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Chongqing's engagement with digital humans traces its origins to a single founding decision in Yongchuan District. In May 2018, Dawa Future (达瓦（重庆）影像科技有限公司) was established there by Lu Qi, a serial entrepreneur in virtual production, with registered capital of ten million renminbi and an initial focus on VR, virtual filmmaking, and game development. The company anchored itself at Yongchuan's Software and Information Services Outsourcing Industrial Park, and from that base it would shape Chongqing's virtual production identity for years to come. That same August, Chongqing hosted the inaugural Smart China Expo, a national-level intelligent industry exhibition that would become a recurring fixture of the city's technology calendar. The 2018 edition centered on AI, big data, and smart manufacturing, with VR and AR demonstrations among the exhibits, though no dedicated digital human showcases were featured. Its significance for the subsequent digital human trajectory was nonetheless notable: at the expo, Tencent and iFlytek announced plans to relocate their Southwest China headquarters to Chongqing, seeding the broader technology ecosystem that would subsequently support digital human ventures.
Dawa Future's ambitions scaled rapidly beyond its founding scope. In October 2019, the company secured a role as the only private enterprise to participate in building the full-process simulation system for the 70th Anniversary National Day Military Parade, partnering with China Aerospace Science and Industry Group's Third Academy on the project. In December 2019, Dawa Future unveiled what it described as China's first real-time digital human at the Advanced Imaging and Digital Twin Innovation Development Summit Forum held in Yongchuan. The product filled a domestic gap in real-time digital human rendering and marked Chongqing's earliest verified contribution to the national digital human field.
A decisive shift arrived in early 2022, driven by municipal and district-level policy rather than organic market demand. In February 2022, the Yongchuan District Party Committee's theory study session formally proposed accelerating the layout of the metaverse, establishing a dedicated metaverse development company, and attracting high-end resources to the district. Yongchuan acted on these proposals with notable speed: in the first half of 2022 the district established what it described as Chongqing's first metaverse company, a joint venture between the Yongchuan Big Data Industrial Park and Dawa Future incorporated as 重庆市元宇宙数字科技有限公司, released its "Digital Cultural Creative 17 Articles" industrial policy, created a two-hundred-million-renminbi digital content industry fund, and announced plans for a three-hundred-thousand-square-meter Chongqing Metaverse Center as an incubation and industrial space.
Yubei District moved in parallel. In April 2022, Yubei issued Chongqing's first formal metaverse action plan, which explicitly included virtual digital humans among its target application scenarios and announced the Metaverse Pilot Test Zone at the Xiantao International Big Data Valley, co-built with the Chongqing Big Data Development Bureau. Also in April 2022, the China Metaverse Industrial Development Summit Forum convened at the Xiantao International Big Data Valley. SenseTime (商汤科技) sent the director of its Smart Industry Research Institute, Tian Feng, to deliver a keynote titled "From 'Digital Human' to 'Digital Space'," at which the company simultaneously released a white paper on enterprise-grade AI digital humans. At the same forum, the China (Chongqing) Metaverse Industry Alliance and the Chongqing Metaverse Development Fund were formally established, marking the city's first institutional structures dedicated to the sector.
In May 2022, Lu Qi, chairman of Dawa Future, received the 26th China Youth May Fourth Medal, a national honor conferred alongside forty-nine other recipients in recognition of his contributions to digital technology innovation. June 2022 brought further policy momentum: Liangjiang New Area released its "1+N" industrial high-quality development policy system, offering research-and-development subsidies of up to fifty million renminbi for digital economy enterprises across the full business lifecycle. Also in June 2022, China News Service's Chongqing bureau published a profile of Liu Hui, a "virtual avatar builder" (虚拟形象构建师) based in the city, drawing national attention to the emergence of metaverse-adjacent new professions including virtual hosts, virtual employees, and virtual stars.
The first concrete deployment of a virtual digital human for a Chongqing client arrived in August 2022, when Chongqing China Tobacco's Tianzi (天子) brand held a strategic product launch event featuring what was presented as the tobacco industry's first virtual digital human, a CG-rendered character named "追赶者" (The Chaser). The character was created by Shiyou Technology (世优科技（北京）有限公司), a Beijing-headquartered digital human company, and co-hosted the entire event alongside a human presenter using real-time motion capture technology, constituting a direct Chongqing-located deployment commissioned by a Chongqing client from an external provider. Also in August 2022, the Smart China Expo provided Dawa Future and Yongchuan District with a major national showcase. The district presented an immersive "Yongchuan Metaverse" experience using XR technology, inviting visitors to move through a metaverse environment, while Dawa demonstrated its rapid digital human generation and XR virtual filming capabilities. By this point the company had grown to over three hundred employees and operated the Yongchuan Science and Technology Film Studio — what it called Western China's only nationally leading virtual production base — featuring China's largest LED virtual shooting screen of the time, a forty-two-meter arc standing seven meters high and covering approximately eight hundred square meters.
