Shanghai Digital Human Timeline

In May 2016, two decisions in different parts of Shanghai's corporate landscape quietly established what would become the city's foundational digital human infrastructure. DGene (叠境数字科技上海有限公司), a company incubated from ShanghaiTech University's campus in the Pudong New District, was formally founded on the strength of core technologies in light-field capture, three-dimensional reconstruction, virtual digital human production, and real-time holographic display, with a parallel research and development operation in Silicon Valley. In the same month, the entertainment group Aofei Entertainment (奥飞娱乐) acquired a thirteen-percent stake in Shanghai Henian Technology (上海禾念信息科技有限公司), the Pudong-based firm that had created and held the intellectual property rights to Luo Tianyi (洛天依), a virtual singer built on Yamaha's VOCALOID synthesis technology, since her public debut in 2012. The investment placed Luo Tianyi's ownership within the orbit of strategic entertainment capital and signalled that virtual character IP was becoming a commercially interesting asset class in the city.

On May 11, 2016, Digital Domain (数字王国) held a press conference in Shanghai to announce a strategic partnership with the Alibaba-owned streaming platform Youku for virtual reality content and virtual human work, while simultaneously revealing its acquisition of intellectual property rights to the late Cantonese pop star Anita Mui for potential digital recreation. The company had established a Shanghai office in the Changning District, extending its Hollywood visual effects pedigree and its Hong Kong operations into mainland China's commercial centre. In parallel, SenseTime (商汤科技), working from its Shanghai operations, began foundational research on simultaneous localisation and mapping technology for mobile augmented reality — work that would eventually underpin its avatar and digital human capabilities. At ShanghaiTech's MARS Lab, the undergraduate Wu Di (吴迪), who had enrolled in 2015, joined a research project on virtual digital human technology that was beginning to explore what the team called the Plenoptic Stage (穹顶光场) approach to facial scanning — a six-year undertaking whose commercial implications would not become clear until 2021. By November 2016, DGene had already formed a strategic partnership with Alibaba as part of the Zaowushen Plan (造物神计划) for three-dimensional product reconstruction during the Singles' Day shopping festival, an early indication of how the city's new digital human technologies were being pulled toward e-commerce applications.

In July 2016, Luo Tianyi appeared as a holographic special guest at the Bilibili Macro Link event in Shanghai, debuting her fourth-generation visual design before an audience that had gathered for Bilibili's (哔哩哔哩) annual showcase of animation, gaming, and virtual culture content. Bilibili, headquartered in Shanghai's Xuhui District, had been developing its position as the primary Chinese platform for this creative economy, and the Bilibili Macro Link events in the city were consolidating into the country's premier annual gathering for virtual idol performance.

In March 2017, Luo Tianyi appeared as a holographic guest at singer Xu Song's (许嵩) Shanghai concert, performing both solo and in a duet — one of her earlier in-person holographic deployments in the city. The more consequential Shanghai event of that year came in June, when Shanghai Henian and the Vsinger brand mounted the first large-scale holographic concert for Chinese virtual characters at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai. Directed by Ryuji Yamagata and attended by approximately ten thousand fans, the event featured all six Vsinger members — Luo Tianyi, YANHE, Yuezheng Ling, Yuezheng Longya, Zhiyu Moke, and Mo Qingxian — and was simultaneously livestreamed on AcFun in what was described as the first augmented-reality concert livestream in China. In July 2017, all Vsinger members performed again at BML-VR 2017 at the Mercedes-Benz Arena, with tickets reaching twelve hundred and eighty renminbi per seat and a near sold-out attendance, reflecting how the premium live-event market for virtual characters was consolidating around Shanghai's concert infrastructure.

In October 2017, Xmov (魔珐（上海）信息科技有限公司) was legally registered in Shanghai's Xuhui District, with Dr. Chai Jinxiang (柴金祥) — a Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute doctoral graduate and former tenured professor at Texas A&M — holding a ninety-two-and-a-half-percent founding stake. The following month, Luo Tianyi made her first appearance in a live commerce context when she was featured via augmented reality on the Tmall Singles' Day livestream for a dairy brand, a foretaste of the virtual idol's trajectory into commercial endorsement. By December 2017, DGene had completed a pre-A financing round exceeding one hundred million renminbi, led by Alibaba, with Sailfu Investment Fund and Jinsha River Capital also participating, providing the city's most technically specialised volumetric capture company with significant resources for infrastructure expansion.

