August 2025 News

August 31 News

Healthcare: Guangxi Liuyao Pharmaceutical Group (广西柳药集团) has deployed a digital human health assistant named 阿桂药师 in outpatient settings to support chronic disease management. This AI-powered virtual being creates health records for patients, tracks medication usage, analyzes health data, provides disease education, and conducts follow-up visits, offering continuous care support as an extension of pharmaceutical and clinical services. The deployment of 阿桂药师 reflects a broader integration of AI-driven digital humans into Chinese healthcare infrastructure to extend patient services and improve accessibility to ongoing medical guidance.

Entertainment: Baidu (百度) developed the AI digital human AI 吴彦祖, which replicates the appearance and actions of a well-known celebrity for roles in films and interactive entertainment experiences. During the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit held in Tianjin, AI digital humans were deployed to deliver real-time news updates in an interactive format, demonstrating the use of virtual beings in live broadcast and public communication contexts. iFlytek (科大讯飞) showcased a highly advanced virtual human at an event at its Central China headquarters, where the digital figure engaged visitors through interactive features blending AI with virtual personalities. JoggAI unveiled its AvatarX model, a next-generation AI avatar system capable of transforming portraits, paintings, cartoons, anime, and sculptures into lifelike avatars, expanding the range of source material that can be animated for entertainment and content creation.

Marketing: AI-generated virtual salespeople operating in live-streaming retail environments in China have demonstrated the capacity to outperform traditional human counterparts in driving consumer engagement and product promotion, marking a significant shift in how brands utilize virtual beings for consumer interaction. Research published as "Virtual Influencer Effects in China's Gen Z Market: How Core Characteristics and Dual Moderation Shape Purchase Intentions" examines how virtual influencers are displacing traditional celebrities and human endorsers among Generation Z consumers in China, attributing this shift to their controllability, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and visual adaptability, particularly in fashion and beauty sectors. A further study, "Artificial Intelligence-Powered Digital Streamers in Online Retail: Empirical Insights and Design Strategies from Experiments," documents the deployment of AI-powered digital streamers on live-streaming platforms, where these virtual beings autonomously interact with consumers in real time to promote products using generative AI and virtual reality, while a companion paper, "Disentangling Negative Sentiment towards Virtual Influencers: Towards a Taxonomy of Criticism," categorizes criticisms of hyper-realistic virtual influencers relating to consumer trust, brand authenticity, and the perpetuation of unrealistic appearance standards, calling for greater transparency and accountability in their marketing use.

Enterprise: At the 2025 Baidu Cloud Intelligence Conference, Baidu presented the AI 吴彦祖 digital human in the role of a language coach, using natural language processing and speech models to assist users with language learning and personalized interaction at scale. NetEase (网易) developed Hi Echo 2.0, a virtual language tutor that functions as an AI-powered virtual companion for personalized language learning, illustrating how enterprise applications of virtual beings extend into educational technology. In Guangdong, the AI digital human 宝你HUI assists with public service tasks including government service upgrades and facilitation of online applications, and is integrated into the 一网通办 and 随申办 administrative portals, underscoring the use of digital beings in streamlining government-facing services. In Xinjiang, AI digital shop assistants have been introduced into retail environments to enable personalized customer interactions and support, while in Guizhou the digital human 黄小西 has been configured for tourism and public services, providing personalized guidance, automated customer service, and travel planning within smart platforms.

Cultural: Hangzhou has deployed a digital human designed as an interactive tourist guide, providing personalized historical and cultural narratives through immersive storytelling to enrich the visitor experience and position the virtual being as a cultural tourism ambassador. The Liu Shaoqi Memorial Museum in Changsha employs the AI digital tour guide 小九, which directs visitors through exhibits while delivering personalized commentary, exemplifying virtual beings in memorial and heritage interpretation contexts. Students at Hunan University created an AI digital martyr that reconstructs the persona of a World War II historical figure to educate museum visitors about pivotal historical events, demonstrating how digital human technology can render historical narratives more accessible and emotionally engaging for contemporary audiences. Across these deployments, virtual beings are functioning not merely as informational interfaces but as culturally situated entities capable of bridging historical memory and present-day educational experience.

Ethical Contexts: The expansion of digital humans across China's public and private sectors has prompted attention to risks including the displacement of human workers in sensitive domains such as healthcare and public services, and the requirement for transparency in AI-driven decision-making processes. Baidu and other Chinese technology firms are developing AI-driven anti-counterfeit features to maintain trust in digital human interactions and prevent misuse of virtual identities. The societal consequences of substituting AI-driven virtual beings for human interaction in healthcare, administration, and cultural education remain an active area of concern, with governance frameworks needed to protect users, ensure responsible operation, and prevent the erosion of service quality in contexts where human judgment and empathy have traditionally been central.

August 30 News

Commerce and Livestream Marketing: Baidu (百度) tested AI-driven e-commerce by staging a six-hour live commerce stream featuring a digital double of internet celebrity Luo Yonghao, demonstrating that an AI avatar can sustain extended promotional broadcasts without fatigue. Baidu's Huiboxing (慧播星) platform underpinned this initiative, offering full-chain integration from appearance cloning to interactive performance and incorporating a master script mode powered by the Wenxin 4.5 Turbo multimodal model to generate high-quality broadcast scripts for scalable commercial deployment. In Hebei's Zhangjiakou, AI-powered digital human livestream hosts were deployed in e-commerce settings to promote specialty agricultural products including "Huai'an Smart Eggs," engaging customers in real time to broaden product outreach. In Guangxi, multilingual AI digital human anchors conducted e-commerce livestreams introducing Silk Road products, switching languages seamlessly to serve international trade and marketing objectives.

Healthcare: Ant Group (蚂蚁集团) developed AQ, an AI-driven platform connecting elderly users to medical resources through "famous doctor AI doubles" linked to over 5,000 hospitals and nearly one million doctors, enabling AI companions to function as medical avatars for professional healthcare interaction. The platform combines myth-busting and scam-prevention education with medical consultation, illustrating a dual public-welfare and clinical application of digital humans. Tencent (腾讯) and Yuwell (鱼跃医疗) have also deployed AI doctor avatars to extend digital healthcare services for aging populations, positioning virtual beings as caregivers and health companions within China's growing silver economy.

Cultural Heritage and Media: People's Daily Digital (人民日报数字传媒) introduced the humanoid digital avatar Wang Yangming and the AI digital human Baize, deploying both for interactive media storytelling and cultural branding across multiple venues. In Chongqing and Ningxia, Baize was used in staged dialogues simulating a journey 500 years into the past, with the AI synthesizing debate content and condensing diverse viewpoints into cohesive narratives for live audiences alongside human hosts. At the 15th China International Digital Publishing Expo in Zhengzhou, Baize appeared under the theme "DATA Night," using AI-driven synthesis of participants' views to craft a collective consensus narrative. At the Shanxi Cultural Industry Expo, multiple ultra-realistic digital humans were showcased, including a 3D hyper-realistic Mulan modeled on Northern Wei history and Qingniao, a virtual being inspired by the Jin Hou Bird Zun artifact, both designed to embody Shanxi's cultural heritage through immersive historical representation. A virtual host also made its debut as master of ceremonies at a Zhuhai mapping promotion event, integrating digital presentation with a live polar research video link to enhance audience engagement at a large-scale cultural and educational event. Yili (伊利) developed an industry-grade hyper-realistic digital human for brand representation, applying the technology in corporate contexts to strengthen consumer engagement and brand storytelling.

Tourism: The digital human Huang Xiaoxi, an AI intelligent agent, was deployed across Guizhou and Fujian to function as a digital travel companion offering itinerary planning, smart ticket booking, tour guiding, and travelogue generation. By integrating personalized interaction with practical travel services, Huang Xiaoxi demonstrates a concrete application of virtual beings in enhancing regional tourism and lifestyle experiences for domestic visitors.

Enterprise and Business Operations: Aifedigou (爱吠的狗) developed an enterprise-focused virtual human platform designed to integrate AI into entire business processes, positioning AI virtual humans as tools for customer experience management and measurable commercial value creation through data-driven solutions. Huawei Cloud (华为云) established itself as the national market-share leader in China's 2D AI digital human platform sector, with its system underpinning what has been described as the "universal digital human" era by enabling enterprises to adopt cost-effective AI avatars for communication and service applications across industries. At the 2025 Baidu Cloud Intelligence Conference, a digital human modeled on actor Daniel Wu and referred to as "AI Wu Yanzu" was presented performing live in fluent English to demonstrate international communication capabilities; managed by Yashi Education (雅思教育), the creators plan to expand the digital celebrity "Azhu" into the Hong Kong market as a cross-border entertainment and educational figure.

Technology and Production: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) released the open-source Wan2.2-S2V model, which converts a single portrait image combined with audio input into animated digital-human video, substantially reducing production costs for talking-avatar content. The Wan2.2-S2V model was additionally highlighted on RunningHub as part of AI application workflows, and an "Ultimate Digital Human Model" variant designated the S2V KJ Edition was previewed within the ComfyUI developer community, illustrating active iterative development of the technology across practitioner pipelines. HitPaw (海马科技), through its Edimakor product, launched an AI avatar tool for creative video-making that allows speaking characters and animal avatars to be inserted into visual content, extending AI-driven avatar deployment into consumer entertainment and personal media production.

Legal and Ethical Contexts: Courts in Zhejiang have begun adjudicating cases involving virtual digital human rights, including the first civil public interest lawsuit against organized "water armies" and the first infringement case specifically concerning virtual digital human likenesses, establishing legal precedents for intellectual property, personal rights, and regulatory governance of AI-generated personas in online environments. 