Institutional development accelerated through the opening weeks of 2023. In January of that year, Yongchuan District released its Metaverse 3-Year Action Plan covering 2023 through 2025, which explicitly targeted virtual digital human production alongside digital collectibles and science-fiction film as key metaverse applications, and designated a two-hundred-thousand-square-meter Chongqing Metaverse Center as the primary incubation space. Later in January 2023, the China Metaverse Digital Economy Industrial Development Summit convened in Yuzhong District as part of the Chongqing International Cultural Industry Expo. Under the theme "Linking New Chongqing, Building a New Era," twenty digital economy enterprises from Beijing, Nanjing, Chengdu, and other cities signed contracts with Yuzhong District, whose government reported housing over 3,400 big data and AI companies and sustained digital economy growth of more than twenty percent annually.
In February 2023, People's Daily published a profile of Lianou Technology (连偶（重庆）科技有限公司), a Liangjiang New Area-based startup founded in 2017 by Yang Jiansong, a former Shanghai Television producer. Lianou had developed "Ancient Shu Phantom Land" (古蜀幻地), described as the world's first mixed-reality museum tour film, deployed at the Sanxingdui Museum in Sichuan. The product combined mixed-reality glasses with narrative storytelling across a seven-thousand-square-meter museum space and had earned Lianou the Tencent "Explorer Plan" 2022 Outstanding Case award, the only recipient from Southwest China. Although the Sanxingdui Museum deployment was located in Sichuan, Lianou's operations and development work were based in Chongqing's Liangjiang New Area.
In March 2023, Chongqing's first AI virtual news anchors made their debuts. The Chongqing International Communication Center, working in collaboration with technology provider Zhongke Wenge (中科闻歌), launched "Bridget" (小乔), described as Chongqing's first AI virtual English-language anchor, for bilingual coverage of the annual National Two Sessions. Simultaneously, an AI anchor named "Xiao You" (小游) debuted on Shangyou News (上游新闻), the platform of the Chongqing Daily Press Group. Both anchors relied on multimodal AI-generated content technology integrating machine learning, speech generation, and natural language processing, and both constituted Chongqing-based deployments of embodied synthetic presenter systems within broadcast journalism.
By June 2023, district-level government services in Chongqing had adopted digital human presenters as a routine communication channel. The Shapingba District government launched a "Digital Human Broadcast" (数字人播报) service, deploying synthetic presenters to deliver official policy communications directly on the district's government website.
In July 2023, the Chongqing Municipal Economic and Information Commission issued the AI Industry Action Plan (2023–2025), which explicitly named virtual humans (虚拟人) as a future track to cultivate alongside digital twin factories, NFTs, and digital collectibles. The 2023 Smart China Expo, held in September, centered primarily on intelligent connected new energy vehicles but included digital human-adjacent technology throughout its exhibition halls. The more consequential policy document arrived later in September 2023, when the Commission released the Chongqing Metaverse Industry Development Action Plan (2023–2025) — the city's first municipal-level metaverse plan and the fifth such provincial-level plan nationally. It set a target of one hundred billion renminbi in metaverse industry output by 2025, specified support for virtual digital humans in cultural tourism, esports, and city governance, and outlined plans for two to three dedicated metaverse industrial parks across the municipality.
In October 2023, five national ministries jointly announced seventy "2023 Virtual Reality Pioneer Application Cases," and four Chongqing projects were included in the list. Lianou Technology's Sanxingdui mixed-reality tour and Dawa Future's virtual filming system both received recognition, as did Chongqing Yunwei Technology's (重庆云威科技有限公司) "Fly Over Jiefangbei" VR city experience and Chongqing Electric Power College's VR power cable training simulator. The coordinated inclusion of four Chongqing entries marked the first time the city's digital human and virtual content companies received national-level recognition as a cluster. In November 2023, a Chongqing municipal delegation attending the Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou reported that over sixty percent of exhibition booths featured digital human products and technology, with Lianou's CEO Yang Jiansong identifying the concentration as a key strategic opportunity for Chongqing. In December 2023, Bishan District hosted the "Mengji·Yuanjing Cup" metaverse digital content creation competition in partnership with Alibaba's Yuanjing platform, drawing over fifteen thousand participants from more than one thousand universities nationwide.