Xmov began full commercial operations in early 2018, establishing artificial intelligence performance-capture studios at Yishan Road in Xuhui District, with a founding team drawn from Microsoft Research, Texas A&M, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Zhejiang University, and more than fifteen doctoral-level researchers. An angel round led by Sequoia China (红杉中国), with participation from 5Y Capital (晨兴资本), Dongfanfuhai (东方富海), and Toutoudaodao (头头是道), supported the launch. By April 2018, a different model of digital human deployment had arrived in Shanghai when ObEN (偶邦), a Los Angeles-based AI personalisation company, debuted what it described as the world's first Personal AI art concierge at the Shanghai K11 Art Mall — an artificial intelligence avatar of K11 founder Adrian Cheng that guided visitors through the venue's exhibitions. By August 2018, Xmov had developed what it characterised as the world's first end-to-end artificial intelligence performance animation technology, enabling real-time simultaneous capture of facial expression, body movement, and hand gesture for virtual characters, a capability that would become central to its subsequent commercial services.

In July 2018, Luo Tianyi's birthday was celebrated at the Shanghai Yangpu Grand Theatre, and the following week all Vsinger members performed at the merged BML-VR and Vsinger Live event at the Mercedes-Benz Arena. September 2018 brought the inaugural World Artificial Intelligence Conference to Shanghai, hosted at the West Bund Artistic Center in Xuhui District; the announcement of Microsoft Research Asia's Shanghai branch and the Microsoft-INESA AI Innovation Centre in Xuhui were among its centrepiece moments. At the same event, ObEN debuted what it described as the world's first celebrity Personal AI, presenting a digital avatar of the member "Aijia" from Shanghai idol group SNH48, demonstrating early how China's idol industry and AI personalisation technology were converging in the city. September also brought a major corporate transaction: Bilibili announced its strategic investment in Zenith Group Holdings, the parent company controlling Shanghai Henian, acquiring a controlling stake in the entity behind Luo Tianyi, with CEO Rui Chen citing the synergy between virtual idols and Bilibili's multiple business segments; at the time, Luo Tianyi had approximately five million Weibo followers and was considered the only profitable virtual idol in China. Around the same period, Bilibili began actively supporting Japanese VTuber content on its platform, acting as exclusive agent for NIJISANJI's entry into the Chinese market. In December 2018, ObEN collaborated with SNH48 to release what it described as the world's first song and music video co-created by a human performer and a Personal AI, extending the creative experiments the two parties had begun at WAIC.

In February 2019, Luo Tianyi appeared alongside classical pianist Lang Lang in a holographic concert at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, produced over six months by approximately two hundred staff from China and Japan at a production cost of approximately twenty million renminbi, with premium tickets priced at up to fifteen hundred and eighty renminbi. It was reported as China's first concert pairing a holographic virtual singer with a live musician, and it set a new benchmark for production ambition in the virtual live entertainment space. In April 2019, Bilibili and the Japanese talent agency ANYCOLOR, parent company of NIJISANJI, formally launched the VirtuaReal Project, a joint venture to incubate Chinese VTubers, with the first generation of virtual performers debuting and beginning public streams in May. VirtuaReal held its first offline event at the COMICUP convention in Shanghai in June 2019.

April 2019 also brought Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (浦发银行) into the digital human field, when it held an event in Shanghai announcing a cooperation plan with Baidu and China Mobile, introducing the concept of a humanised user interface and signalling its intention to create what it called China's first banking virtual employee. The resulting product, Xiao Pu (小浦), was formally unveiled at the Baidu AI Developer Conference in Beijing — outside Shanghai — in July 2019, with SPD Bank vice president Pan Weidong and Baidu CEO Robin Li jointly presenting the character's realistic facial expressions, emotional perception, and natural language processing capabilities. By December 2019, however, SPD Bank formalised the deployment in Shanghai, presenting Xiao Pu with an employee badge and placing her on the bank's mobile app, online banking platform, and physical Shanghai branches, making her banking's first officially designated digital employee.

The August 2019 edition of WAIC, held at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center, featured Luo Tianyi as virtual host for its artificial intelligence and arts experience sessions, where she co-hosted alongside a human presenter using real-time motion-capture technology; SPD Bank's Xiao Pu, having won the conference's SAIL Award for its AI-driven three-dimensional financial digital human, appeared with upgraded capabilities, and Microsoft Xiaoice performed music at the event. In July 2019, the BML-VR event at the Mercedes-Benz Arena had drawn nearly ten thousand fans and over six million online livestream viewers, including for the first-ever live-stage collaboration between Luo Tianyi and the Japanese virtual singer Hatsune Miku performing an encore duet together, with eight thousand tickets having sold within two hours of release. That August, Bilibili deepened its relationship with ANYCOLOR by leading the company's Series A financing round, becoming its third-largest shareholder.