August 29 News

Technology: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) released Wan2.2-S2V (Speech-to-Video), an open-source model that converts speech into high-quality video representations of digital humans with improved motion control, positioning it as scalable infrastructure for content production across media and advertising industries. ByteDance (字节跳动) introduced OmniHuman-1.5, a virtual digital human model that advances beyond audio-synchronized movement to incorporate cognitive simulation, generating avatars with intentionality and emotional alignment suited to naturalistic interaction in short-form video and marketing contexts. Tencent (腾讯) developed Hunyuan Video-Foley, which improves audio realism for AI-generated video, directly enhancing the credibility of digital human outputs. Yingmou Technology (影眸科技), a 3D large-model company specialising in digital human platforms and tools, secured tens of millions of U.S. dollars in a new funding round led by BlueRun Ventures, with participation from ByteDance and Sequoia China Seed, reflecting strong investor confidence in the commercialisation of digital human infrastructure for enterprise applications.

Marketing: Alibaba's Wan2.2-S2V model has direct implications for advertising and digital media by enabling developers to generate digital human video outputs from speech at scale without requiring physical actors. ByteDance's OmniHuman-1.5 further supports marketing applications by producing avatars with naturalistic emotional cues, increasing their suitability as synthetic brand representatives in short-form video campaigns. Research published in 2025 and 2026 across multiple academic papers—including work by C. Ko and H. Baek on emotional expression in virtual influencer posts, by P. Chaihanchanchai on human-like virtual influencers as celebrity endorsers, and by J. Liu and K. Luo on the role of anthropomorphism in purchase intention—collectively document how virtual influencers and AI-driven synthetic characters are reshaping brand communication, consumer trust, and purchase behaviour on a global basis. Additional research applying stimulus-organism-response and pleasure-arousal-dominance models confirms that affective and experiential dimensions of AI-powered virtual influencer campaigns significantly drive consumer decision-making.

Entertainment: Digital Human (数字人, 835670.BJ), a Beijing Stock Exchange-listed company, reported a 150.97% year-on-year revenue increase in the first half of 2025, with the fourth quarter remaining its primary earnings period, demonstrating the growing profitability of digital human services within China's enterprise and content sectors. Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) has scaled operations for its virtual UP主 (virtual creators), embedding them into its anime and creative ecosystems as part of a content-user-creator loop that deepens community engagement among its audience base. Hoyoverse's (米哈游) detailed NPC character designs in titles including Zenless Zone Zero have attracted significant user commentary and cultural appreciation, reinforcing non-playable characters as meaningful design and storytelling touchpoints within digital entertainment.

Enterprise: Chongqing Department Store Co., Ltd. (重庆百货大楼股份有限公司) reported that AI-generated digital humans contributed to Q2 income reaching nearly 5 billion RMB, illustrating commercial adoption at significant scale within the retail sector. Shaanxi Broadcast and Television Network (陕西广播电视网络) deployed digital human services across multiple government and institutional contracts, including the provincial public security information network, the justice department, the market supervision bureau, and the Xi'an National Version Museum, where digital humans provided service interfaces and information access points. Wuxi Public Security has deployed digital human officers within immersive metaverse platforms as part of experiments in metaverse policing digital humans (元宇宙警务数字人), demonstrating integration of virtual beings into law enforcement and public-facing government services. In Anhui, Chengling Microelectronics (晨灵微电子) offered demonstrations of digital human applications at the University of Science and Technology Valley (科大硅谷) innovation hub, and the upcoming Hangzhou digital expo announced that interactive digital human holographic cabins would feature prominently alongside gaming and esports events as centrepieces of the exhibition.

Cultural: Guangxi has incorporated AI digital humans into cultural and tourism publicity, positioning them as vehicles for promoting the region's role in the Belt and Road Initiative and China–ASEAN exchanges, and has also integrated digital human technology into smart scenic area management, cultural heritage digitisation, and AI-driven tourism operations showcased at the 2025 AI Empowerment Super League. In Guizhou, the tourism sector deployed a digital human AI assistant named Huang Xiaoxi (黄小希) capable of providing itinerary planning, smart ticketing, guided tours, and travelogue generation, functioning as a comprehensive digital companion within the cultural tourism industry. In Shandong, the Qilu Nongchao (齐鲁农潮) agricultural retail initiative introduced a digital human named Xiaoman (小满) as a promotional and customer engagement figure for specialty agricultural products, blending local commerce with digital interaction. The Changsha Survey and Design Institute (长沙勘察设计院) launched a digital human named Kankan (勘勘), used to deliver one-minute educational videos about historic architecture and cultural heritage protection, linking digital archiving with public science communication.

Healthcare: In Tianjin, a digital human-based AI Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctor system was developed as an intelligent medical aid that overlays acupuncture points, provides precise guidance on needle direction, and specifies contraindications, offering a direct application of digital humans in clinical training and patient interaction. The system has undergone internal testing across multiple institutions with the aim of making traditional Chinese medicine more accessible and standardised through an interactive virtual human interface.

AI Companions: A January 2024 survey by the Fudan Development Research Institute (复旦发展研究院) found that 13.5% of young Chinese internet users confided in AI virtual humans for emotional support, treating them as accessible private confidants—a pattern described as using virtual beings as "tree holes" for personal disclosures among younger populations navigating stress and isolation. This data point illustrates the adoption of virtual humans in emotional and mental health contexts within China's digital landscape, where AI companions serve a social function beyond entertainment or commercial utility.

Legal and Ethical Contexts: A case at the Beijing Internet Court (北京互联网法院) established that virtual digital human images are protected under copyright law, clarifying the legal status of digital humans and the boundaries of their permissible use. The judgment was framed as a significant step in aligning intellectual property protections with the emerging digital human industry, providing a legal foundation for creators and companies operating in this sector.

August 28 News

Healthcare: AQ App introduced more than 300 AI medical companion avatars under the designation "名医AI分身," developed in collaboration with 好大夫 (Hao Daifu), a platform aggregating approximately 300,000 licensed physicians; these virtual doctor doubles are designed to provide always-available triage, guidance, and follow-up interactions that extend verified clinical expertise to large patient populations while retaining a direct link to credentialed practitioners. The company Digital Human pursued a parallel trajectory through formal research partnerships with Shandong University, Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University, and Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, integrating computer science with medicine to advance digital human applications in medical education, clinical support, and healthcare research, positioning synthetic characters as infrastructure for AI-driven medical AI development.

Entertainment: Galaxy Corporation (银河娱乐) formalised a virtual idol production pipeline by launching an AI artist audition in which candidates compete as virtual characters to debut as a new idol, institutionalising a talent system that decouples human embodiment from performance persona. Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) invested at the platform level in synthetic performers by releasing the Index-AniSora animation model and the IndexTTS2 voice model to generate animated video and expressive voice output, enabling creators to run VTuber-style "virtual UP-master" channels that sustain emotional companionship with audiences on an always-on basis.

Marketing and Commerce: Zhejiang Netsun Business Treasure Co., Ltd. (浙江网盛生意宝股份有限公司) integrated digital human livestreaming into bulk commodity e-commerce at the Fourth Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou, combining product selection and shared live studio infrastructure with virtual anchors to scale commercial broadcasting. At the 2025 China International Fair for Trade in Services, Beijing will deploy a digital human designated "Beijing Solution Promotion Officer" to present and market the capital's innovative policies and achievements to trade visitors. In Hong Kong, the "Asian Influencer Creative Competition" highlighted digital humans as instruments for cross-border brand promotion, enabling companies to leverage synthetic virtual beings in international market outreach. In Xining, Qinghai, a talent recruitment fair deployed digital human anchors to broadcast job opportunities and paired them with an AI job-seeking assistant to support candidates through the hiring process, demonstrating virtual being applications in employment services and human resources innovation. Shanxi's Cultural Industry Expo presented a three-dimensionally rendered hyper-realistic digital human performing Hua Mulan alongside AI animation production of The Reunion Order and cultural large models including a Guan Gong character, expanding digital human deployment into traditional culture and digital art with commercial exhibition objectives.

Cultural Heritage and Tourism: Changsha launched "勘勘," a digital human cultural heritage guide that greets visitors and narrates sites including Wenchang Pavilion, combining digital archiving with narrative activation to preserve and present local history through a synthetic character. The Summer Palace operates an AI digital human as a smart customer service presence for visitors, reflecting the adoption of virtual beings as venue-level service agents in large tourist destinations. Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics constructed the VRP-MUSEUM virtual exhibition hall using high-definition imagery and multidimensional video captured at Bailuzhou Academy and Yangming Academy, embedding digital human tour guides and augmented reality interactions to produce an immersive cultural experience. In Wuhan, Hubei, the digital human "Chuchu" was introduced as a virtual tour guide within a metaverse environment, while in Lulong, Hebei, the Huaxia Backbone Pavilion deployed AI digital humans to simulate historical time-travel experiences for student visitors. In Shanxi, the digital human "Jin Yiyi" served as a cultural promotion ambassador at a cultural expo, performing Jin opera excerpts and engaging audiences directly, and the digital human "Hongxing Yang" at the Eighth Route Army Cultural Digital Experience Hall in Shanxi recreated wartime dialogues with visitors to bring revolutionary history into interactive relief.

