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China's cultural tourism sector has become one of the most visible arenas for the country's digital human industry, with deployments spanning museums, scenic areas, trade fairs, and provincial promotional campaigns. The trajectory from early experiments to systematic national strategy unfolded rapidly across a few pivotal years, driven by converging advances in 3D modeling, motion capture, speech synthesis, and large language models, and accelerated by explicit government mandates that identified digital humans as essential infrastructure for a modernized tourism economy.
Among the earliest regional efforts was Xinjiang's development of Kunlun Xi (昆仑羲), a hyper-realistic cinematic-quality digital human rooted in Kunlun mythology and described as a time-traveling incarnation of the Kunlun goddess. Created by Xinjiang Tingguangtong Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (新疆亭光通数字科技有限公司) over a production period of nearly two years, Kunlun Xi debuted on July 3, 2023, in a promotional video for the Jianguo Music Festival, Xinjiang's first local music festival. The project was characterized at the time as achieving a zero-to-one breakthrough in Xinjiang's digital human field, and it signaled the willingness of even China's western provinces to invest in ultra-realistic virtual figures for cultural tourism promotion. That investment has continued in the region, with a separate Xinjiang cultural tourism digital human called Qingniao (青鸟) later appearing on the 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases list from Tianjin.
At the national institutional level, the National Museum of China (中国国家博物馆) introduced two virtual digital humans in July 2022. Ai Wenwen (艾雯雯) debuted on the museum's 110th anniversary as a virtual spokesperson and cloud exhibition guide, while Tong Gujin (仝古今) served as a virtual cultural relics restorer partnering with Ai Wenwen in the China Civilization Cloud Exhibition (中华文明云展). The primary technology partner was Tencent, specifically its SSV Digital Culture Lab and Tencent Cloud Xiaowei, providing multi-modal human-computer interaction, 3D modeling, and speech synthesis. Additional contributors included Fantuo Digital (凡拓数字创意) for motion and expression capture, Shandong University of Art and Design for image design, and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications for the cloud exhibition platform. The underlying technology drew on digital twin approaches, multi-modal interaction, 3D modeling, speech synthesis, motion capture, and VR panoramic techniques rather than mixed reality as sometimes described. By 2024, Ai Wenwen had undergone three upgrade phases and her knowledge base drew from more than 1.4 million museum collection items.
Major trade fairs and expos became important showcases for the maturing industry. The 2023 China (Nanjing) Cultural and Science-Technology Integration Achievement Exhibition and Trading Fair, held September 21 through 23, 2023, at the Nanjing International Expo Center, spanned 26,000 square meters with more than 430 exhibitors. A dedicated Cultural Metaverse exhibition zone showcased digital humans, digital twins, and related digital technologies in cultural applications. The Nanjing Lingjing Metaverse Research Institute exhibited a high-fidelity humanoid figure called Xiao Hui (小慧) designed for cultural venue guidance and tourism services, while the event also hosted the Second China (Nanjing) Cultural Metaverse Forum. Major exhibiting companies included SenseTime, iFlytek, and NVIDIA, and the fair premiered Wendu Mijing (文都秘境), a metaverse game built on real Nanjing landmarks using 3D modeling, rendering, AIGC, and blockchain.
The China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industry Expo has similarly reflected the sector's growth across successive editions. At the 18th ICIF, held from December 28, 2022, through January 2, 2023, digital humans were present among 3,402 exhibitors across 120,000 square meters. Yongsheng Animation (咏声动漫) brought digital human and metaverse products, Laihua Technology (来画科技) showcased digital human creation platforms, and Bilin Planet (比邻星球) displayed AI interactive virtual human and motion capture technology. Hall 11 was dedicated to Cultural Tourism Integration and Hall 14 featured Cultural Technology and Digital Creativity installations. It was, however, the 19th ICIF in June 2023 that became the first edition to use digital humans for live broadcasting and to establish a dedicated Digital China area, and by the 21st ICIF in May 2025, AI had its own dedicated exhibition area with 6,280 exhibitors participating.
CIFTIS 2023, the China International Fair for Trade in Services held September 2 through 6, 2023, in Beijing, prominently featured digital humans across more than 2,400 exhibitors including over 500 Fortune 500 companies, with dedicated Communications and Digital Technology and Metaverse Application themed halls. Among the exhibitors, FaceUnity (相芯科技), a company founded in 2016 and headquartered in Hangzhou, showcased its self-developed AvatarX Intelligent Digital Human Platform in Shougang Park Hall 11. The platform generates a personalized 3D digital human image from a single photograph, supports DIY face-sculpting and outfit customization, and offers full-stack digital human capabilities across five categories: cartoon, video, ultra-realistic, lifelike, and full-reality. FaceUnity also demonstrated its ObjectX platform for 3D digital object creation. Other digital human exhibitors included Sanqi Interactive Entertainment (三七互娱) with AI holographic digital humans, Yuanli Digital (原力数字) with virtual livestreaming, and financial institutions deploying digital human employees.