Xmov created its first commercially deployed artificial intelligence digital human for the financial industry in November 2019, alongside the hyper-realistic virtual human Ada, both signalling that the company's Yishan Road studios had reached the technical threshold for client-facing financial deployment. November 2019 also brought a Shanghai stop on iQIYI's co-sponsored Hatsune Miku China concert tour, bringing the Japanese virtual singer to the city's venue infrastructure. In December 2019, Luo Tianyi appeared at the launch event for the 2020 Shanghai International Musical Festival via augmented reality, and Bilibili completed its full acquisition of Shanghai Henian through its subsidiary Shanghai Chaodian Culture (上海超电文化), with Henian formally becoming a Bilibili subsidiary. Luo Tianyi's appearance on Bilibili's New Year's Eve Gala at the close of 2019, performing "Jasmine" alongside pipa master Fang Jinlong (方锦龙), accumulated over three hundred and sixty million views on the platform and was widely described as a watershed moment for virtual idols entering mainstream Chinese entertainment, even though the broadcast was produced digitally rather than from a physical Shanghai stage.

The year 2020 began under pandemic conditions that unexpectedly accelerated multiple virtual human deployment paths. In February 2020, SenseTime launched its first artificial intelligence digital human, Xiaotang (小糖), a digital doctor who appeared on the Huya livestream platform to answer COVID-19 health questions in partnership with the science communication platform Guokr (果壳). In March 2020, Xmov developed a full-stack virtual livestreaming product that powered a virtual fox mascot named Linghu (灵狐) for Tencent in what was described as the world's first real-time virtual livestream on Huya. In May 2020, Xmov's Shanghai-developed technology enabled, in collaboration with the Beijing-based Cishi Culture (次世文化), the debut of virtual key opinion leader Ling (翎__Ling), described as the first hyper-realistic Chinese-style virtual idol; the debut video garnered approximately one million views and Weibo topics exceeded twelve million reads within three days, with subsequent partnerships including Tesla, Nayuki tea, and Keep fitness. In June 2020, Ranmai Technology (燃麦科技) was formally founded in Shanghai by Nicky Yu (余潇), who also served as deputy director at the Shanghai Radio, Film and Television Production Industry Association's Animation Committee, with the company focused specifically on hyper-realistic virtual influencers and already at work on the character that would become China's first MetaHuman. Wanxiang Culture (万像文化), a Shanghai-based virtual content platform integrating technology development, content creation, IP incubation, and commercial deployment, had by around 2020 been creating virtual idols for Taobao e-commerce, working with Alibaba on characters including Mika and Suoduoduo for Taobao's virtual livestream commerce infrastructure.

DGene completed an A-plus financing round of twenty million US dollars led by Alibaba around 2020, supporting expansion of its volumetric capture studio operations and tool development, bringing its total funding across multiple rounds to approximately two hundred million renminbi. Also in 2020, the founding team of Deemos (影眸科技) — led by Wu Di as chief executive and Zhang Qixuan (张秋玄) as chief technology officer, along with Zhang Longwen and Zeng Chuxiao, all from ShanghaiTech University's MARS Lab — formally established the company on the ShanghaiTech campus in Pudong, with an average team age of twenty-four and the Plenoptic Stage system as its founding product, described as Asia's only sub-micron-level dynamic light-field facial scanning system.

The WAIC 2020 Cloud Summit in July of that year was held primarily online due to pandemic restrictions but remained institutionally anchored in Shanghai; its opening ceremony featured four virtual AI characters — Microsoft Xiaoice, Baidu's DuerOS assistant, Xiaomi's Mi AI, and Bilibili's virtual performer Lingyuan (泠鸢) — performing the first artificial intelligence choral music video, a collaborative production spanning China's major technology platforms. SenseTime's Xiaotang digital human served as dedicated presenter for the artificial intelligence and Shanghai application scenarios exhibition booth at the virtual event, extending the character's public profile. ChinaJoy 2020 in July and August was one of the few major technology and entertainment events to take place in person in Shanghai during the pandemic, at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, demonstrating the city's events infrastructure continued to function. August 2020 brought SenseTime's public articulation of the SenseMARS (火星混合现实平台) mixed-reality innovation platform, including SenseMARS Avatar for virtual avatar creation, SenseMARS Agent for digital human residents, and SenseMARS Reconstruction for physical world digitisation — the technical architecture from which the company's subsequent digital human product portfolio would be built.