Enterprise and Productivity: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) consolidated its virtual human capabilities with two complementary offerings: the open-source Wan2.2-S2V (Speech-to-Video) model, which generates digital human video from a single portrait and audio input, and the Tongyi app's persona customisation function, which allows users to create bespoke AI partner avatars or clone self-representations for use as branded assistants and spokescharacters. The company 愛吠的狗 described a cross-domain intelligent virtual human platform in transition from virtual reality pipelines toward agentic AI, aiming at full-stack character creation and autonomous operation for business contexts. 千方科技 showcased consumer-grade digital doubles through its 宇视写真 product, offering portrait-quality avatar generation that blends personal likeness with stylisation for retail marketing and tourism-adjacent content creation scenarios. Yang Ming Chiao Tung University deployed a virtual host to orchestrate an online graduation ceremony, demonstrating event-scale use of a synthetic master of ceremonies in higher education administration.

Education: Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, in collaboration with Neusoft Technology (东软技术), launched the "Minyi Finance Large Model," structured around a four-layer application architecture that incorporates digital humans, the Minyi intelligent agent, and the Minyi space to support teaching in statistics and management disciplines; by embedding digital humans and agents into educational scenarios the framework enables interactive virtual assistance and advances AI-driven finance education. The university also developed the VRP-MUSEUM virtual exhibition platform, which uses digital human guides to deliver immersive instructional and cultural content to students visiting the reconstructed academy environments.

Companionship and Social: LOVERSE positions itself as a dating platform built around engagement with AI-generated characters rather than human partners, with reported adoption among middle-aged men including married users, marking a measurable consumer shift toward persistent synthetic companions as primary relational interfaces. Alibaba's Tongyi persona customisation supports individualized AI partner avatars and self-cloned digital doubles for daily personal interaction, while Bilibili's virtual UP-master tooling sustains ongoing parasocial relationships between creators' synthetic personas and subscriber communities, together illustrating how companionship, fandom, and personal identity expression are converging around configurable virtual beings at the platform level.

Public Services and Civic Communication: The Jiuquan, Gansu Public Security Bureau deployed AI digital human anchors during the "National Online Law Promotion Tour" to conduct anti-fraud public education campaigns, with the virtual beings functioning as legal knowledge broadcasters operating alongside drone infrastructure to form a coordinated smart defence system combining legal publicity with precision policing outreach. The Guizhou Big Data Expo similarly featured digital humans alongside large models and embodied intelligence demonstrations, giving attendees close-range interactive experiences with publicly deployed synthetic figures in a government-sponsored technology exhibition context.

Research and Technology: Wan-S2V is an audio-driven video generation model developed to move digital human production beyond talking-head formats into complex film and television scenarios, combining text-guided global motion control with audio-driven fine-grained local motion to achieve consistent and realistic digital human animations across multiple clips; it addresses long-video generation challenges through optimised motion frame token reduction and was trained on a large dataset of public and internally collected video material to enable cinematic-quality virtual human performances. OmniHuman-1.5 presents a framework for embedding cognitive principles drawn from System 1 and System 2 cognitive science theory into video-based avatars, integrating deliberative reasoning through multimodal large language model agents whose outputs are fused with reactive signals via a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer supplemented by a symmetric audio branch and a pseudo-last-frame strategy, yielding avatars capable of semantically coherent and naturalistic motion across complex multi-person interactions. PanoHair introduces a generative framework for synthesising detailed three-dimensional hair strands on volumetric digital human heads, modelling heads as Signed Distance Fields while predicting semantic labels and three-dimensional orientations to enable precise hair strand growth; it employs an orientation projection loss for multi-view consistency and a fast hair volume extraction technique using boolean operations on implicit representations, substantially improving the realism and rendering efficiency of digital human characters for immersive applications.

Ethical and Legal Contexts: The Beijing Internet Court issued an effective judgment affirming copyright protection for virtual digital human images, clarifying the legal attributes and permissible behaviours associated with synthetic character likenesses and reducing intellectual property uncertainty for studios and platforms that operate digital humans commercially. This ruling strengthens the institutional environment underpinning cultural deployments such as Changsha's "勘勘" and the Summer Palace's digital human, entertainment initiatives by Galaxy Corporation and Bilibili, enterprise avatar stacks from Alibaba, 愛吠的狗, and 千方科技, and companionship applications such as LOVERSE, by establishing enforceable rights around character likeness and derived content production.

August 27 News

Healthcare: In Guangzhou, the AI medical assistant digital human "Sui Xiaoyi" was launched within the Alipay platform as part of the "Guangzhou Health Link" initiative, enabling users to access services including registration, appointment booking, and medical guidance through natural conversation. An unnamed digital human company, which reported 151% revenue growth in the first half of 2025, has pursued academic-industry partnerships focused on integrating computer science with traditional medicine, conducting AI medical research in collaboration with Shandong University, Capital Medical University Xuanwu Hospital, and Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, with the declared goal of advancing digital human applications in clinical contexts.

Enterprise and Government Services: The municipal police department in Wuxi launched a metaverse policing digital human functioning as a 24-hour digital officer within a virtual service center, guiding citizens and answering queries in real time. On August 25, 2025, Bank of Communications finalised its "Enterprise Virtual Digital Human System Construction and Upgrade Project," selecting Beijing Baidu Netcom Science and Technology (百度) as the supplier for a contract valued at 4.45 million yuan, marking a large-scale enterprise-grade deployment aimed at improving customer engagement and operational efficiency. In Guangdong, the Huangshi Chamber of Commerce introduced a digital human as the official digital double of its president, enabling the president to be represented at events when scheduling conflicts arise. The Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions launched the "AI+ Learning Action for Industrial Workers" initiative through the "Worker's Home" app, incorporating digital humans as components of a skills development programme and encouraging workers and innovation studios to engage with digital human platforms in professional training contexts.

Marketing: Youche Technology, based in Hong Kong, deployed an "AI Digital Human Army" comprising 100 AI-generated digital humans to conduct promotional shop visits in Indonesia as part of an international automotive marketing campaign, demonstrating mass-scale synthetic character deployment for localised cross-border brand outreach.

Cultural Heritage and Film: In Changsha, the digital guide Kankan (勘勘) was deployed at Wen Chang Pavilion to support digital archiving and dynamic cultural utilisation, providing AI-driven cultural interpretation services for visitors and enabling more active engagement with historical materials. Cultural projects in Beijing have employed digital humans to reconstruct historically accurate figures and events associated with the May Fourth Movement, with stated ambitions to address the technical challenge of representing large-scale historical events with documentary simultaneity. Changchun Film Studio released The Code in the Notes, promoted as China's first AIGC-generated film, in which AI digital human technology was used to revive the performance of Li Yalin, an actor known for the film The Young People in Our Village, enabling him to appear on screen alongside contemporary actors and exemplifying the use of digital humans for cultural preservation and cross-generational cinematic storytelling.

Legal and Regulatory: The Beijing Internet Court issued a ruling establishing that virtual digital human images are protected under copyright law, clarifying their legal attributes and defining boundaries for permissible use and ownership, a decision expected to strengthen the regulatory foundation of the digital human industry.

Technology and Platforms: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) released Wan2.2-S2V, an open-source video generation model capable of producing cinematic-quality digital human videos from a single image, with realistic facial expressions, synchronised lip movements, and smooth body gestures, with intended applications in livestreaming, film production, and AI-driven education. Alibaba also integrated avatar-based personalisation into its Tongyi app, allowing users to create custom AI doubles for interactions including connections with historical figures, paintings, and animated characters. Mango Excellent Media (芒果优媒) has committed to the virtual human business as a long-term strategic direction, signalling an intention to deepen its virtual production ecosystem. A Taiwan-based startup, as reported by the Central News Agency, is developing a cross-domain intelligent virtual human platform that combines VR and agent-based AI for enterprise and interactive applications.

August 26 News

Entertainment: Mango Excellent Media (芒果超媒) has developed a substantial portfolio of virtual beings integrated into television broadcasting and live events, beginning with the digital host Xiaoyang, deployed on programs including Hello Saturday and New Year's Eve galas. Beyond hosting, Mango Excellent Media created China's first AI director, Aimang, and produced domain-specific digital experts, including a microbiology specialist for the documentary Soy Sauce and a virtual guide for the Hengyang Tourism Development Conference. In the livestreaming sector, digital human anchors have been adopted as presenters in Wuhan, reflecting the broader integration of AI-generated hosts into the digital economy. Baidu (百度) reported that its AI-generated digital humans generated over 500 million yuan in revenue during the second quarter, derived through advertising, livestreaming, and digital content services. Huya (虎牙), the Chinese livestreaming platform, filed patents on intelligent interaction methods with virtual digital humans, targeting improved accuracy in the output materials generated by AI-driven virtual performers.

Healthcare: Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital (南京鼓楼医院) launched the "博爱" (Boai) large model and its associated AI agent at the Fourth National Large Public Hospital Reform and High-Quality Development Conference, co-hosted by the Chinese Hospital Association and the Jiangsu Hospital Association, integrating digital human technologies into intelligent healthcare and describing the system as "digital humans living as electronic pets" to support patient interaction and medical assistance functions. Neusoft Group (东软集团) collaborated with Wuhan University Zhongnan Hospital (武汉大学中南医院) to build a digital twin hospital incorporating a digital human AI assistant capable of real-time interaction and automated responses, including the generation of digital consultation maps to guide patients through medical facilities.

