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In October 2018, Chengdu hosted one of China's earliest large-scale experiments in game-IP-to-virtual-character performance, when Tencent's Tianmei Studio (天美工作室), the local developer behind the mobile battle game King of Glory, staged the title's third anniversary concert and introduced augmented reality virtual idol versions of two in-game figures, Diaochan (貂蝉) and Gongsun Li (公孙离), performing a dance battle before a live audience. The event drew on Chengdu's accumulated pool of animation and three-dimensional character design talent, a concentration the city had developed across more than two thousand game studios, and it signaled the readiness of Sichuan-based creative infrastructure to support embodied virtual characters at public performance scale.
The following year, Sichuan's virtual idol ecosystem began to develop beyond the gaming sector. In May 2019, a Chengdu-based startup called Yiji Culture (一几文化) launched a virtual idol named Yishiqi (伊拾七) on the short-video platform Douyin, designing the character with deliberate Sichuan identity markers including panda hair clips and a personality built around hotpot culture, positioning the figure as a regionally inflected virtual influencer at a time when most Chinese virtual idols projected a culturally neutral metropolitan image. Also in 2019, Bilibili World, the major ACG convention, held a Chengdu edition that brought dedicated VTuber and virtual idol content to Sichuan audiences at scale for the first time, reflecting growing fan demand in the province. That same year, Mingtu Technology (成都明途科技), an enterprise software company founded in Chengdu's Tianfu New Area by University of Electronic Science and Technology of China graduate Xiao Xuesong, completed an A-round of financing with state-backed Sichuan Development (四川发展) as lead investor, marking the entry of provincial institutional capital into what would become one of the province's leading AI digital human firms.
In early 2020, Yiji Culture completed an angel financing round to support the continued development of Yishiqi, whose Douyin following had grown to approximately 889 million by that point. In August 2020, Nanjing-headquartered Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能) registered a Mianyang-based subsidiary, Mianyang Silicon Intelligence Technology (绵阳硅基智能科技有限公司), with registered capital of ten million renminbi at the Mianyang Science and Technology City Software Industry Park, establishing the earliest confirmed institutional footprint of a dedicated digital human company in Sichuan, nearly two years before its flagship Mianyang facility would formally launch.
In January 2021, the death of a VTuber known as Mocha (墨茶Official), a virtual game streamer from Xichang in Liangshan Prefecture who died in poverty, generated widespread national attention and drew public focus to the economic precarity underlying Sichuan's grassroots virtual creator economy. The case became a social media phenomenon and highlighted how deeply VTuber culture had penetrated small-town Sichuan even as structural support for independent virtual creators remained largely absent. In June 2021, the Sichuan Provincial Broadcasting Administration published the Sichuan Broadcasting Deep Convergence Development Action Plan covering 2021 through 2023, the province's first broadcasting-sector policy document to explicitly call for the deployment of virtual anchors, AI news presenters, and humanlike sign language interpreters across news, variety, weather, and educational programming. In November 2021, Mingtu Technology commercially released WorkAI, a service platform designed to integrate AI-driven virtual human interfaces into enterprise customer engagement workflows, representing the company's first public move toward the AI digital human sector.
In March 2022, Silicon Intelligence formally inaugurated what it called its Digital Human Global Live Broadcasting Base in Fucheng District, Mianyang, with the first twenty studio rooms brought online for AI-powered livestream commerce operations. The facility directly materialized the subsidiary registration made eighteen months earlier and positioned Mianyang as a production hub for AI digital human anchors serving the rapidly expanding live commerce market. In June 2022, state broadcaster CCTV launched a digital interactive space titled Sanxingdui Fantasy Journey at the Sanxingdui Archaeological Site in Guanghan, creating an immersive experience anchored in the ancient bronze-age culture unique to Sichuan. In August 2022, the Meishan Municipal Government appointed a virtual human named Su Xiaomei (苏小妹), created by BlueFocus Group (蓝色光标) and modeled after the legendary sister of Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo, as the city's official digital spokesperson and Song Culture Recommendation Officer, making Meishan one of the earliest Chinese cities to formally install a heritage-derived virtual character in an official civic-communication role.