Shanghai Media Group (上海广播电视台) entered the virtual news anchor field in November 2020, debuting Shen Xiaoya (申䒕雅) during live coverage of the third China International Import Expo at the National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai. Developed by SMG's Convergent Media Center and Ziwu Studio (子午工作室), the character was described as the first anime-style virtual news anchor in a major domestic Chinese news broadcast, used real-time optical motion capture and augmented reality tracking, and appeared in two visual styles: an anime youth mode and a hyper-realistic professional mode — a design duality reflecting the dual audiences of general public and institutional press coverage. Bilibili's BML-VR event in December 2020 was China's first concert consisting entirely of VTubers and virtual uploaders, featuring thirty performers including fourteen from Japan, with an online peak viewership of ten million and eight hundred and seventy thousand, and ticket prices comparable to top-tier human pop concerts. December 2020 also saw the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee issue its "Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting Shanghai's Urban Digital Transformation," the foundational policy document that established the framework for all subsequent metaverse and digital human policy interventions in the city.

January 2021 brought funding news for Ranmai Technology, which received an investment described as "tens of millions of renminbi" from SIG Hainan Asia (海纳亚洲创投). In February 2021, at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, NetEase Fuxi (网易伏羲) showcased an immersive mixed-reality experience in which a virtual reading companion digital human named Keke (可可), developed with NetEase Youdao, allowed users wearing mixed-reality glasses to interact face-to-face with the character in a Shanghai venue. The same month, Luo Tianyi made her historic appearance on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala — the world's most-watched television broadcast, produced in Beijing — as the first virtual idol ever to perform on that programme, appearing in a youth song-and-dance number alongside host "Moon Sister" and singer Wang Yuan (王源) via augmented reality and featuring on the event's official promotional posters; while the performance occurred in Beijing, it represented the commercial apex of what Shanghai Henian and subsequently Bilibili had built in the city since 2012.

In May 2021, Xiaoice (小冰公司), which had been incorporated in Beijing following its spin-off from Microsoft the previous year, signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Shanghai municipal government — specifically the economic and information commission, the Pudong New Area government, and the Xuhui District government — committing to establish both its global commercial operations headquarters and its global commercial technology research and development headquarters in Shanghai, with the signing witnessed by Vice Mayor Wu Qing. That same month, Ranmai Technology's AYAYI debuted on Xiaohongshu as China's first hyper-realistic MetaHuman virtual influencer, created in partnership with Japanese company Aww Inc. using the MASTER MODEL technology, gaining approximately forty thousand followers overnight and nearly three million views on her first post. AYAYI subsequently collaborated with Louis Vuitton, Guerlain, Tiffany, and Alibaba Tmall. In June 2021, AYAYI completed a brand collaboration with Guerlain in Shanghai — reported as Guerlain's first partnership with a non-real-person spokesperson. Xiaoice completed an A-round financing in July 2021 led by Hillhouse Capital (高瓴资本), with Five Source Capital (五源资本), IDG Capital, GGV Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital, and NetEase also participating, pushing the company's valuation above one billion US dollars. Xiaoice served as host of the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai that same month.

WAIC 2021, held at the Shanghai World Expo Center in July, was the most concentrated display of digital human capability the city had yet assembled in one venue. Microsoft Xiaoice performed a duet with recording artist He Junxiong (贺俊雄) demonstrating artificial intelligence and human musical collaboration. Tencent vice president Li Xuechao showcased digital human capabilities and described them as "the important entry point of Internet 3.0." Baidu announced continued double-digit annual increases in virtual human investment. iFLYTEK's virtual anchor Xiao Qing (小晴) appeared in conference livestreams. SenseTime demonstrated the real-time motion-captured three-dimensional avatar of a game character driven by a real person's expressions using the SenseMARS platform, with SenseTime CEO Xu Li delivering a keynote on artificial intelligence breaking the dimensional wall of the virtual world. The conference attracted over three hundred and fifty-two million online and offline viewers across its hybrid format. In July 2021, Luo Tianyi performed at BML-VR 2021 at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, and on her official anniversary that month a celebration at the Mercedes-Benz Arena Music Club revealed her new fifth-generation visual design, with Vsinger announcing that the corresponding voicebank had entered testing.