Early 2024 brought Chongqing's first major virtual idol production. Shiyou Technology — which had by this point created over one thousand digital humans for clients including CCTV and Huawei and had completed six financing rounds totaling nearly three hundred million renminbi — provided virtual digital human, virtual studio, and augmented-reality live broadcast technology for the Yongchuan District 2024 Dragon Year Spring Festival Gala. The production, staged in Yongchuan using the Beijing company's technology, featured "Yongchuan Dragon" (永川龙), a digital dinosaur host that appeared on a large screen introducing programs and educating audiences about Yongchuan's paleontological heritage. The event represented Chongqing's first verified use of real-time digital human technology in a major televised entertainment production. Also in January 2024, Beibei District convened a metaverse industry development symposium exploring applications of virtual characters, digital twins, holographic projection, and interactive sensing in tourism, consumption, and sports.
In June 2024, Chongqing Broadcasting Group (重庆广播电视集团) launched an XR news studio for intelligent content production. The facility occupied approximately three hundred square meters and featured a twenty-meter LED screen covering roughly one hundred and twenty square meters, ultra-high refresh rate floor screens, and automated boom cameras. Its premiere broadcast of "Chongqing News" (重庆新闻联播) on Chongqing Satellite TV was described as the first among provincial satellite channels to complete a full-process virtual production workflow. Later in June 2024, Yongchuan hosted the First China-Chongqing Sci-Tech Film Week at the Yongchuan Science and Technology Film Studio under the theme "Sci-Film Symbiosis, Light Maps the Future," during which Dawa Future demonstrated its virtual filming technology through immersive experiences featuring large gauze screens, laser projections, and three-hundred-and-sixty-degree viewing environments. Also in June 2024, Yongchuan's production infrastructure served a qualitatively new purpose when A-SOUL — the virtual idol group originally co-created by ByteDance and Yuehua Entertainment in November 2020, with Yuehua acquiring full ownership in April 2024 — held its "It's Only 8 PM Party" (才八点派对) city tour at the Yongchuan Science and Technology Film Studio. Featuring the group's three active virtual members Bella, Jiaran, and Nailin, the event marked Chongqing's first hosting of a nationally prominent virtual idol live performance at this scale.
In August 2024, MDL Art Technology (魔导力科技有限公司), a Yuzhong District-based enterprise specializing in XR large-space experiences, virtual digital humans, and digital asset production for government and cultural tourism clients, was recognized as a Chongqing Innovative SME. A-SOUL returned to Yongchuan during the National Day holiday period: in October 2024, the group held its A-SOUL Carnival at the Yongchuan International Convention and Exhibition Center and followed it with an encore city tour event at the Yongchuan Science and Technology Film Studio. The consecutive October events demonstrated that Yongchuan's production infrastructure had matured sufficiently to support top-tier virtual idol live experiences that had previously been feasible only in cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The year 2025 opened a new technological chapter for Chongqing's digital human ecosystem. In March 2025, MDL Art Technology announced that its AI digital human products had been fully adapted to the DeepSeek large language model, framing the integration as enabling a new generation of intelligent interactive capabilities for its cultural tourism, event hosting, and educational applications. Later in March 2025, the Chongqing Technology Transfer Research Institute (重庆市技术转移研究院) guided Chongqing Sugu Information Technology (重庆速谷信息技术有限公司) to launch what was described as Chongqing's first digital human livestreaming platform integrating DeepSeek, the "Aizhuanxing" (爱转型) platform. According to a China Daily report from April 2025, the platform serves as a nationwide chain brand for small and medium enterprise AI transformation, offering seven major scenario solutions and two hundred and eighty-one AI transformation products. Two Chongqing-based actors — one a cultural technology enterprise and one a platform guided by a municipal research body — thus adopted DeepSeek-powered digital human capabilities within the same month, signaling a shift in the city's ecosystem from showcase deployments toward scalable, AI-native services.
In September 2025, the Smart China Expo — by this point renamed the World Smart Industry Expo — featured a "Premier 100" launch event at which multiple AI digital human products debuted in Chongqing. Among them were "渝小智" (Yu Xiaozhi), an intelligent AI customer service avatar for Chongqing's "Yukuaiban" government services platform drawing on over 3.46 million government knowledge entries, and the "梦界空间" (Dreamscape) metaverse platform developed by Chongqing Broadcasting Group. The city's policy framework continued to expand through the final months of 2025: in December of that year, Chongqing's municipal government issued its "AI+" Action Plan, containing fifteen policy measures and seventeen key actions targeting seventy-percent AI terminal and agent adoption across the city by 2026. In January 2026, updated supporting policies for the "Mantianxing" (满天星) software action plan were published, introducing computing vouchers of up to one million renminbi per year for companies developing AI agents and digital twins, alongside rewards of up to two million renminbi for outstanding intelligent products and five hundred thousand renminbi for companies first achieving national-level generative AI model filings — closing the arc from a single virtual production startup in Yongchuan to a city-wide policy ecosystem explicitly designed to sustain and scale AI-driven digital human services.
[Mar 2026]