Enterprise: The Bank of Communications (交通银行) awarded a contract worth 4.45 million yuan to Beijing Baidu Netcom Technology Co., Ltd. (北京百度网讯科技有限公司) to develop an enterprise-level virtual human system designed to support customer engagement, service automation, and digital transformation strategies within the financial institution. This deployment represents the adoption of digital humans as scalable enterprise tools operating within a regulated industry context.

Cultural Heritage and Education: Datong (大同) developed a hyper-realistic 3D digital human version of the legendary historical figure Hua Mulan, integrating natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, intent understanding, and emotional response technologies to enable full-chain interactive communication as part of a cultural IP innovation and tourism initiative. In Changde, Hunan, the virtual digital human Lingling delivers historical storytelling about China's "Two Bombs, One Satellite" project to local children through immersive avatar interaction. Wuxiang County (武乡县) in Shanxi deployed the virtual digital human Hongxing Yang (红星杨), dressed in Eighth Route Army uniform, within the Red Culture Digital Experience Hall to engage visitors in historical dialogue about wartime resource struggles. In Qinhuangdao, Hebei, the Lu Long Scenic Area (卢龙景区) applied AI digital human technologies in the Huaxia Spine Pavilion, enabling children to interact with virtual representations of historical figures including Qian Xuesen to support cultural education.

Marketing and Commerce: Ningxia unveiled its first hyper-realistic digital human, "Xia" (夏), as the digital brand ambassador for Xia Jin Dairy (夏进乳业) at the Ningxia Milk Culture Festival in Yinchuan, representing a significant regional milestone in the commercial deployment of virtual beings as promotional figures. This development positions a digital human as both a cultural symbol and a marketing asset for a regional brand at a high-profile public event.

Public Services and Legal Education: In Jiuquan, Gansu, AI digital humans were deployed alongside intelligent drones as part of public legal education initiatives, functioning as communicators of legal knowledge and combining traditional cultural elements with digital interactive methods to extend access to legal information across the region.

Labor and Employment: In Qinghai, AI-powered digital human anchors hosted live job promotion sessions as part of the East-West cooperation program's talent night market, broadcasting employment information in real time to connect employers in Nanjing and Xining with remote job seekers and facilitating efficient communication of labor market opportunities across geographies.

Productivity and Companionship: The mobile version of Gogh – Virtual Dolls and Focused Learning/Work embeds virtual characters designed to sit beside users virtually during work or study sessions, providing a sense of companionship and accountability through focus-based gaming mechanics. The application demonstrates how virtual beings can be used to enhance concentration, motivation, and productivity within interactive digital environments.

August 25 News

Entertainment: The motion capture performances of virtual humans based on the Soul Land characters Xiao Wu and Huliena demonstrate high-fidelity application of virtual human technologies in adapting animated intellectual property into digital performance, distributed via YouTube. Online dance productions have further illustrated virtual human capabilities, with creators employing three-dimensional modeling and character animation software to stage choreographed productions featuring synthetic performers. Bilibili (B站) has integrated AI-assisted anime creation and virtual UP hosts into its platform, combining entertainment content generation with emotional companionship features and conducting small-scale internal testing to develop a content ecosystem in which AI characters interact with users. AI-driven VTubers such as MOTHERv3 represent live interaction formats on YouTube, where synthetic streamers engage audiences in real time, while independent creators and voice actors have adopted virtual avatars on TikTok to build distinct streaming identities. Research into multi-avatar performance in virtual reality by Laibson, Coulombe, Tarr, Gochfeld, and Yeh (2025) has introduced body tracking and dynamic avatar transition methods that enhance real-time streaming for VTubers and virtual filmmakers, and complementary work by Galappaththy (2025) has demonstrated the feasibility of generating three-dimensional avatars using standard webcams for augmented reality interaction, offering resource-efficient pathways for digital embodiment across entertainment contexts.

Marketing: Kuaishou (快手) has deployed virtual digital human solutions for livestreaming and short-video AIGC content production, reporting over 30 million RMB in daily consumption of digital human-powered advertising and live commerce services. Baidu (百度) has expanded digital human revenue through AIGC marketing applications and has filed a patent for a digital human-based live broadcast image generation method, device, and electronic equipment, formalising an intellectual property framework around digital human production technology. In Zhejiang Province, government plans to cultivate cross-border e-commerce live broadcast parks explicitly encourage the adoption of digital human live-streaming technologies, and in Shanghai a virtual human content factory has showcased Su Xiaomei, a digital human capable of generating multilingual marketing content to support cross-border e-commerce brands in overseas promotion. In Guangzhou, a digital human technology platform has been deployed to assist cultural tourism agencies in developing virtual spokespersons and establishing a cultural export digital channel for city branding, with plans for digital human engagement at major events such as the Guangzhou Marathon. Reports citing WIRED have noted that Chinese virtual human salespeople are demonstrably outperforming their human counterparts, indicating the operational maturity of AI-driven virtual employees in sales contexts. Academic research on virtual streamers in China's agricultural e-commerce sector by Jiang and Li (2025) examines how the traits and interactive behaviours of AI-driven virtual streamers shape consumer purchasing intentions, while Choi, Kim, and Kim (2025) have studied how popular versus iconic virtual influencers affect consumer responses to fashion brand corporate social responsibility campaigns, and Stancic (2025) has explored how AI-created influencers alter authenticity perception and brand engagement in the fashion and beauty sectors.

Enterprise: At the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Beigou Village presented an AI-powered digital human village secretary as part of its rural revitalization strategy, integrating artificial intelligence, big data, and digital human technologies across governance, public service, healthcare, and cultural tourism functions. Shanghai's Yangpu District launched the Digital Human Social Security initiative to improve employment and social service processes through human-like AI intermediaries. Hong Kong City University (Dongguan) unveiled a digital human campus navigation assistant for new students in 2025, developed under the leadership of Associate Professor Cai Chengjun, providing real-time guidance and information services on campus. Shanghai's municipal government has reported that its metaverse industry ecosystem now encompasses hundreds of companies and is formulating standards covering digital human interaction applications, with policy emphasising scenario-driven development and outcome selection to foster collaboration across more than 800 upstream and downstream enterprises. Industry analysis has also highlighted the complex integration of extended reality with digital humans, requiring precise calibration across asset creation, filming, and display to produce outputs applicable across film, tourism, catering, and merchandising sectors. Research by Park, Chung, and Koo (2025) examining the hospitality industry demonstrates how avatar-based AI companions deployed as hotel concierge services are shaped in their uptake by interaction type and social playfulness, extending the application of virtual beings into enterprise-grade tourism service environments.

Cultural: 37 Interactive Entertainment (三七互娱) has developed the virtual human 葱妹, who functions as a smart city assistant providing AI-powered public services in Guangzhou and who has served as an information guide during large-scale sporting events including the National Games, delivering real-time updates to citizens and visitors. Cultural events have featured the Wang Wei digital human IP, a synthetic character based on Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei that employs holographic projection technology to blend traditional cultural heritage with immersive modern display. At the Shanxi Cultural Expo, the digital human 红星杨 was deployed to enable visitor dialogue about anti-Japanese war history, supported by the 红色武乡数字星谱 platform, which links virtual beings to historical narratives and cultural education. The Fifth Hunan Tourism Development Conference introduced AI avatar applications allowing visitors to converse with virtual representations of historical figures, experience AI-powered costume transformations into ethnic attire, and engage in light-and-shadow performances of regional history, positioning AI avatars as interactive companions for personalised cultural storytelling. In Guangdong, digital human technology was used in classrooms to recreate Wang Jiasheng, the child depicted in the wartime photograph known as China Doll, as a digital human who narrates his historical experiences directly to students, illustrating the deployment of virtual beings in patriotic education and immersive historical instruction. Shanghai's broader metaverse industry development has seen multiple unicorn companies emerge around applications of avatars and digital humans for cultural and creative purposes, with scholars including Beijing Film Academy President Hu Qiang and East China Normal University Professor Shen Jiayi articulating that digital human roles should be understood as complementary to rather than replacements for traditional performance arts.

Ethical Contexts: The cultural discourse in China, as framed by Hu Qiang and Shen Jiayi, directly addresses concerns about the displacement of human performers and the need to delineate the appropriate boundaries of virtual being deployment within artistically and culturally significant domains, reflecting a national-level negotiation over the role of synthetic characters in professional creative industries.

August 24 News

Entertainment: In China, digital human technology is being integrated into cinematic and television production through XR-based workflows. The mobile game Seven Days World and the television series Happiness China both employ digital human avatars whose realism depends on precise XR material preparation and live-action synchronization, demonstrating how synthetic characters are being embedded in immersive storytelling environments that bridge gaming and broadcast media. Shanxi province highlighted the Datong "Mulan 3D Ultra-Realistic Digital Human" as an AIGC-driven cultural IP project connecting traditional heritage narratives with immersive digital production, and China's first fully AIGC-produced animated film represents a broader milestone in the use of synthetic characters in feature-length filmmaking.

Marketing: Since 2022, Chinese e-commerce platforms have widely adopted AI virtual humans as livestream sales hosts, enabled by advances in large language models that support natural expression, real-time interactivity, and high-quality rendered environments. Brother combines live human anchors for three to four hours before switching to virtual anchors, addressing broadcaster fatigue and enabling uninterrupted 24-hour operations; AI anchors on such platforms have been reported to generate RMB 76,000 in two hours, with transactional records reaching RMB 2.4 billion in a single session. Baidu (百度) filed a patent for a method of generating livestream images using digital humans, reinforcing its technical position in commercializing digital-human-driven content production at scale. TikTok has deployed AI virtual influencers as marketing assets within its platform ecosystem. In Yinchuan, digital human technologies were displayed at agricultural e-commerce fairs, where virtual beings presented and promoted the outcomes of Fujian-Ningxia collaborative projects, functioning as brand representatives and interactive content hosts in a regional retail context.