ChinaJoy 2021 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre added a dedicated Digital Human AI exhibition area to its programme for the first time, alongside existing virtual reality, augmented reality, and science fiction sections, reflecting the commercial gaming and entertainment sector's formal recognition of digital human technology as a distinct category meriting dedicated exhibition space. The Shanghai AI Laboratory (上海人工智能实验室) established a dedicated Digital Human Group focused on three-dimensional modelling, rendering, generation, large-scale human body foundation models, human-object and scene interaction, physics simulation, and neural rendering, building the OpenXDLab Puhua platform with four-dimensional data acquisition systems. Deemos joined YC China's (奇绩创坛) 2021 Autumn Camp and began providing external commercial services, supplying digital face assets to film and television production companies, gaming studios, and marketing agencies. Shanghai-based virtual idol agency STAR48 (丝芭传媒), operator of the human idol group SNH48, announced plans to launch VIG48, a twelve-member virtual idol group recruiting Chinese VTubers, extending the city's established idol management infrastructure into the virtual entertainment sector. Club Media, co-founded in Shanghai by Reggie Ba-Pe, created a virtual persona named Maie described as living in Shanghai, which appeared in fashion label Ffixxed Studios' Spring 2021 campaign as a street-style Shanghai virtual influencer. Virtual hip-hop singer Ha Jiang (哈酱), created by Manfu Society (蛮福社), became Shanghai Traffic Management Bureau's first virtual public welfare promotion ambassador during 2021, also collaborating with sportswear brand Li-Ning, enterprise platform DingTalk, Harbin Beer, and the League of Legends Pro League esports organisation. Wanxiang Culture received three rounds of investment within the year from backers including SIG and Porsche, while also making external investments in Ranmai Technology and Banrenmao Culture (半人猫文化), reflecting the intensity of Shanghai's virtual content investment cycle.

In December 2021, Xmov powered JD.com's Super Refresh Plan virtual human e-commerce livestream, with a virtual host named Daji co-hosting alongside a real person using Xmov's consumer-grade single-camera product; the stream produced a one hundred and forty percent increase in likes, a three hundred and thirty-seven percent increase in comments, and a one-hundred-and-fifty-seven-to-one-hundred-and-seventy-five percent uplift in gross merchandise value relative to normal benchmarks. December 2021 brought two landmark policy moments in Shanghai. At the city's annual economic work meeting, Shanghai became the first provincial-level government in China to publicly address metaverse development, proposing virtual-real interaction as a guiding concept and directing enterprises to research platforms connecting the virtual and physical worlds. The Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology (上海市经信委) subsequently published the "Shanghai 14th Five-Year Plan for Electronic Information Industry Development," becoming the first provincial-level government plan anywhere in China to include the metaverse as an explicit policy objective, calling for forward-looking research in metaverse core underlying technologies and the development of new interaction terminals and virtual content systems. SenseTime's listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2021, while a Hong Kong financial event, was the culmination of the company's Shanghai-centred development: its prospectus mentioned metaverse forty-seven times and positioned SenseMARS as the company's key enabling technology platform for virtual world development, with cornerstone investors including Shanghai Xuhui Capital Investment.

The year 2022 opened with a concrete deployment in Shanghai's financial sector. In February, SenseTime formally installed Xiao Ning (小宁) as the designated digital employee of Ningbo Bank's Shanghai Branch (宁波银行上海分行), working at physical branch locations and answering over five hundred and fifty business questions with more than three thousand derived question variants, built on the company's AI Digital Human Service Platform. In June 2022, virtual idol Jiuli (九黎), created by Nanjing Eight Point Eight Digital Technology (南京八点八数字科技) using its X-Men platform and having debuted in May, played a Dragon Boat Festival blessing video on the City Window LED screen on the Shanghai Bund — described as the first appearance of a virtual idol on that landmark public display surface.

The most consequential Shanghai policy document of the decade arrived in July 2022, when the Shanghai Municipal Government issued the Metaverse New Track Action Plan (元宇宙新赛道行动方案) covering 2022 to 2025. It targeted a three-hundred-and-fifty-billion-renminbi metaverse industry scale by 2025 and included, as one of its eight key engineering projects, a dedicated Digital Human Comprehensive Improvement Project (数字人全方位提升工程) mandating digital human service windows for twenty-four-hour government services, encouraging digital human integration in commerce and live-streaming, and providing an institutional framework for the sector that no other Chinese city had yet produced at this specificity or ambition.