In September 2022, the Sichuan-based news application Chuanguan News (川观新闻) launched version 9.0 and introduced a digital journalist named Xiaoguan (小观), a virtual presenter developed to anchor live news coverage and serve as the application's on-screen editorial identity. In October 2022, Xiaoguan was deployed to provide digital coverage of the Twentieth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, with the digital journalist operating in Beijing on behalf of a Sichuan media organization, marking one of the most high-profile national assignments given to a Chinese digital journalist to that date. In November 2022, Chengdu hosted a Digital Cultural Creative Metaverse Forum that provided a coordination platform for Sichuan's emerging digital human stakeholders and accelerated alignment between provincial policy goals and industry development.
In January 2023, Sichuan Satellite TV (四川卫视) broadcast a New Year concert featuring the debut of the Sanxingdui Rock Band (三星堆摇滚天团), a virtual ensemble of thirteen motion-captured three-dimensional characters drawn directly from bronze relics excavated at the Sanxingdui Archaeological Site. The Golden Mask served as lead vocalist, the Zongmu Mask appeared as drummer, and the Bronze Divine Bird took the DJ role, with the broadcast generating over ten million views on Weibo and representing the most ambitious deployment of Sichuan's archaeological heritage as virtual character IP to that date. Also in January 2023, Chengdu's municipal government issued the Metaverse Industry Development Action Plan covering 2022 through 2025, formalizing the city's commitment to developing digital human technology as a component of its creative economy strategy.
In March 2023, Tencent and the Sichuan Archaeology Institute signed an artificial intelligence cooperation agreement focused on the Sanxingdui site, creating a framework for applying AI digital character and reconstruction technology to the site's cultural materials. In May 2023, the second Digital Human Showcase took place within the Digital Sichuan conference in Chengdu, embedding digital human demonstration further into the province's flagship digital economy event. Also in May 2023, Mingtu Technology launched WorkChat, a cloud-based digital human platform designed to embed conversational virtual human interfaces into enterprise productivity tools. That same year, Mingtu received a strategic investment from iFlytek (科大讯飞), one of China's leading AI speech-and-language technology companies, and jointly inaugurated an AI Digital Human Laboratory with the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China to support applied research in virtual human systems.
In September 2023, sixteen Sichuan provincial departments jointly released the Sichuan Metaverse Industry Development Action Plan covering 2023 through 2025, which included a dedicated Digital Human New Application Extension Project targeting sectors including consulting, education, entertainment, healthcare, and cultural storytelling. The multi-departmental plan represented the broadest official institutional backing the province had yet given to digital human technology. In November 2023, Sichuan Daily's full-media division (川报全媒体) announced that its matrix of AI digital journalists had reached forty-two in total, a figure the division described as the largest of its kind in China. In December 2023, the digital journalist Xiaoguan appeared at the 2023 Sichuan Big Data Annual Conference in Chengdu alongside Ya'an's digital journalist Pan and Deyang's digital journalist Sansan (三三), demonstrating the normalization of AI virtual presenters within the province's media and government events circuit.
In March 2024, the Sichuan Provincial Department of Science and Technology formally certified Mingtu Technology's facility as the Sichuan Provincial Intelligent Digital Human Engineering Technology Research Center, designating it as the province's official platform for digital human research and development. In April 2024, Sichuan Daily's full-media division published what it described as China's first dedicated management regulations for AI digital journalists, establishing an editorial and governance framework for the province's substantial matrix of AI virtual news presenters. In May 2024, the AI and Digital Humans Application Forum convened in Chengdu as part of the Digital Sichuan conference, bringing together industry and government stakeholders to assess the sector's development. Also in May 2024, Sichuan Cultural Investment Group presented a digital human portraying the Song dynasty polymath Su Shi at the Twentieth Shenzhen International Cultural Industries Fair, attracting more than three thousand visitors during the fair's run and demonstrating a knowledge representation accuracy rate of ninety-eight percent across the historical figure's works. The Su Shi digital human was an out-of-province deployment by a Sichuan entity, with the cultural product originating in Sichuan but exhibited in Shenzhen.
In June 2024, Chengdu's municipal government announced its AI Industry Three-Year Action Plan covering 2024 through 2026, which explicitly named Mingtu's WorkChat platform among large language model products to receive accelerated municipal support. During 2024, researchers at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China also developed an emotionally responsive virtual human named Yang Anqing (杨安晴), designed to adapt its expressive behavior in response to user emotional cues, advancing the institution's applied digital human research program. In July 2024, the First China Digital Human Application Capability Competition was launched at Sichuan University's Wangjiang Campus in Chengdu under the auspices of the China Internet Association, establishing Chengdu as the host city for China's inaugural national competition in applied digital human skills.