On the commercial side, Ranmai Technology (燃麦科技), operating under the brand iMaker and founded circa 2019 to 2020, created AYAYI, China's first hyper-realistic meta-human virtual influencer, launched in May 2021. The company received Pre-A funding from SIG and strategic investment from Porsche Ventures in 2021, with additional backing from NBCUniversal and iQIYI. AYAYI has collaborated with more than 35 brands including Guerlain, LVMH, Burberry, Dior, Porsche, and Alibaba's Tmall platform, where she became a digital brand manager. The company's documented commercial applications have concentrated in luxury, fashion, automotive, and e-commerce sectors.
Several landmark deployments emerged from 2024 onward that demonstrated the deepening integration of digital humans into China's tourism infrastructure. Dunhuang's Digital Sutra Cave (数字藏经洞), jointly developed by the Dunhuang Research Academy and Tencent, became the world's first game-technology-based time-space participatory museum, with more than 300 caves digitized and the Digital Dunhuang resource library reaching 23 million users from more than 78 countries by end 2024. The Capital Museum deployed an AI digital human called Jing Hui (京慧) in 2024, trained over six months on the museum's knowledge database to provide interactive exhibit guidance. Guangxi's Liu Sanjie (刘三姐) became China's first provincial-level hyper-realistic cultural tourism digital ambassador, offering multi-language promotion in English, ASEAN languages, Cantonese, Zhuang, and Hakka, and appearing on CCTV's 2026 Spring Festival Opera Gala. The Nüwa Plan (女娲计划), announced in 2023, set an ambitious target of creating 100 digital human IPs carrying Chinese cultural content by 2025.
Industry leaders increasingly integrated large language models into tourism applications during this period. MoFa (Shanghai) Information Technology Co., Ltd. (魔珐（上海）信息科技有限公司), backed by ByteDance and SoftBank Vision Fund and ranked first in 3D digital humans by IDC in 2025, deployed 3D digital guides on Nanjing Yangtze River cruise ships. Mobvoi (出门问问) launched a physically mobile digital human combining DeepSeek and proprietary models for exhibition guidance and cultural tourism interaction. Multiple tourism operators including Zhonglv Travel, OCT Group, and Haichang Ocean Park completed DeepSeek integration in early 2025 for digital human tourism applications.
The scale of the broader ecosystem is striking. By late 2024, China had 135.9 million virtual digital human-related enterprise registrations, up 36.9 percent year-over-year, with 41.3 million new registrations in 2024 alone. The core market was projected to reach 48 billion yuan, approximately $6.65 billion, by 2025 according to iMedia Research, and China accounts for 34 percent of global intelligent avatar deployments.
Government policy has been a decisive accelerant. The Metaverse Industry Innovation Development Three-Year Action Plan for 2023 through 2025, jointly issued in September 2023 by five ministries including MIIT and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, explicitly mandated building cultural tourism metaverse experiences around cultural venues and scenic areas, specifying digital human interpretation and narration and XR guided tours as required products and services, and calling for the cultivation of a batch of well-known digital humans as benchmark cultural products. In May 2024, five agencies including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued the Smart Tourism Innovation Development Action Plan, China's first national-level smart tourism guideline, targeting an expanded smart tourism economy by 2027 through AI, VR/AR, and digital transformation of tourism facilities. In November 2024, the National Radio and Television Administration issued GY/T 411-2024, China's first formal industry standard for digital virtual humans, defining classification systems, application scenarios, image requirements, and driving technology standards, with Tencent Cloud AI serving as a key drafter. The July 2024 National AI Industry Comprehensive Standardization System Guide established digital human standards as a distinct AI product category, targeting more than 50 new standards and 1,000 implementing enterprises by 2026.
Provincial and municipal governments have pursued their own ambitious targets. Hangzhou issued a November 2024 plan targeting a one trillion yuan digital cultural tourism industry by 2027. Wuhan released a December 2024 plan targeting core cultural tourism metaverse industry scale exceeding 40 billion yuan by 2027. By end 2024, 21 provincial-level and 40 municipal-level units had issued nearly 300 specialized policies related to digital human industries, with Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Zhejiang as the most prolific policy issuers. The IEEE also approved a global 3D digital human standard on modeling and driving technical requirements in September 2024, submitted by a Chinese company, signaling China's ambition to set international norms for the technology it is deploying so aggressively at home.
[Apr 2026]