Nowadays, the digital world continues to invade the real world, and we constantly upload, update and iterate on our own data, as if we are constructing another “me” in the virtual world. In that world, the aborigines appeared early on. These virtual beings feed on data and blur the boundary between the two worlds in the constant interaction with the real world. In the future, in the Metaverse, how will we coexist with them, and how will the real world be transformed?
On January 21, 2021, Edward Saatchi, CEO of Fable Studio, published some opinions on Metaverse and Virtual Beings in GamesBeat and Oculus VR events. He believes that the ultimate goal of developing virtual beings is to achieve the complexity and self-awareness of virtual beings like “Her” or “Blade Runner 2049”. Furthermore, virtual beings need to have: sociality, interactivity, and memory, and the driving force behind this is AI.
These virtual people will far surpass the NPCs that game players are familiar with, and they will no longer rely solely on a certain story or worldview. You should know that in games like Red Dead Redemption 2, every NPC has at least 80 pages of scripts, and this main work is done by humans “manually”. All this work is nothing more than to let players feel the authenticity of NPCs in that game world.
For the virtual person, his authenticity is not dependent on any specific scene or story, and the interactivity is closer to the interaction between humans. For example, Miquela Sousa or the 19-year-old Instagram virtual idol Lil Miquela, she already has more than three million followers. She was developed by Brud, a Los Angeles-based startup that focuses on artificial intelligence and robotics. This obviously inspired the developers of Seraphine from the League of Legends, who also has an Instagram account.
In addition, we can also see the “Digital Deepak” built by Dr. Deepak Chopra on the AI Foundation platform. People can conduct tailor-made meditation and training under the help and guidance of virtual Deepak through dialogue with the virtual Deepak; Epic’s In accelerating the generation and creation of humans in the digital world, people can create realistic digital characters more conveniently and quickly through MetaHuman Creator; and Genvid Technologies is working hard to reshape the boundaries between virtual humans and humans through Rival Peak.
All this is the first step towards the ultimate Metaverse. When we continue to digitize ourselves, and more and more virtual humans are generated, whether it is human or virtual human, our boundaries will be gradually eliminated in the Metaverse.
I.When We Are Discussing Virtual Beings, What Are We Discussing
In fact, virtual human was originally a medical term, referring to the “body” model established through digital technology to “evolve” the “activity” of the human body in medicine. This is of course not the concept we think of when we talk about virtual humans, because this concept only emphasizes the digital body, and many other important elements are missing.
In our opinion, as Edward Saatchi said, a mature virtual person needs to be social, interactive and memorable, which makes the virtual person more real to some extent. From a macroscopic or broader perspective, unlike robots or avatars in animation, the definition criteria for virtual humans should be:
- Have a virtual image that has a non-physical entity and exists in the digital world
- Have a specific personality and personality that can convince the “audience” of their existence
- Able to interact with the “audience” in two ways
Under this definition, let’s take a look at whether the NPC in the game meets the definition of a virtual human.
First of all, the NPCs in the game have a specific avatar, and have a specific background story and personality and personality, such as the unique character of Judy in Cyberpunk 2077. In addition, these NPCs can also have a two-way relationship with the player in the game world. of interaction. So the NPCs in the game meet the standards of virtual humans, but they only exist in the game world.
Imagine those NPCs created in the game. In addition to its functionality and plot guidance, don’t game designers hope that when players enter the game as the protagonist, they can interact with them and regard it as a “real” existence in the game world? And our process of making NPCs more “smarter” is not to bring the NPCs in the game closer to the virtual humans in the Metaverse?
The Development Path of Virtual Beings
So further we can find that as the boundaries or degrees of these three standards are continuously expanded, we will gradually transition from the game world to the digital world, and four clear technology-oriented business paths have emerged:
- Image end: More realistic representation of the virtual image and its characteristics, making it closer to humans in appearance
- Logical end: Provide virtual people with “intelligence” and give them character, making it closer to human characteristics
- Interactive end: Provides multidimensional interaction methods, such as voice, text, and action, etc.
