistic style lightly crossing the uncanny valley.
Edit(Aug 24th, 2020): Along with the researches, we finally released an avatar video-chat/streaming app for who wants to create digital humans! Currently, the app, Hyprmeet, is free to download as a beta app so check it out and let us how you think.
It contains a built-in avatar customizing tool, a virtual webcam feature for streaming/video call software such as Zoom/Discord/OBS, and our real-time facial mocap technology. We are planning to add more features such as VRoid 3D model support, button-triggered animation, etc. so stay tuned!
Digital Humans Are Here, Beyond Hollywood
These days, Alita isn’t only in futuristic sci-fi movies. Meet Lil Miquela, a virtual influencer with over 1.5M Instagram followers who collaborates with Prada. Another popular virtual influencer is Shunu, claimed as ‘world’s first digital supermodel.’
The seemingly sudden rise of digital humans is already a prevalent concept in the live streaming world across the Pacific Ocean. In Asia, Kizuna AI holds over 2.4M youtube subscribers which makes her channel Top 27 in Japan. So-called ‘VTubers’ like her, a shorten term for virtual youtubers, are roughly counted as over five thousand including individuals despite the technical threshold such as 3D modeling or real-time motion capture controlling.
Do YOU Want to Build Your Own?
If you search #zepeto on Instagram, you will find tons of 3D avatars that look alike but all different. And looking closely, you will notice that the avatars are customized characters created by ordinary teens as their digital avatars.
So, how did they do this? Through an app called Zepeto, that allows you to create a cute 3D character of yourself that would pop out of one of those Disney movies. Targeted for generation Z, the app is popular among teenagers with over 10M downloads solely counted on Google play.
On the other hand, there is VRChat. VRChat is a massively multiplayer online video game that a player can interact with others as a 3D character model.
Gaining its momentum over Youtubers and Twitch streamers, the game showed the possibility of the vibrant social community gathered as virtual avatars. Real-time communication over the virtual avatars has built stronger and genuine social interaction over VRChat.
Facebook Reality Labs also has been putting its effort in creating lifelike VR avatars of oneself using machine learning. Although this project — ‘Codec Avatars’ — is nowhere near being ready for the public in years, the progress allows us to take a glimpse at the future of online interaction as our digital-selves.
Imagine Far More With Hyprsense
The barrier over digital human is breaking down giving access to even common users like us. At the same time, the need for live interaction with real-like expression is increasing over time. And we, team Hyprsense, believe that the rise of digital human will continue to shape future entertainment and a new type of online interaction.
At the frontier of the upcoming digital human interaction, Hyprsense develops real-time facial motion capture software to breathe life into any 3D character to be animated with a user’s own expressions.
We have been gaining tractions over the market-leading entertainment companies in the fields of mobile service, game development, and 3D content creation. The upcoming collaborative projects we have been working on will be updated on our facebook page. And we believe this is just the very beginning of the digital human trend and related market.
Are you also interested in the digital avatar world to realize your broader imagination? Connect with us and tell us your story. Let’s build something awesome together.
Hyprface is our product-ready software fully built in-house to track expression values and remap them into a 3D character in real-time. The SDK supports iOS, Android, Windows, Unity, and Unreal. If you are interested, feel free to ask us for a free 30-day trial SDK.