Healthcare: A major hospital in Shanghai developed a "Traditional Chinese Medicine Digital Human" project, piloted in community committees in the Puxing area, deploying AI-driven digital humans to extend professional medical expertise and make healthcare services accessible outside clinical settings. In Guangxi, the AI Experience Officer program under Guangxi Cloud–Guangxi Daily (广西云–广西日报) introduced digital human personas named "Logic Sister" and "Director Gu," with an application called "AI Medical Friends" using digital human interfaces to promote intelligent health management. Dayang Group (大洋集团), based in Hong Kong, incorporated AI digital human medical assistants into its Web 4.0 transformation strategy, combining health data management with tokenized asset frameworks to support decentralized health service ecosystems. Together these cases illustrate how healthcare institutions and technology companies are deploying digital humans to bridge resource gaps, extend professional services geographically, and engage patients through interactive virtual interfaces.

Enterprise and Government Services: Chunghwa Telecom (中華電信) developed 3D AI virtual humans under its 5G Accelerator program and deployed them at the 2025 Osaka World Expo Taiwan Pavilion and at Taoyuan International Airport. These digital humans integrate facial recognition, crowd analysis, and multilingual service capabilities, offering guided tours and precision marketing functions tailored to diverse visitor groups, and are positioned simultaneously as navigation assistants and cultural exhibition tools. Baidu launched its legal AI agent initiative "AI助法下乡·百城公益行," deploying a lawyer AI avatar across 100 Chinese cities from August to September 2025, paired with professionally recruited human lawyers to supervise outreach, creating a hybrid human-AI model for extending legal education to underserved communities. Baidu also filed a patent for a method of generating livestream images using digital humans, further consolidating its position across both public-service and commercial digital-human applications.

Nanjing and Xining jointly organized a cross-city talent night market recruitment event in which AI-powered digital human anchors presented 130 job opportunities to an audience of 11,000 viewers, supplemented by an AI job-hunting assistant for candidate guidance. Government service platforms in Gansu and Qingyang integrated digital human guides into intelligent service portals to improve administrative efficiency for enterprises and citizens. Shiyou Universe (世优宇宙) Technology Co., Ltd. in Chengdu introduced the "Bota AI Digital Human Integrated Machine" featuring a 3D character called "Big-Eyed Deer," deployed as part of the city's real-world AI and robotics validation activities within a unified hardware-software integration system. Dingjie articulated a corporate AI transformation framework featuring digital avatars, digital expert agents, and digital commander agents, presenting them as portable and trainable digital doubles for long-term enterprise use. Vivo (维沃) conceptualized mixed reality as a platform for digital avatars functioning as cognitive companions, situating them within a broader ecosystem alongside mobile devices as personal intelligence systems and robotics as physical proxies.

Gaming: Dayang Group identified gaming as a primary application domain for digital humans within its Web 4.0 transformation strategy, with virtual beings used to enhance player immersion. The mobile game Seven Days World integrates digital human avatars with XR technologies, demonstrating how extended reality production workflows are being combined with synthetic characters to achieve immersive storytelling experiences that operate across cinematic and interactive game environments.

Cultural, Tourism, and Education: Guizhou's provincial smart tourism system launched the "One Code Tour Guizhou" 3.0 platform, integrating digital humans into visitor interaction and cultural experience workflows. In Liaoning, the "Shanhai AI 2.0 Intelligent Guide" at the provincial museum introduced digital human docents providing artifact explanations, real-time question-and-answer interactions, 3D model displays, and guided navigation, supported by excavated relic data including material from Mawangdui. In Ningxia, the Minning collaborative e-commerce program used digital humans to demonstrate agricultural collaboration outcomes and enable interactive displays at regional fairs. In Xinjiang, the official recognition of "AI Digital Human Trainer" as a new occupation reflects the institutionalization of digital humans as professional tools and the corresponding labor market demand for specialists trained to build, optimize, and maintain these systems.

In education, teacher Luo Xiao in Guangdong employed AI-generated digital humans in ideological and political classes, animating historical figures including composer Xian Xinghai to narrate their own stories for primary students, demonstrating applied use of synthetic characters in formal classroom instruction. Dayang Group extended digital human applications into educational technology as part of its Web 4.0 strategy in Hong Kong, linking virtual beings to asset management and tokenization frameworks within a broader institutional digitalization program.

Ethical Contexts: Cultural reporting in China has documented individuals forming strong emotional and financial attachments to what are described as "two-dimensional companions" (二次元伴侣), in some cases generating tensions in real-life relationships, illustrating the psychological depth of user investment in virtual beings as social surrogates and raising questions about the boundaries of companion-oriented AI design. These cases highlight the broader ethical dimensions of AI companion virtual beings, including their potential to displace real-world relationships and cultivate psychological dependency among users.

August 23 News

Entertainment: Bilibili (B站) has been testing virtual UP主 capable of providing emotional companionship through AI-driven anime-assisted creation, blending fandom culture with artificial intelligence to expand its entertainment ecosystem with synthetic character performers. XiaoYu Interactive and Matchbox Culture jointly launched a virtual boy band leveraging voice synthesis, hyper-realistic rendering, and VR technologies, demonstrating how synthetic characters have become central to popular culture and fan engagement within China's virtual idol industry.

Cultural: Shiyou Universe (世优宇宙（成都）科技有限公司) developed the Bota AI Digital Human integrated machine featuring a 3D cartoon digital human named "Big-Eyed Deer" (大眼鹿), deployed at the Chengdu Natural History Museum for real-time visitor interaction; the company also presented its MAS system and positioned the Bota platform as a tool for enhancing museum experiences through AI-driven digital human engagement. The virtual digital human "葱妹" was integrated as the official Smart National Games Assistant for the Fifteenth National Games in Guangzhou, providing event information, venue navigation, and cultural explanations through the self-developed "Xiao Qi" large model, embedding synthetic characters into major national sporting events as interactive cultural guides. In Changsha, immersive productions used holographic projection and virtual digital humans to recreate revolutionary narratives in interactive opera formats, supported by Hunan Broadcasting System (湖南广播电视台) and Mango TV (芒果TV), which promoted the content through dedicated programming and digital human applications. Tianwei Video integrated AI large-model technologies to create television-based AI voice digital humans and voice assistants, bridging interactive synthetic character companionship with traditional broadcast media. At the Expo pavilion "null2," visitors experienced Mirrored Body, a digital human designed for interactive dialogue, showcasing immersive communication as a cultural attraction in a futuristic exhibition setting.

Enterprise: China Mobile Hong Kong (中国移动香港) presented highly humanlike AI digital employees at the Belt and Road Software Expo (Hong Kong) 2025, built on multimodal intelligent agents, hyper-realistic voice interaction, and 3D virtual figure technologies to cover customer service, product marketing, and brand IP development, positioning digital humans as one of four core enterprise solutions alongside cybersecurity, low-altitude economy, and smart health kiosks. In Wuxi, municipal government services deployed over 20 digital humans including virtual hosts and intelligent customer service agents, with the AI digital butler "Fubao" introduced on the city's Online Intermediary Supermarket platform to enable the province's first digital human plus online bidding project, reducing procurement costs by 15% and shortening the selection cycle by more than one day. Zhongzhi Group (中智集团) introduced an AI digital human–based intelligent recruitment system in Beijing that applies multimodal evaluation technologies to generate precise candidate profiles and improve fairness in hiring, while Beijing International Human Resources similarly integrated AI digital human interaction into its recruitment solutions to support HR decision-making and streamline hiring processes. The Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area announced a procurement project specifically for digital human construction and management infrastructure, signaling municipal-level institutional investment in synthetic employee systems. In China's retail and e-commerce sector, virtual human salespeople have been reported to surpass human sellers on performance metrics, indicating a practical commercial shift toward synthetic employees for cost efficiency and scalability. In Guangzhou, Lingju Information (灵聚信息) was founded by Zhang Sheng (张胜), who has pursued AI digital human development since 2013, reflecting the broader ecosystem in the Pearl River Delta where AI avatars are commercialized alongside large models.

Healthcare: Fujian Medical University Mengchao Hepatobiliary Hospital deployed a digital human powered by DeepSeek technology on an electronic screen in its outpatient building, where the system is designed to answer patients' medical inquiries with patience, reducing the burden on hospital staff while improving patient access to reliable information. This deployment represents a direct application of AI digital humans in healthcare navigation, where a synthetic character functions as a patient-facing interface within a clinical environment.

Social: NetEase Cloud Music (网易云音乐) launched the Cloud Village Study Room, in which users adopt customizable virtual avatars to enter themed roles, creating a sense of companionship and shared community within an online study environment, while the platform concurrently tracks study time, generates monthly learning reports, and provides leaderboards to blend gamification with avatar-driven identity and social presence.

Government and Public Services: Wentian Technology Co., Ltd. (天津市问天科技有限公司), led by founder Feng Gang (冯刚), has applied digital humans to pre-trial dispute resolution in Tianjin, where systems assist with certification processes aimed at reducing costs and increasing efficiency in judicial contexts, illustrating a direct deployment of synthetic characters in the legal field. Government and regional reports in both Hunan and Fujian have formally listed AI digital human trainers and generative AI system application specialists as new official occupations, positioning digital human training and deployment as structured career paths and further embedding virtual beings into the national labor ecosystem. Reports from the Macau market linked AI-generated digital humans to significant revenue streams, with Baidu search data indicating that more than 64% of results were AI-generated digital humans producing nearly 500 million RMB in Q2 revenue, underscoring the scale at which digital humans have become substantial contributors to regional financial and entertainment sectors.

