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In January 2022, the Haikou Government Work Report formally proposed establishing a metaverse industrial base at Fuxingcheng Industrial Park alongside a national blockchain innovation center, marking Hainan Province's first official policy commitment to the metaverse and digital economy wave then sweeping China's major cities. This government signal set the conditions for a cluster of commercial and cultural digital human activity that would materialize over subsequent months.
By April 2022, JX Luxventure Limited, a Haikou-headquartered company listed on the NASDAQ, received iiMedia Research's Best Virtual Human Software Technology Service Provider award for its virtual influencer known as Little L, who was intended for deployment to members of the Hainan Cross-Border Merchants Association. This is the earliest confirmed instance of a Hainan-based company creating and commercially operating a digital human character. In the following months, the virtual idol Chaoyue AI (超越AI), modeled on the likeness of celebrity Yang Chaoyue, was reportedly appointed as Haikou City Promotion Officer at a Haikou Metaverse City Promotion Conference, representing an early use of a synthetic virtual character in civic and destination branding within the province.
In approximately July 2022, the digital human Li Lu (黎鹿) made her debut at the 9th Overseas Chinese Affairs Summit held in Sanya. Described as China's first government-backed virtual intelligent digital human in the cultural tourism field, Li Lu was built on AI three-dimensional virtual digital human technology and was designed to embody the indigenous Li ethnic minority culture of Hainan, serving both virtual content creation and commercial cultural development purposes. The event took place in Hainan, making this one of the earliest confirmed deployments of a purpose-built provincial cultural digital human on Hainan soil.
Also in 2022, NetEase (网易) signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the city of Sanya to establish a metaverse industrial base project, extending the company's digital ecosystem ambitions into Hainan's southern coast. By the end of 2022, iiMedia Research data showed that Hainan had 598 registered virtual anchor enterprises, placing the province second nationally behind only Guangdong's 640. This extraordinary figure largely reflected tax-driven company registrations enabled by the Free Trade Port's preferential policies — including fifty to seventy percent rebates for livestreaming and multichannel network companies — rather than the full-scale operational presence of nearly six hundred active firms, but it nonetheless positioned Hainan as a significant structural node in China's virtual anchor industry. In December 2022, Haikou hosted the IEEE SmartWorld and Metaverse 2022 international academic conference, which included a dedicated metaverse track and formalized the province's growing engagement with digital immersive technologies at the scholarly level.
In March 2023, the Boao Forum for Asia annual conference in Boao, Hainan served as the site for the deployment of a cultural metaverse digital space called Xinlingjing · Time Island (新灵境·时光岛). The installation comprised nine metaverse modules, among them a dedicated Virtual Digital Human Interaction zone, a Metaverse Press Hall, virtual art performances, and a National Treasure Digital Collection Museum, representing a substantial deployment of digital human technology at one of Asia's most prominent diplomatic and economic forums, physically staged in Hainan. Around the same period, Magic Future (魔法未来), a Shandong-based digital human company, listed Hainan Culture and Tourism among its clients for virtual digital human real-time interactive solutions, indicating that Hainan's provincial tourism authorities had begun engaging commercial virtual human technology vendors from outside the province.
During 2023, a digital human portraying the historical poet Su Dongpo — built by Zhonghua Book Company (中华书局) in collaboration with the Beijing-based studio Diting Shijie — appeared on CCTV's Chinese Poetry Conference using holographic projection and mixed reality technology. The human performer voicing and animating the character was Professor Haibin from Hainan Normal University (海南师范大学), a specialist in Su Dongpo scholarship, a connection grounded in the poet's historical three-year exile in Hainan's Danzhou region from 1097 to 1100. While the broadcast was a nationally produced cultural project rather than a Hainan-originated deployment, the Hainan academic involvement and the cultural subject matter rooted in Hainan history made this a significant moment of provincial participation in high-profile digital human content at the national level.
In August 2023, the NARS Light The Way campaign ran at the CDF Sanya International Duty Free Shopping Complex, organized through a partnership between Shiseido Travel Retail and China Duty Free Group. The campaign featured two metahuman characters named AjA and MonoC, created by the agency Gusto Collective, delivered through physical activations and augmented reality experiences at the duty-free complex in Sanya. This was one of the earliest confirmed instances of a global luxury brand deploying custom-built virtual human characters for a consumer retail experience physically located in Hainan.
In March 2024, the Free Trade Port AI Technology Conference took place at the Hainan International Convention and Exhibition Center, and included a dedicated sub-forum titled AI Cultural Tourism: Metaverse and Digital Humans combined with an AI Application and Robot Exhibition, signaling that digital human technology had by this point secured a named presence in Hainan's official innovation conference programming. In the same month, Blue Ocean Thinxtra (蓝海彤翔) launched its Hainan International Data Center, built on RTX 4090 GPU server clusters with stated capabilities explicitly encompassing AI digital humans, virtual livestreaming, and online interactive exhibitions, providing the computational infrastructure necessary for real-time digital human rendering within the province itself.
In April 2024, the 4th China International Consumer Products Expo held in Haikou featured digital human livestreaming in its digital and service consumption exhibition zone in Hall 1, which drew visitor attention according to coverage from the Hainan provincial government website, representing one of the first publicly documented instances of commercial digital human livestreaming presented as an exhibition feature at a major consumer expo held in Hainan. Also in April 2024, the Hainan Lingshui International Digital Content Industry Platform was officially launched, operated by Hainan Lanling Digital Technology and making use of Lingshui County's international submarine cable infrastructure. The platform's stated scope covered IP incubation, project crowdsourcing, copyright protection, and offline rendering for digital content production, with direct relevance to the virtual human and synthetic character production ecosystem.
