The Future of Virtual Metahumans
The day before winning gold in the women’s freeski big air competition at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, 18-year-old athlete Gu Ailing (Eileen Gu) was still at a studio recording a Winter Olympic television program. At first, the audience may have been wondering: Shouldn’t Gu be focusing on preparing for her final? But after a closer look, they would have noticed that it wasn’t actually Gu herself in the studio, but her digital avatar, known as MeetGu.
Digital avatars, also known as virtual digital humans (VDHs), are created by integrating people’s personal appearances, voices, facial expressions and body language into a digital display.
This was not the first time that artificial intelligence technology like MeetGu has caused a sensation. Before that, the Vanke virtual employee Cui Xiaopan, Tsinghua’s virtual outstanding female student Hua Zhibing, and TikTok virtual beauty expert Liu Yexi, among others, have brought this technology to the public’s attention. During the coverage of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the