- Presentation end: presents a more immersive interactive experience for the “audience”, such as VR, holographic imaging and other equipment
In the game world, the products of these four business paths mainly include:
- Image end: Unity Engine, Unreal Engine, Realblast, Fuxi animation generation, Crypko character generation, etc.
- Logical end: Chaos Box, etc.
- Interactive end: Agora API, GPT3, etc.
- Presentation end: Playstation VR, Oculus Rift S, Valve Index, etc.
In the wider digital world, the products of these four business paths mainly include:
- Image end: MetaHuman Creator, Character Creator 3, Adobe, Autodesk, Nuke, Fusion, Cinema 4D, Maya, 3D Max, Houdini, ZBrush, Blender, DaVinci, etc.
- Logical end: Morpheus Cloud, Wizard Engine, etc.
- Interactive end: Agora API, GPT3, Amazon Lex, Alibaba Cloud intelligent voice interaction, etc.
- Presentation end: Oculus Quest, HP Reverb, etc.
At the same time, two development paths for virtual humans appeared:
- Outside-in: that is, starting from the image side and then to the logical side. At the beginning, the company focused on the appearance of the virtual person, and then began to enhance its intelligence, and thus began to build the virtual person. Their focus was on the high level of realism of the character. Lil Miquela, Shudu, Magic Leap’s Mica, next-generation culture Ling, and Soul Machines’ virtual humans are all good examples.
- Inside-out: This means starting from the logic side and moving to the image side. At the beginning, the companies mainly focus on the intelligence of the avatars, then they gradually improve their appearance, and they focus more on the emotional connection with the “audience”. For human beings, we would prefer that the avatars show some intelligence and interact with us more emotionally, like Samantha in Her.
Development stages of virtual beings
With the above business and the development path of avatars, and referring to the “White Paper on the Development of virtual human beings in 2020” released by the China Artificial Intelligence Industry Development Alliance, we can see that the development of avatars has mainly gone through the following four stages.
Looking back at the development process of virtual humans, we can find that they are scattered around the world, causing short ripples and then not causing much of a reaction for a long time, The main reasons are.
- The “interactive properties” of virtual humans are not enough, and the “intelligence” is still far from what we expect. The early virtual IPs did not have strong interaction with the “audience” and were more of an “idol”, so there was not much innovation with the traditional idol economy. For example, “Hatsune Miku”, “Lotte”, etc.; until later, there are more and more virtual people with different personalities, who share their virtual lives and interact with humans on social platforms, but their “intelligence “still needs to be further strengthened
- The virtual people’s circle-breaking properties are not yet so strong. The virtual singer represented by “Hatsune Miku” and “Luo Tianyi” is mainly active in the ACG groups, while the virtual human represented by Lil Miquela is trying to break the boundary between virtual and reality.
- The direction of commercial realization of virtual people is still being explored. The current main direction: advertising cooperation, concerts, education and live broadcast, etc., still lack of large-scale application of the landing scene
Of course, this is also a gradual transition and the process of getting better, we look forward to the moment when virtual people gradually penetrate our lives, just as we have been looking forward to the moment of awakening of the NPCs in the game world.
II. How to Meet Virtual Human Beings in the Metaverse
As mentioned earlier in this article, as the natives of the virtual world, virtual human beings will continue to live and thrive in the Metaverse. We in the real world have been meeting them through different digital media for a long time, and in the future, the ways of meeting them will continue to be enriched and our path through the Metaverse will be widened.
Generally speaking, the virtual human beings are made of 5 modules: human image, voice generation, animation generation, audio and video synthesis display, and interaction.
In the future, when people in the real world gradually digitize all their personal information, then we may enter the virtual world in a real sense. In the virtual world, we seem to have no big difference with the virtual people, because our presentations are the image of digital characters and our communication and interaction are mainly through text, voice and etc. as well. The only difference is that real people will think more intelligently, but this difference will gradually shrink in the process of continuous improvement of artificial intelligence technology.
Therefore, the process of real-world humans interacting with virtual people is not as difficult as one might think. Because no matter virtual people or real people with digital identities, they are just ordinary residents in the digital world, working, living and communicating with the support of digital platforms.