In September 2024, the Sanxingdui Museum opened an experience titled Seeking Sanxingdui (寻觅三星堆), billed as China's first VR experience situated within an active archaeological site, featuring digital human versions of real archaeologists Lei Yu and Ran Honglin serving as virtual guides through digitally reconstructed reproductions of the site's sacrificial pits at a one-to-one scale. The deployment was among the most archaeologically grounded digital human tourism implementations in China and extended the province's use of Sanxingdui heritage as the basis for virtual human character development. In November 2024, an AI Embodied Intelligence Holographic Capsule was exhibited at the Twelfth Mianyang Science and Technology Expo, presenting visitors with a humanlike interactive virtual interface within a purpose-built immersive enclosure, further establishing Mianyang as a site of digital human public exhibition alongside its role as a production hub through Silicon Intelligence's live broadcasting operations.
In January 2025, Tianfu Bank (天府银行) launched two digital human representatives, Xinglan (星澜) and Panda Tiantian (熊猫天天), becoming the first city commercial bank in Sichuan to publicly deploy digital human technology in customer-facing roles. Also in January 2025, a digital human named Rong Xiaobu (蓉小布) was deployed at the Chengdu Municipal Two Sessions, where it provided intelligent question-and-answer services about legislative proceedings through a system integrating voice synthesis, three-dimensional animation, and retrieval-augmented generation, marking the extension of virtual human interfaces into Chengdu's formal civic and governmental processes. In February 2025, Sichuan-based computing firm Huakun Zhenyu (华鲲振宇) and Silicon Intelligence jointly released what they described as the first fully domestically produced AI digital human solution, achieving end-to-end private deployment spanning AIGC content generation, large language model decision-making, and domestic computing infrastructure, with target markets in government, healthcare, and education.
In April 2025, Cover Media (封面传媒), the Sichuan-based media group operating the Cover News digital platform, published a patent for digital human expression driving technology under application number CN119760088A, reflecting the company's effort to secure proprietary intellectual property in the methods underlying its AI virtual presenter systems.
In August 2025, the Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum in Chengdu opened an exhibition titled Dream Back to Luoyang (梦回洛阳), deploying AI digital human technology to present an interactive embodiment of the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu within the heritage site, extending the province's established practice of using digital humans to animate historical literary figures for cultural tourism. In September 2025, the digital human Xiao Zhuge (小诸葛), a virtual guide modeled on the Three Kingdoms strategist Zhuge Liang, had served tens of thousands of tourists at Wuhou Shrine in Chengdu and had been recognized on a national metaverse case study list, affirming the deployment as one of the more successful heritage-figure digital human implementations in China. In November 2025, a company named Xinglanxing installed a Three Kingdoms-themed holographic display at Wuhou Shrine, using holographic screen technology to present virtual reconstructions of historical figures from the Three Kingdoms period within the shrine's grounds. On November 18, 2025, the Tianfu Digital Economy Conference convened in Chengdu, at which Sichuan's digital economy core value was reported to exceed 530 billion renminbi, capturing in aggregate the provincial growth across AI, media, and cultural digital sectors to which digital human technology had meaningfully contributed. In December 2025, Mingtu Technology exhibited its AI-driven systems at World Cup Park in Chengdu during an International Table Tennis Federation tournament, deploying interactive AI experiences for visiting audiences and demonstrating the company's expanding application of digital human and AI interface technology beyond its original enterprise and media markets.
In January 2026, a national enumeration of 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases included four entries from Sichuan: the Xiao Zhuge digital guide at Wuhou Shrine, a Kangba Tibetan-language weather-broadcast digital human serving Ganzi (甘孜) Prefecture, an intelligent interactive digital human named Yuanqi (元启) developed by Chengdu Jiuzhou Electronics for museum visitor engagement, and the AI Du Fu figure at the Du Fu Thatched Cottage, reflecting the geographic and functional breadth of Sichuan's digital human deployments from ethnic-minority frontier broadcasting to urban heritage institutions. Also in January 2026, the Sichuan provincial government issued the AI Empowering New Industrialization Three-Year Action Plan covering 2025 through 2027, extending institutional backing for AI and digital human technology into a new planning cycle. In February 2026, the Du Fu Thatched Cottage's Spring Festival programming featured a digital Du Fu reciting classical poetry for visitors, building on the interactive digital human capabilities established through the Dream Back to Luoyang exhibition and demonstrating the site's sustained commitment to presenting an AI-embodied version of its namesake poet as a living interpretive presence for audiences during peak seasonal visits.
[Mar 2026]