August 22 News

Healthcare: Ping An Good Doctor (平安好医生) reported 19.5% revenue growth in the first half of the year, driven by AI-enabled services structured around a "digital twins" framework. The company has deployed digital avatars across multiple healthcare roles, including AI family doctors, AI eldercare assistants, AI medical offices, AI health managers, AI chronic disease managers, and AI health welfare officers, embedding these virtual beings across the full cycle of healthcare service delivery to support intelligent clinical and administrative decision-making.

Enterprise: China Telecom's (中国电信) Zhengzhou branch launched Xiaoyi (筱翼), a digital human assistant integrated into its online customer service system, achieving a 95% resolution rate for customer queries. Dongfeng Motor (东风汽车) introduced an AI digital human at its 2025 Corporate Social Responsibility conference for branding and public communication purposes. Dayang Group Holdings Limited (stock code 1991) announced a strategic pivot centred on digital humans as a core growth engine, combining AI digital human deployment with a Real World Asset tokenization platform to generate four revenue streams: lead generation, AI-plus-RWA financing consulting for SMEs, tokenized asset operations income, and traffic monetization; its investee Jusun Technology Limited plans to deploy AI digital humans across education, gaming, and healthcare. Xmov (魔珐科技), founded by computer vision expert Chai Jinxiang and based in Shanghai, has positioned itself as a large-scale digital human services provider leveraging advanced visual AI. A company listed as Digital Human (835670) secured a procurement contract with Shanxi Medical University worth 2.97 million RMB, marking the entry of specialist digital human firms into institutional procurement markets.

Cultural: China Unicom (中国联通) developed AI-powered digital humans deployed across the provincial museum, library, and science museum in Jiangxi, using 5G and AI to deliver real-time speech interaction and cultural interpretation for visitors. In Nanjing, the Jiangning Weaving Museum's immersive performance A Dream of Red Mansions integrated digital projection, virtual environments, and digital human technology to create an advanced cultural performance system. In Nanning, Guangxi, a virtual digital human modelled on a well-known television host was created to serve as an interactive tour guide and cultural ambassador within tourism and event contexts. In Guizhou, during the Big Data Expo, a digital human modelled on the philosopher Wang Yangming was deployed to engage guests in dialogue, illustrating the use of synthetic characters for intellectual and cultural exchange. In Chengdu, Sichuan, an AI product showcase featured the Boda AI digital human machine and a digital guide named Big-Eyed Deer, which provided themed tours and educational Q&A in museums and tourist sites. Ray Media (光线传媒) is incorporating virtual digital humans into its business portfolio alongside traditional film, animation, and IP-based assets, while Huatse Film (华策影视) and Fangzhi Technology (方直科技) have positioned virtual digital humans within strategies spanning VR/AR, metaverse ecosystems, AIGC, online education, and gaming. The virtual idol Luo Tianyi continues to attract large audiences at live concerts, with fan communities supporting events through crowdfunding, merchandise exchanges, and coordinated in-person gatherings.

Government Services: The Hefei municipal service centre in Anhui deployed AI digital humans as administrative processing assistants, offering instant approvals and smart Q&A to reduce service bottlenecks. In Gansu and Fujian, government service platforms integrated DeepSeek's (深度求索) large language model to launch digital human assistants for legal and administrative services, combining intelligent customer service, voice response, and secure infrastructure within integrated governance platforms.

Marketing: PLTFRM deployed 30 virtual avatars on Taobao and Pinduoduo using Baidu (百度) video models with DeepSeek language models, making it materially involved in China-based virtual avatar commerce operations. Baidu's digital human technology, built on the Wenxin large model, generated approximately 500 million RMB in Q2 2025 revenue from one report, with a separate report citing approximately 5 billion RMB, and with over 64% of Baidu search results in that quarter generated by AI digital humans, representing a 55% quarter-on-quarter increase reflecting full-stack deployment across enterprise cloud services and consumer-facing search.

Ethical and Legal Contexts: The Beijing Internet Court determined that digital avatars qualify as works of authorship, establishing a significant legal precedent for the ownership and protection of synthetic characters. A separate Chinese court ruling expanded voice rights to cover AI clones in an e-commerce dispute, underscoring the regulatory need to govern synthetic character likeness and usage in commercial contexts.

August 21 News

Healthcare: Zhejiang University's School of Medicine deployed a digital twin AI companion modeled on the likeness of Dr. Mao Hongjing to support patients with insomnia, enabling large-scale consultations with a potential annual reach of millions of users compared to the approximately 10,000 patients seen in person. Ant Group (蚂蚁集团) extended AI avatar deployment through its platform AQ by launching medical advertising fraud-prevention initiatives that incorporate AI companions to deliver medical education, provide consultations, and support senior fraud-prevention campaigns. Gushengtang (固生堂), a major traditional Chinese medicine provider, integrated "National Doctor AI Avatars" into its services, combining renowned physician resources with AI-powered patient support to extend healthcare accessibility and support expansion into overseas markets.

E-Commerce and Marketing: SenseTime (商汤科技) developed influencer cloning technology to produce AI avatars that synthetically replicate known personas for scalable content generation, while a separate operator deployed 24/7 virtual human presenters on Chinese e-commerce platforms under a fully constructed brand-presenter model, both approaches optimised for continuous livestream sales without ongoing human labor. ByteDance (字节跳动) functions as a downstream distribution layer through its TikTok platform, where AI digital avatars licensed from individuals' likenesses can front commercial advertisements, completing a pipeline from dataset capture to audience reach. AnalogAI applied digital human technology to the real estate sector in China, deploying AI-driven agents that act as interactive sales representatives to showcase properties and provide virtual assistance to prospective buyers. Ke Yi Yun (科易云) developed digital humans specifically for livestream commerce in Henan, positioning them as a new category of digital broadcast entity designed to overcome constraints of time and physical presence in live selling formats. Baidu (百度) reported that its digital human business generated nearly five billion yuan in revenue in Q2, with 64 percent of mobile search results now AI-generated, underscoring the scale at which synthetic characters function as commercial content and marketing tools.

Cultural Tourism: At the 7th Grand Canal Cultural Tourism Expo in Jiangsu, digital humans were featured alongside county-level exhibitions on rural homestays and resorts as part of technology-integrated cultural tourism initiatives. In Inner Mongolia, digital human tour guides were combined with AR real-scene explanations, enabling visitors to scan codes and hear local legends as part of a cloud tourism strategy promoted as a new regional brand. At the 19th Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference, the digital human "Huang Xiaoxi" was deployed as an AI intelligent guide and recommendation agent for cultural tourism promotion across the province. Fuzhou launched an "AI Digital Human Recommendation Officer" programme in the historic Sanfang Qixiang district, introducing nine digital human prototypes designed to blend youth engagement with local tourism marketing.

Public Services and Governance: In Xinjiang, the city of Karamay introduced "Xiao Ke," a digital human social worker designed to improve administrative service accessibility and transparency, representing a trend of embedding AI-driven virtual staff in local governance. Guangzhou launched digital human volunteers for public service engagement as part of the city's high-efficiency urban management initiatives. In Wuhan, the digital human "Huang Xiaochuang" served as a promotion officer for the second Future Industry Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, while Dongfeng Motor (东风汽车) had a digital human deliver its 2025 social responsibility and sustainability report at a corporate event. Xmov (魔珐科技) collaborated with the Xuhui District Environmental Protection Bureau in Shanghai to release upgraded digital humans "Xu Xiaomei" and "Xu Xiaoling," designed for intelligent interaction in ecological protection communications.

Enterprise and Finance: The Bank of Communications (交通银行) Guangdong Branch adopted digital humans in digital finance scenarios, deploying them alongside AI-driven quality inspection, anti-face-swapping technology, workload forecasting, and scheduling models to enhance customer service delivery. Qilu Talent used an "AI Digital Human" as a perpetual host for livestream job fairs in Shandong, enabling continuous recruitment broadcasting beyond the constraints of human availability. Daheng Imaging's (大恒图像) subsidiary Daheng Xuanjing (大恒玄镜) applied broadcasting-grade 3D modeling and WebGL rendering capabilities to create high-precision digital human avatars for enterprise clients, combining advanced AI-driven behavior with professional-grade visuals for use in interactive media, marketing campaigns, and digital communications.

Entertainment and Media: Hunan Mango Fantasy Technology (芒果幻视), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hunan Broadcasting, advanced a full-chain production solution for virtual digital humans, building on core technologies within its media ecosystem. The company introduced "Xiao Jiu," a robot-styled digital entity featured in the program Chinese Restaurant: Africa Entrepreneurship Season, integrating the digital human into mainstream entertainment broadcasting as a named on-screen presence.

Gaming: Chinese developers have explored advanced applications of digital human technology for historical gaming through AIGE technology, which generates hyper-realistic digital humans capable of speaking over 40 languages and is designed to enable immersive interactions with realistic synthetic characters within historical game settings.