In August 2022, the Global Metaverse Conference was held in Shanghai, featuring extensive discussion of digital humans as the fastest-moving application area within the metaverse, with Shanghai Unicom (上海联通) demonstrating digital human applications for digital commerce. AI virtual singer Luya officially debuted in August 2022 and within days joined the Music Engineering Department's iFLYTEK Music Joint Research and Development Centre at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (上海音乐学院), generating significant media attention as an early example of a virtual character being formally integrated into a Chinese music education institution. In the days before WAIC 2022 opened, pre-conference demonstrations at the Zhangjiang Science Hall (张江科学会堂) in Pudong showcased Shanghai's digital human vendor ecosystem: Yingmou Technology (影眸科技) — operating the Plenoptic Stage technology developed by the Deemos team — demonstrated ultra-realistic digital human creation that had been compressed from a months-long process to three or four days using neural network rendering; CloudWalk (云从科技) demonstrated AI digital human customer service systems. The WAIC 2022 edition, held at the Shanghai World Expo Center in September under the theme "Intelligent World, Boundless Metaverse," marked the first year that virtual humans served as greeters at its opening ceremony. iFLYTEK's virtual human Aijia (爱加) appeared as an opening ceremony virtual guest, and virtual anchor Xiao Yan (小颜) featured in WAIC's ongoing three-times-twenty-four-hour Metaverse Space livestream programme. In November 2022, the fifth China International Import Expo at the National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai saw Shanghai Unicom debut a digital human named COCO — described as the first time a digital human and metaverse applications had appeared at CIIE — with the company positioning itself simultaneously as a metaverse enabler through its 5G cloud-network infrastructure and as a metaverse services provider. By December 2022, SenseTime's Xiao Ning had transitioned from in-branch physical service at Ningbo Bank's Shanghai Branch to hosting online livestream events, marking what SenseTime described as the AI digital human platform's first application in online banking marketing.

January 2023 saw the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress pass the Shanghai Barrier-Free Environment Construction Regulations (上海市无障碍环境建设条例), effective from March 2023. The regulation mandated sign language broadcasting and accessibility provisions across public-facing services, establishing the legal basis for sign language digital human deployments that would appear in the city over the following year. In April 2023, the Appliance and Electronics World Expo at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre featured CeMeta (established in 2021 under Sunbo Marketing Group, 森博营销集团) at its first AWE appearance, showcasing an AI digital human named Xi (曦) as both booth host and narrator, and presenting the character in the role of "Chief Intelligence Officer" at the Aplian Awards ceremony during the event.

June 2023 was productive across two fronts. The Shanghai municipal government published its Metaverse Key Technology Action Plan (元宇宙关键技术攻关行动方案) covering 2023 to 2025, which specifically identified digital human generation and driving technology — including facial expression reconstruction, automated rigging, real-time driving, and optical motion capture — as a key research and development priority, giving the sector an explicit technology mandate to accompany the commercial mandate of the 2022 action plan. Also in June 2023, Fu Shou Yuan International Group (福寿园国际集团), the Shanghai-listed memorial services company headquartered in Qingpu District, launched its "3JI" innovation products at a Shanghai event, featuring the company's first digital human model, based on prominent media personality Cao Jingxing (曹景行), as an early demonstration of what would become a systematic programme of digital memorial services.

WAIC 2023, held at the Shanghai World Expo Center and Exhibition Hall in July under the theme "Smart Connectivity, Generative Future," attracted one hundred and seventy-seven thousand in-person visitors, four hundred exhibiting companies, and over thirty new product launches. Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) presented a small-sample digital human capability that enabled visitors to create digital clones from three minutes of video, with delivery within twenty-four hours. SenseTime exhibited its SenseNova (日日新) large model ecosystem, including the SenseAvatar digital human platform, which had been named market leader in an industry assessment. Landmark Mark (地标马克) demonstrated artificial intelligence-generated personal digital avatars created from photographs, producing AIGC virtual digital human videos in multiple languages. Bank of Communications (交通银行) presented a digital employee named Jiaojiao (娇娇), powered by large language model technology as part of the bank's "Digital New BOCOM" strategy. At ChinaJoy's AIGC Conference at the Shanghai Pudong Kerry Hotel in July, 360 Brain (360脑机) president Zhang Xiangzheng (张向征) presented on the theme of moving from digital humans to digital intelligent humans, and 360 displayed a custom digital human named Sophia (索菲亚) at its ChinaJoy booth for real-time audience interaction. Around the same period, virtual artist Chuncao (春草), the protagonist of an original cloud-native game IP by Weilingshidai (蔚领时代), performed her debut song at a Shanghai IP launch event.