Digital upload of real identities
Digital identity means recording information about an individual, including identity information and personal behavioral preferences, in digital information to distinguish different individuals. With the development of the Internet and digital technology, digital identities have been widely used.
For example, the account identities of WeChat, Facebook, and Instagram record users’ social information, the account identities of Alipay, Taobao, and Amazon record consumption information, and the account identities of games and video software record entertainment preferences. Users have built up a large number of digital identities representing themselves through the process of social, consumption and entertainment activities on the Internet.
In this process, we have used digital identities to interact with numerous virtual people. The users you like and comment on social platform may be virtual beings, such as Instagram’s virtual celebrities, artist Lil Miquela and supermodel Shudu; the users you ask questions or communicate with during online shopping may also be virtual beings, such as AI customer service or virtual live-streaming hosts ; when you are playing games, your teammates or opponents may both be virtual beings, controlling by the AI system……
These behaviors are already embedded in our lives. Thus it’s not difficult to imagine more digital interactions with virtual beings in the Metaverse.
VR-based immersive experience
The initial application of VR technology is in the game field, while in the 1990s, Nintendo and Philips first brought VR into the commercial sector. In the next 20 years, since major companies like Oculus, HTC, and Sony largely invested in R&D, the price of VR had become more affordable and the content experience and interaction tools had become more powerful. The industry entered an explosive growth period.
In fact, review and forecast the development of VR technology, its development process can be divided into three stages.
- In the first stage, the use of head-mounted displays and two handheld controllers can give users a relatively immersive experience in virtual space, but this type of technology only affects the visual, auditory and limited forms of touch
- In the second stage, the use of haptic body suits and omnidirectional treadmills allows the user’s entire body to feel and move in the virtual space as it would in the real world, dramatically increasing the level of immersion compared to the first stage
- In the third stage, it can be expected that advanced VR technology will be used to connect human neuro tactile senses, replicating signals from the brain exactly into the virtual environment and using VR to transfer consciousness directly into the virtual space
At different stages, VR technology has been improved in the direction of improving the immersive experience of the user, whether visual, auditory, tactile or perceptual. This also provides support for better interaction in the virtual world.
In traditional Internet, we socialize with others online through media platforms such as WeChat, QQ, and Weibo; in VR games, players are able to interact with NPCs or virtual images of other players in the world of game; if they are removed from the context and environment set by the game, they can interact with other virtual characters in the virtual world created by using VR. The virtual offline social interaction becomes possible.
In the Metaverse, we will be able to interact freely in specific scenarios in the virtual world and communicate face to face. This is not only with real people, but also with intelligent virtual beings created by a string of code.
A day with virtual beings in the Metaverse
Now let’s imagine how a real human would live with virtual beings in the Metaverse.
- At 8 a.m., you wake up and put on your smart glasses. Your AI assistant has arranged a healthy breakfast that suits your tastes, briefing you on the day’s schedule and news from your social media platforms while you eat.
- At 10 a.m., you meet in a virtual conference room to prepare a project proposal, and your virtual colleagues will conduct intelligent tests based on your proposal, anticipate its feasibility, and give immediate feedback
- At 5pm, you enter Amazon’s virtual platform and start shopping, accompanied by a virtual shopper who will recommend the most suitable products and services for you
- At 9 p.m., you are tired after a long day of travel, so you log into the game to chat and play with your virtual friends
This seems unimaginable now, but maybe it’s just a mundane day in the Metaverse for humans in the future. The future is hard to predict, but it is undeniable that with the perfection of the virtual digital world, virtual beings will appear more and more frequently in our lives and play an increasingly important role.
III. The arrival of the Metaverse and the transforming real world
The Metaverse will not arrive suddenly with a landmark event, but, as Edward Saatchi says, we are now living in the Metaverse in different ways, at different stages of maturity. We are constantly building the digital world, digitizing ourselves as well as the physical world, and in the process we will gradually experience virtual people as our assistants, colleagues, friends, and even loved ones.
Although we cannot feel the arrival of the Metaverse instantaneously, the emergence and maturation of avatars can help us to feel the changes of the Metaverse from another angle, we will see the avatars gradually change the information dissemination and emotional relationships of people in the real world, and the Metaverse will change from different real variables. For example, education, employment, consumption, etc. affect the real world social structure and economic system.