Legal and Intellectual Property: The Beijing Internet Court determined that original virtual digital human images constitute artworks protected under Chinese copyright law, a ruling that emerged from an infringement case in which a former employee sold unauthorised CG models of virtual humans through another company's platform. In a related judicial proceeding, the court ruled on a case involving the companies Ju Mou and Yuan Mou, which were jointly responsible for producing and operating two virtual digital humans; finding infringement, the court awarded damages of 15,000 yuan and established an enforceable precedent recognising virtual digital humans as protectable creative works subject to intellectual property rights under Chinese law.

Social and Ethical Contexts: A case reported in Spain involved Jiang, a 75-year-old Chinese man who left his wife to cohabit with a virtual AI companion, illustrating how digital human technologies have developed emotional significance particularly among elderly populations with Chinese cultural backgrounds and raising broader questions about the social consequences of AI-driven synthetic characters in intimate personal contexts.

August 20 News

Healthcare: Gushengtang (固生堂) is developing AI-powered digital twins of traditional Chinese medicine doctors, replicating the clinical knowledge of top practitioners as transferable and accessible resources, specifically to address the challenge of preserving and disseminating rare medical expertise. Zhejiang province's Health Commission, in coordination with multiple government departments, launched an "AI + healthcare" program under which doctor digital humans are planned to support patient-facing services including triage, procedural guidance, and follow-up management, with the explicit aim of reducing strain on healthcare systems. In Hubei, separate healthcare pilots are deploying doctor digital humans and digital twin assistants to enhance the patient journey across diagnosis and post-treatment stages in intelligent hospital settings, positioning virtual beings as medical intermediaries in clinical workflows.

Education: Banfish (伴鱼) integrates virtual characters named Tina and Coco as AI-driven learning companions within its educational platform, treating these avatars not as decorative mascots but as interactive partners designed to sustain children's long-term engagement and deliver personalized teaching interactions that adapt to individual learning needs.

Enterprise: Dingjie Digital Intelligence (鼎捷数智) has articulated a vision for "portable digital doubles" that function as intelligent agents capable of growing through training and acting as active participants within business operations, with defined archetypes including digital specialist agents and digital commander agents intended to replace rigid organizational hierarchies with fluid, cross-regional collaborative structures. Real estate companies in China are separately integrating avatars within agentic AI systems to streamline client engagement and extend digital presence in property transactions, illustrating how virtual beings are entering professional service contexts beyond media. Wuhan Zhanhai Network Technology has developed a structured four-step methodology—diagnosis, customization, integration, and evolution—for deploying AI digital humans across industries, specifically designed to resolve systemic fragmentation in business systems and enable scalable virtual being adoption at the enterprise level.

Media and Entertainment: Mango Excellent Media (芒果超媒) announced progress on a full-chain virtual digital human production pipeline that integrates AIGC, mixed reality, and digital asset libraries into a unified intelligent content creation system, embedding digital human capabilities into large-scale corporate media workflows. Shanghai Yanfan Digital Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Group, introduced a digital mermaid character as part of a cultural initiative to rejuvenate local marine heritage, extending the project into H5 mini-games and IP ecosystem development to drive interactive entertainment and cultural storytelling at scale. Dangxia Technology, based in Wuhan, integrated digital humans into its video production matrix and produced more than twenty "public welfare + tourism" campaigns that collectively reached over 100 million views, demonstrating the commercial and communicative scalability of digital humans in content-driven industries.

Cultural Commemoration: In Guangxi, the Guangxi Daily's AI Experience Officer known as "Logic Sister" collaborated with the digital human "Director Gu" to explore Thailand's national AI systems on-screen, deploying paired digital humans as engaging co-hosts in cross-cultural media programming. In Shandong, AI-generated digital human portraits of resistance martyrs Li Zhuru and Liu Yuanxiu were presented at a commemorative ceremony, with the digital humans narrating each martyr's life and legacy to live audiences, applying virtual beings as instruments for preserving collective historical memory and connecting contemporary audiences to figures from the past.

Governance and Public Services: Entropy Function Technology, based in Hainan, developed the AI digital human "Shouzheng" for Hainan First Intermediate People's Court to strengthen public legal education, with the digital human making offline appearances including at an anti-drug awareness campaign held at Haikou Meilan International Airport. The Guangzhou Municipal Government introduced a service plan integrating virtual digital humans and governance large models to modernize administrative services, establishing "urban service complexes" designed to combine public service delivery with AI-enabled citizen interactions. In Yinchuan, Ningxia, AI digital human hosts were deployed at the city's "Talent Night Market" as continuous live-stream anchors broadcasting job opportunities, marking a novel application of virtual beings in labor-market and employment-service contexts.

Legal and Ethical Contexts: The Beijing Internet Court issued a ruling establishing that original virtual digital human designs, where they demonstrate distinctness and creative authorship, qualify as works of art protected under copyright law; the specific case involved digital human likenesses referred to as "甲" and "乙," which a court-recognized creative team had independently designed, with infringers ordered to pay compensation, reinforcing the intellectual property framework for the virtual being industry. In a separate regulatory development, Shandong Digital Human Technology faced penalties for irregular financial practices, reflecting growing enforcement scrutiny over companies operating in the digital human sector and signaling a maturing governance environment that seeks to balance technological innovation with corporate accountability.

August 19 News

Entertainment: The Chinese drama 献鱼 deployed digital creatures, including a black snake and an otter, with production teams pre-designing muscle movements and expressions while incorporating on-set lighting data to ensure realism in the final render. At the Grand Canal Cultural Expo in Suzhou, eight technology companies collectively exhibited thirty-nine cultural tourism robots alongside virtual digital humans; among them, Yunmu Zhizao (云木智造) introduced two Bot-H model cultural tourism humanoid platforms distinguished by lifelike facial designs and high-detail rendering. Alibaba (阿里巴巴) released OmniAvatar, a voice-driven virtual human technology that represents a new stage in avatar realism, further evidencing the entertainment sector's reliance on generative AI and motion-capture-informed pipelines to deliver immersive synthetic characters.

Broadcasting and Marketing: The Jilin Meteorological Service Center upgraded its multimedia studio to incorporate virtual hosts capable of moving freely within digital environments, with backgrounds updated in real time to display live weather models, thereby enhancing audience engagement with meteorological broadcasting. AI-generated avatars have been adopted in e-commerce live-streaming contexts, where virtual presenters dynamically adjust tone and pacing in response to audience reactions, including slowing speech or repeating information when viewers display signs of confusion, enabling scalable and responsive synthetic spokespersons for commercial programming.

Legal Frameworks: The Beijing Internet Court ruled that highly original virtual digital human images constitute works of fine art under copyright law, establishing legal protection for such assets. The ruling arose from a case in which two companies successfully sued over the unauthorized resale of virtual human models and were awarded damages. A subsequent report reinforced this precedent by clarifying copyright ownership of virtual digital human figures, affirming that companies and individual creators hold enforceable intellectual property rights over digital human assets within China's legal framework.

Public Services: In Shuangyashan, the Women's Federation launched an AI digital human named Lianbao'er, specifically designed to support local women and children by augmenting social services with technological capabilities. In Xinjiang's Karamay, Qisehua Information Technology Co., Ltd. (七色花信息技术有限公司) developed the Xinjiang Animal Husbandry Cloud Comprehensive Service Platform, embedding a digital human social worker named Xiao Ke into government service halls to deliver more convenient and transparent citizen-facing services, positioning virtual beings as instruments of smart governance.

Cultural Preservation: Guangzhou Applied Science and Technology College created AI digital human figures named Pan Xiaoshan and Pan Xiaoyun to promote and preserve Yao ethnic intangible cultural heritage, demonstrating a youth-led application of virtual beings in ethnic cultural documentation and community outreach. Historical archives are also being re-enacted through digital human avatars embodying historical figures in immersive theater productions, enabling audiences to interact directly with synthetic representations of historical persons and experience past events in a participatory format.

Regional Economic Development: In Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, the Langya Innovation Port publicly debuted digital humans as instruments for regional economic revitalization and AI integration within cultural and industrial ecosystems. The Seventh Sports Expo in Jiangsu assembled eight technology companies to display thirty-nine cultural tourism robots alongside virtual digital humans, underscoring their role in interactive tourism and entertainment infrastructure. In Shandong's Xiajin County, digital human technologies deployed for public cultural services achieved a forty-percent improvement in visual precision while reducing system response time to 0.3 seconds, meaningfully expanding accessibility to cultural programming. Beijing is preparing to feature digital humans, interactive touchscreens, and virtual simulation in its Beijing Plan showcase at the 2025 China International Fair for Trade in Services, presenting these technologies as urban development tools and cultural exhibition media. In Guangxi's Nanning, Zhongguang Digital Technology (中广数字科技) developed AI digital humans as part of a product line that also encompasses AI-driven hardware including smart mice and keyboards, positioning virtual beings as enablers of deeper economic integration between China and ASEAN member states.

August 18 News

Entertainment: The Youku (优酷) series Xian Yu (《献鱼》) integrates digital creatures—including snakes and otters—as central visual elements in a xianxia workplace narrative. The production team designed detailed muscle motion schemes governing movement and expression, and collected on-set lighting data to ensure realistic integration of synthetic organisms within live-action footage. In a separate entertainment context, Xiaomi's (小米) smart assistant Xiao Ai routes users into Xiao Ice's (小冰) character-centric conversational mode, making persona-driven virtual companion experiences accessible through mainstream consumer hardware. Ongoing work in XR-integrated digital human production in China reflects the technical demands of blending synthetic characters with live filming, requiring precise tuning of realism, technological aesthetics, and depth to enrich cinematic storytelling across the domestic entertainment industry.