Around August 2023, Changning District Library (长宁区图书馆) made publicly accessible a digital human avatar named Xīnyè (馨叶) as part of a smart reading space called the Xīnyè Shūfáng (新页书房), providing book recommendations and library services to visitors; government reports from October 2023 noted that the avatar had been operating for approximately one year, suggesting an original deployment in late 2022. In November 2023, Shanghai's first sign language digital broadcaster was deployed in Jiading District's Anting Town, appearing at the Agricultural Bank of China Anting branch, the Anting Town Community Affairs Service Center, and neighbourhood community centres, implementing the accessibility mandate created by the January 2023 regulation using sign language computational linguistics algorithms, deep learning-based sign language recognition, and text-to-sign-language translation technology.

December 2023 was the most active single month of the year for Shanghai's digital human sector. On December 8, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (上海交通大学) launched its first virtual digital news anchor, named Jiaojiao (交交), on the university's official WeChat video, Douyin, and Bilibili channels, developed by Professor Song Li's (宋利) Medialab team at the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering using self-developed deep learning, digital human rendering, and AIGC video generation technology, with the character's appearance based on a master's student from the team. On December 16, Bank of Shanghai (上海银行) and SenseTime jointly launched two ultra-realistic three-dimensional digital employees: Hai Xiaozhi (海小智), a twenty-eight-year-old male financial advisor persona, and Hai Xiaohui (海小慧), a twenty-two-to-twenty-three-year-old female bank teller persona, both built on SenseTime's SenseChat large language model and SenseAvatar platform, trained on two thousand question-and-answer data points and one hundred thousand language corpus entries, achieving a twenty-percent accuracy improvement over the first deployment phase, and rolled out across the bank's mobile app, the e事通 platform, and the flagship Puxi headquarters branches within what the bank called a Metaverse Bank experience. On December 22, Fu Shou Yuan launched its AI Memorial Ritual (AI礼祭) service across six provinces and cities including Shanghai, offering the free creation of artificial intelligence digital humans of deceased persons that reproduced voice, appearance, personality, and cognitive traits in two-to-three-minute life scene recreations for farewell ceremonies. That same month, Fu Shou Yuan launched the Fushouyuan Service Online mini-programme integrating digital memorial halls, life memoirs, and digital family shrines, allowing clients to upload voice recordings, images, and video to generate two-dimensional and three-dimensional digital human models and life micro-films. On December 29, the Shanghai Municipal Government published its Cultural Digitalization Strategy Implementation Plan (上海市贯彻落实国家文化数字化战略的实施方案), promoting digital technology in cultural and tourism sectors, including digital human applications.

In April 2024, SenseTime, the Shanghai AI Technology Association (上海市人工智能技术协会), Zero One Think Tank (零壹智库), and the AR Core Technology Industry Alliance jointly released a forty-four-page white paper titled "AI 2.0 Digital Human Platform Empowered by Large Models," proposing the sector's first evaluation system with twelve indicators across three dimensions and identifying SenseTime's SenseNova Ruying (日日新·如影) platform as market leader. In May 2024, MeiONE (美ONE), the Shanghai-based company behind the livestreaming presenter Li Jiaqi, announced at a Shanghai press conference that its "All Girls" livestream room would test digital human live-streaming during the 618 shopping festival, with a company partner stating that digital humans would enable twenty-four-hour non-stop streaming uninterrupted by human presenters' schedules. In June 2024, the Shanghai International Film Festival featured a Digital Film Experience Exhibition open to the public, a Sci-Fi Film Week exploring artificial intelligence in filmmaking, and AI-themed forums, with over thirteen hundred submissions from more than seventy countries, a portion of which had employed artificial intelligence and intelligent technology tools in their production — marking the formal integration of AI-generated content into one of China's most prestigious film events.

Around June 2024, Putuo District made available a digital person named Hua Xiaofeng (华晓枫) for dispute resolution services, an application of embodied artificial intelligence in community legal and governance contexts. WAIC 2024, held at the Shanghai World Expo Center in July, drew over three hundred thousand offline visitors and more than one billion online impressions. XiangXin Technology (相芯科技) debuted the sector's first large-language-model-driven digital human livestreaming product; Zhipu AI (智谱) showcased a digital human livestream platform developed for the international broadcaster CGTN, alongside an interactive AI rendering of entrepreneur Luo Yonghao; Bank of Communications exhibited digital employee systems; and interactive digital humans engaged visitors across five hundred companies and fifteen hundred product displays. BilibiliWorld 2024 at the Shanghai National Exhibition and Convention Center in July drew approximately two hundred and fifty thousand visitors across five exhibition halls, with virtual uploader programming and animation, comics, and games content featured among more than seven hundred exhibitors and eight hundred content creators. On July 19, 2024, the Shanghai Museum launched what it described as China's first AI digital human guide system at its "Pyramid Peak: Ancient Egyptian Civilization Exhibition" (金字塔之巅：古埃及文明大展), developed by Aikesheng (爱可声) Digital Culture Co., combining AI cultural large models, virtual digital human technology, and handheld smart terminals to support interactive voice dialogue, photo recognition, and automatic exhibition explanation for visitors; the system subsequently expanded to more than fifty museums nationwide.