In August 2024, the Hainan provincial government issued its Digital Health System and Digital Health Economy High-Quality Development Three-Year Action Plan, which referenced digital human health profiles — though in this policy context the term referred primarily to data-based patient modeling in the digital twin sense rather than visually embodied virtual avatar characters, placing it at the boundary of the digital human field as broadly defined. In September 2024, the 14th China International Digital Publishing Expo held in Haikou featured Zhonghua Book Company's Su Dongpo digital human in an interactive exhibition, as well as digital characters named Shu Xiaobao (数小宝) and Shu Xiaomei (数小妹) presented by China Publishing Group (中国出版集团), AI human-computer interaction systems including Doubao, and extended reality metaverse experiences. This concentration of digital human and synthetic character deployments at a single Hainan event demonstrated the growing maturity of the provincial ecosystem.
In October 2024, Fosun Tourism Group (复星旅游集团) officially launched its Hainan Super Mediterranean project at the World Tourism Alliance Xianghu Dialogue held at Sanya Atlantis. The project's announced features included an AI G.O. (Gentil Organisateur), marketed as the Happy Butler digital human — a twenty-four-hour natural language processing-powered digital concierge designed as a core guest service feature — alongside AIGC-personalized guest rooms and virtual reality and augmented reality immersive entertainment. If fully realized, this deployment would constitute one of the most consumer-facing and commercially integrated uses of a digital human in Hainan's hospitality sector. In December 2024, the Cool Tour Hainan (酷游海南) platform was launched by the Hainan Provincial Tourism Department and developed by China Unicom Hainan (中国联通海南), with stated plans to train Hainan cultural tourism AI digital humans for intelligent interactive experience — a capability announced as forthcoming at the time of launch rather than immediately operational.
In March 2025, a digital human named Hai Xiaodui (海小兑) launched on the Haiyidui platform, described at the time as Hainan's first digital human in the small and medium enterprise service field. Built using real-person prototype modeling and AI motion capture technology, Hai Xiaodui produced weekly policy explainer videos for SME operators, representing a concretely active government service deployment of a named digital human persona within Hainan.
In April 2025, the Lingshui Global Recruitment Conference held in Haikou featured a digital human livestreaming exhibition booth alongside animation, gaming, and short drama exhibits, reflecting the expanding role of virtual anchor technology in Hainan's creative economy and labor ecosystem. At the 5th China International Consumer Products Expo in the same month, a digital human broadcaster named Wang Feng (王凤) demonstrated AI interactive technology before visitors in Hainan. Also in April 2025, Morpheus (摩尔普斯) was confirmed operating a content e-commerce base at Lingshui's Overseas Returnees Town, deploying AI digital human anchors for cross-border livestreaming directed at East and Southeast Asian markets — one of the most operationally concrete and commercially specific digital human deployments tied to Hainan's international trade infrastructure.
Between May and June 2025, the 2025 Hainan International Digital Entertainment Expo, also known as the AJ Hainan Animation and Gaming Festival, was held at the Hainan International Convention and Exhibition Center. The event featured a full lineup of nine virtual idol performers from the Yinxiong Lianmeng (音熊联萌) IP stable, including Shaonian Shuang (少年霜), Liang Sheng (良声), and Meili Merry (莓狸Merry), among others, representing a significant VTuber and virtual idol live performance event physically staged in Hainan with approximately 35,000 expected attendees.
In June 2025, the 4th Hainan International Designer Competition confirmed a Digital and Interactive Design track that explicitly accepted digital humans as a recognized submission category. Among the notable entries was a work titled ASTA, described as China's first naked-eye three-dimensional digital human performance IP, and the competition attracted 676 teams from 21 countries, placing this Hainan-hosted design event in an international context for virtual character and digital human creative production.
In July 2025, AllBright Law Firm launched two digital human legal assistants — Jintian (锦天) and Jinli (锦丽) — at its Haikou office as part of a legal technology innovation initiative, making it one of the first law firms in Hainan to deploy named, visually embodied AI digital human personas in a professional services context. Also in July 2025, the AI micro-film Qiannian Guilai: Dongpo Hui Hainan (千年归来：东坡回海南), rendered in translation as A Thousand Years Return: Su Dongpo Comes Back to Hainan, was released by the Hainan International Communication Center (海南国际传播中心) with support from Hainan Normal University. The film featured a hyper-realistic digital Su Dongpo character exploring modern Hainan, extending the province's recurring use of the historical poet as a vehicle for high-production digital human cultural content. In the same month, the Hainan Southeast Tech and Art Festival in Lingshui hosted the VPC National College Student Virtual Production Finals, bringing competitive virtual production education to a Hainan venue.
In September 2025, a cross-border livestream industry conference held in Chengmai featured Volcengine (火山引擎), ByteDance's cloud services and AI platform, presenting multilingual AI-powered content generation solutions relevant to digital human anchor technology and connecting Hainan's cross-border commerce infrastructure to the national AI livestreaming ecosystem. In late 2025, Tiandi Online (天地在线) confirmed that Hainan Lingfa Investment had become a 6.97% strategic shareholder as of May 2025, with the two parties collaborating on virtual reality tourism projects, and the Lingshui Dan Art Museum opened in November 2025 under this partnership. While Tiandi Online's broader portfolio included digital human references, specific named digital human projects for Hainan deployments had not been independently confirmed at the time of research.
In February 2026, the Hainan provincial government issued the Hainan AI Plus Action Plan covering the period from 2026 through 2028, outlining province-wide AI application frameworks that encompassed digital human deployment scenarios across tourism, healthcare, and digital government services. The plan represented the most comprehensive official policy articulation to date of digital humans as a recognized and expected component of Hainan's public and commercial infrastructure, providing a formal foundation for the next phase of the province's engagement with virtual human technology across multiple sectors.
[Mar 2026]