New Zealand-based startup Soul Machines has created Lia, an emotionally intelligent avatar who, in addition to having a virtual brain and a virtual nervous system, possesses digital dopamine, which affects her neurons and triggers her facial muscles. She is able to detect emotional states by looking at the “viewer’s” face, and can learn and respond to external stimuli in real time.
Lia is a very good example to tell us that virtual people are gradually understanding human beings, although now may be due to the maturity of the technology and other limitations will produce the Valley of Terror theory, but in the future when we cross this effect, whether through text or facial expressions for emotional analysis, the feelings of people in the real world will be more understanding and release in the virtual world, and the emotional link with these virtual people will be further strengthened.
From then on, human relationships in the real world we live in will gradually be transformed, but as we invest more time and energy in the virtual world, how can we further distinguish which is real?
As the number of avatars increases and matures, the virtual content in the Metaverse will continue to be enriched and improved, and more and more of our time will be consumed in this world, for our work, education, and entertainment purposes.
We all know that the limited resources of the real world will increase competition, and the emergence and improvement of another world will undoubtedly give us more opportunities to create new values, enjoy new jobs, and receive new education. Perhaps we will generate new consumption habits, consume more virtual goods, and at the same time acquire more virtual assets, and the real-world economic system will be transformed, and the blockchain revolution may come.
Of course, all of this happens because we believe in the arrival of the Metaverse. As in the science fiction novel Cloudball, the words mentioned by Zhang Qi when implementing the crossing plan, believing in itself creates power.
Last but not least
In fact, there are many other discussions on the topic of avatars, for example, when they mature and develop to a certain level, can they still be distinguished from humans? The explanation of consciousness in science fiction may give us some inspiration, for example, in Cloudball, scientists succeeded in discovering the existence of consciousness.
They believe that consciousness is an objectively existing entity, an energy field, a web-like structure composed of many microscopic particles. These microscopic particles are linked to each other by some mechanism similar to quantum entanglement. The microscopic particles themselves can be at different energy levels, representing different states, and leaps in energy levels lead to changes in states, which in turn lead to mechanisms for storage and computation.
And the brain is the host of the consciousness field. Between the consciousness field and the brain cells, a linking relationship similar to quantum entanglement is also formed. This link forms two channels. One channel is the information channel, through which the brain and the consciousness field exchange information. The other channel is the energy supply channel, through which the brain supplies energy to the consciousness field.
Such a description looks very similar to the concept of a quantum computer. However, the generation of the consciousness field requires a certain computational intensity, and consciousness is generated only when a certain computational threshold is exceeded. So when the virtual human has consciousness or awakening, the computational intensity of its virtual “brain” may have caught up with the human, and then we may not be able to distinguish between the two, and the real world may be more strongly impacted.
The seemingly science fictional future of coexistence with avatars will gradually arrive. These virtual humans, which are closer and closer to human characteristics, represent the perfect model conceived by human beings, whether to create a better future with them in harmony or, as in Blade Runner 2049, human beings will pay a painful price, these may have already been written in the notepad by high-dimensional creatures, but for us humans, there are still many unknowns in the process waiting, waiting for us to explore .
Reference
https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/08/live-vr-event-edward-saatchi-talks-about-the-future-of-virtual-beings-and-the-metaverse/
https://medium.com/twentybn/brains-over-beauty-or-building-ai-avatars-inside-out-6608fbd21225
https://36kr.com/p/1124916097970689
https://36kr.com/p/1114684450842882
《2020 年虚拟数字人发展白皮书》
https://metabirds.com/english/
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Aej8bP3OSnVgNuhdieT66g
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/148131309
https://loupventures.com/the-metaverse-explained-part-1-an-inside-look/
https://loupventures.com/the-metaverse-explained-part-2-why-it-matters/
https://loupventures.com/the-metaverse-explained-part-3-economics/
https://loupventures.com/the-metaverse-explained-part-4-challenges/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhackl/2021/01/29/how-brands-can-thrive-in-the-direct-to-avatar-economy/?sh=6139050b417c
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