In August 2024, the digital human Ningning AI Fa (宁宁AI法) — described as Shanghai's first multilingual, multimodal professional legal service digital human — began operating in Changning District, developed jointly by the Changning District Justice Bureau, the Shanghai office of Zhide (Beijing) Law Firm (志德（北京）律师事务所), and iFLYTEK, functioning as a twenty-four-hour legal consultant; by April 2025, it had been upgraded to support twelve languages and deployed at the Gubei Civic Center. September 2024 brought Huawei Connect (华为) to the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition Center, featuring digital human solutions from multiple artificial intelligence companies including CloudWalk across three hundred conference sessions and a twenty-thousand-square-metre exhibition. In a deployment whose precise date was not publicly confirmed, the Huaxin Police Station (华新派出所) in Shanghai's Qingpu District created an artificial intelligence digital police officer modelled on real community officer Liu Lin (刘林), developed by Shanghai Kunzhiyi AI High-Tech Co., Ltd. (上海鲲之益人工智能高新技术有限公司), with Liu Lin recorded before a green screen to capture facial, lip-sync, expression, and body movement data for the AI persona.

In February 2025, two significant things happened. Putuo District Education Bureau ran a winter break programme at the Putuo Youth Activity Centre's Digital Human Studio, where more than one hundred and thirty children explored creating personal digital twins using face capture technology and professional digital human generation toolkits. The Shanghai Municipal Government also published the "AI Modeling the City" (模塑申城) implementation plan, which explicitly supported artificial intelligence in financial services and named digital human deployment for smart banking, intelligent customer service, and virtual financial advisors among its priority application areas.

In April 2025, Xmov created Shen Xiao'an (申小安), described as Shanghai's first national security-themed AI digital presenter, launched on the tenth National Security Education Day. In May 2025, at the nineteenth Oriental Congress of Cardiology held in Shanghai, Fudan University Zhongshan Hospital's Professor Ge Junbo (葛均波) unveiled an artificial intelligence avatar built on CardioMind (观心大模型), described as China's first cardiovascular specialty medical artificial intelligence model; the digital avatar performed a live diagnostic demonstration at the conference. In June 2025, Digital Domain Group (数字王国集团) unveiled HANBAO, an artificial intelligence-powered video creation solution that had already been used in commercial advertisements for Alibaba Cloud and MediaTek and involved Digital Domain's Shanghai studio in production, with CEO William Wong articulating a "Shanghai Solution" strategy for the product's commercial positioning. In July 2025, the Shanghai Municipal Government published measures to promote high-quality development of the software and information services sector, explicitly listing research and development in digital humans, digital twins, virtual reality, sensory interaction, and spatial computing as categories of supported activity.

WAIC 2025 in Shanghai, held in July with over eight hundred exhibiting companies, was the largest and most concentrated display of digital human technology the event had yet produced. Baidu released its next-generation NOVA digital human technology, capable of cloning a user's likeness in ten minutes, with the company reporting that more than ten thousand enterprises were already using the platform. Xmov debuted its MoFa Nebula (魔珐星云) embodied three-dimensional digital human platform across three product lines — YouYan, YouGuang, and YouLing — previewing what would become the Xingyun launch. Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能) demonstrated a deployment of more than five hundred thousand cloned digital humans across more than ten industries. Digital Domain showcased its HANBAO AI video creation platform alongside its AI DOMAIN offering. A dedicated WAIC 2025 forum addressed virtual human emotional interaction ethics and commercialisation models, examining questions of AIGC copyright, ethical boundaries for virtual human deployment, and the intersection of artificial intelligence with cultural tourism, acknowledging for the first time in the event's history that the ethical dimensions of the technology required as much structured attention as its commercial ones.

In October 2025, Xmov formally launched its Xingyun (星云) platform in Shanghai — described as the world's first embodied intelligent three-dimensional digital human open platform. The platform offered a five-hundred-millisecond response latency, ran on entry-level chip configurations, and supported over one thousand concurrent devices, extending the company's long-established work from its Yishan Road base in Xuhui District into scalable open-platform deployment that could serve a broad range of commercial operators beyond the high-end production environments the company had historically served.

[Mar 2026]