Cultural: The exhibition 2049 Mazu Raoyue Space Station (《2049 媽祖遶月太空站》) in Taiwan stages an immersive "space station corridor" in which holographic humans, virtual humans, and physical humans coexist within the same environment. The installation invites reflection on ethics surrounding humans, technology, society, and data, positioning virtual beings not merely as technical artifacts but as actors in posthuman cultural imagination. In Shanghai, a marine culture initiative introduced the metaverse-based digital human Shen Yuer, conceived as a digital mermaid embodying and narrating four thousand years of maritime memory through a virtual cultural network. At the Seventh Sports Expo (运博会), eight technology companies exhibited 39 cultural tourism robots and virtual digital humans, presenting them simultaneously as immersive guides and service providers within cultural and tourism experiences.

Civic and Government: Morpho Technology (魔珐科技) collaborated with the Hainan First Intermediate People's Court to deploy the judicial AI digital human Shouzheng (守正), which supports legal publicity, smart litigation guidance, interactive consulting, and public legal education, embedding digital humans directly within civic governance and justice ecosystems. In Xi'an, the Xi'an Highway Research Institute introduced the Jiaokong Digital Human as part of its transportation innovation strategy, deploying it as a mediator in international diplomatic engagements. The Shanghai district of Xuhui upgraded its environmental protection digital humans Xu Xiaomei and Xu Xiaoling to version 2.0, introducing enhanced 3D interaction capabilities showcased during the city's ecological festival. In Hangzhou, the Zhejiang Women Journalists Association introduced the digital human Xiao Sha, who delivered an advocacy speech at a provincial women-focused civic event, illustrating the use of synthetic characters as symbolic spokespersons in institutional settings.

Healthcare: In Ningxia, a regional initiative launched the Healthy Digital Human Management Platform during a signing ceremony for cooperative projects constituting the "Health Silk Road." The platform uses digital humans to reduce geographic barriers to medical resources, promoting equitable healthcare access across urban and rural areas through integrated data sharing. In Shandong, digital human technology entered medical education at the 11th National College Student Medical Innovation Competition, where Li Qingzhu, General Manager of Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (数字人科技有限公司), participated alongside academic and enterprise representatives, demonstrating the application of digital humans in innovation-driven medical training curricula.

Marketing and Financial Services: China's "8·18" financial festival saw widespread deployment of AI large models and digital human livestreaming across financial marketing and investor education campaigns, establishing digital humans as routine communicators in large-scale consumer financial events. In Chongqing, a digital human was deployed for the first time to broadcast the 2024 Investor Online Collective Reception Day, marking a concrete instance of AI-driven virtual presenters in public-facing financial communication. Alibaba's (阿里巴巴) AI fitting application Lookie uses digital twins to enable instant virtual try-on experiences, allowing consumers to test diverse clothing styles within a minute and representing a direct convergence of fashion retail with avatar-based digital embodiment.

Enterprise: Shandong Mixed Reality (山东混合现实) has released a full-stack virtual digital human solution combining AI and XR technologies, covering entertainment performance, virtual anchors, brand marketing, and industrial training as an end-to-end industrialized offering. China Energy Engineering Group Anhui No. 2 Electric Power Construction Co., Ltd. (中国能建安徽二电建) incorporated digital human systems into its smart management platform, supporting HR, asset management, R&D, and supply chain coordination functions within a corporate digitization framework. Jiangsu Yunmu Intelligent Manufacturing Technology Co., Ltd. (江苏云木智能制造科技有限公司) showcased virtual digital humans alongside humanoid robotics and VR systems at the 7th Yunbo Conference in Nanjing, positioning interactive digital human demonstrations as core elements of experiential technology ecosystems. In Yancheng, participants of the "World Youth See China" program visited the Yangtze River Delta (Yancheng) Digital Audiovisual Industry Base and experienced one-click digital human generation alongside high-end manufacturing showcases. A concept for portable digital twins also emerged as a form of authorized human-controlled representative capable of delivering personalized services using enterprise data across time and space, functioning as a situationally intelligent extension of individual presence rather than an autonomous substitute.

August 17 News

Entertainment and Media: Beijing's youth innovation hub supports creators developing digital humans by capturing real human images and data to generate lifelike virtual characters designed for films, videos, and interactive apps, expanding applications in entertainment and immersive storytelling. In the Chinese fantasy drama 献鱼, the production team created digital creatures including a black snake and an otter, preparing detailed muscle movement schemes for actions and expressions and integrating lighting environment data during filming to achieve realistic presentation of these digital beings. New Hunan's V12.0 Smart Media Cube, launched by the New Hunan client (新湖南), features an AI digital human news anchor capable of broadcasting with realism comparable to human hosts, representing a concrete advancement in AI-generated media. Binhai College of Foreign Studies in Tianjin developed a digital human image to host twenty livestreaming sessions, applying virtual humans in interactive higher education and promotional campaigns.

Healthcare: Yi Chi Vision (一尺视界) presented XR-based digital medical applications at the DIC XR exhibition, showcasing how AI and XR can enhance medical teaching and diagnostics. These developments place virtual humans within a clinical context, enabling interactive and immersive training alongside new diagnostic approaches that merge virtual simulation with real clinical needs.

Cultural and Tourism: At the Grand Canal Cultural Tourism Expo in Suzhou, virtual digital humans were presented alongside VR and other technologies to enhance visitor engagement and cultural programming. In Yangzhou, a digital human named Lin Meimei was deployed to design one-day travel itineraries as part of tourism promotions, demonstrating direct integration of virtual beings into cultural tourism services. Yingfan Technology (盈帆科技) in Shanghai developed an original digital character IP, the digital mermaid "Shen," who serves as a cultural ambassador in the city's ocean metaverse, reinforcing maritime heritage. At the China (Hainan) Dongpo Cultural Tourism Conference, stage designers introduced an "AI Dongpo" virtual image that reimagined the historical figure Su Dongpo, enabling a dialogue between past and present through digital performance.

Enterprise: China National Nuclear Corporation (中国核工业集团有限公司) has integrated AI-powered digital humans across diverse enterprise applications, including an immersive 3D holographic presenter known as the "Xiao Zhi" avatar for intelligent Q&A, virtual anchors, interactive museum guides, and training simulators, supported by in-house large models including "Huazhi" and specialized systems for management processes. The corporation's projects include the nuclear sector's first digital productivity platform "Longyin·Wanjie," AI-enhanced livestreaming, and XR-based exhibition experiences developed in collaboration with Huawei (华为) and Tongfang Knowledge Network (同方知网). In Xi'an, the Xi'an Highway Research Institute (西安公路研究院) showcased its patents alongside the "Jiaokong Digital Human," an enterprise-level AI-driven virtual human system integrated into research and development contexts. Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) supported Jisi Technology (吉思科技) in upgrading its e-commerce live-streaming digital humans, designed to enhance efficiency in online retail and target trillion-yuan market potential. Yunding Silk Road (云顶丝路) applied for a patent covering a "digital human intelligent system" that optimizes the full process from user interaction to back-end management, illustrating the trend toward digital human deployment in enterprise and technological infrastructure. Shandong Mixed Reality Digital Industry Development Co. (山东混合现实数字产业发展有限公司) introduced a full-stack virtual digital human solution at an XR industry forum, combining AI-driven interaction with XR environments to create seamless virtual–real experiences.

Civic and Environmental: Shandong Digital Culture Group (山东数字文化集团) introduced an interactive intelligent digital human named "Lele" at the 2025 Shandong New Energy Vehicle Rural Campaign, providing on-site engagement for attendees. The Shandong Provincial Department of Ecology and Environment (山东省生态环境厅) partnered with Qilu Evening News (齐鲁晚报) to launch what has been described as China's first ecological environment-themed digital human broadcast, dedicated to environmental education. In Shanghai, Xuhui District (徐汇区) unveiled upgraded 2.0 versions of its environmental protection digital humans "Xu Xiaomei" and "Xu Xiaoling" at a municipal press conference, with the new iteration designed to strengthen public messaging on sustainability and civic engagement.

Personalized and Consumer Applications: Macaron AI (马卡龙AI) generates custom virtual images for users based on their preferences and personality settings, with the system adapting dynamically during interactions by detecting user needs and adjusting responses, positioning the virtual character simultaneously as a personal assistant and a synthetic identity that enhances lifestyle and productivity.

August 16 News

Public Services: In Shanghai's Xuhui District, the Environmental Protection Bureau launched version 2.0 of its virtual digital humans "Xu Xiaomei" and "Xu Xiaoling," enabling real-time interaction in which citizens can pose environmental questions and receive precise answers drawn from a curated knowledge base, embedding AI digital humans directly into local government service delivery. Elsewhere, Bola developed a custom AI digital human for the Chongqing Women's Federation that was showcased at the federation's conference, positioning digital humans as focal points for institutional public engagement at the municipal level. In Jinan, the establishment of an AI industry alliance alongside a dedicated digital human platform provided foundational capabilities for digital transformation among local businesses, while in Hong Kong the Startup Council partnered with industry partners to host a private AI digital human event focused on accelerating enterprise digitisation. Across China more broadly, a digital human deployed in a busy metro station illustrated growing integration of virtual beings into everyday public infrastructure, where they serve simultaneously as service agents and cultural touchpoints.

Healthcare: A cloud medical and education division developed a weight management large model powered by a digital twin that integrates the diagnostic and management experience of more than twenty medical experts, enabling personalised health monitoring at scale. In Nanning, Zhongguang Digital Technology integrated AI digital humans with AI-enabled mice, keyboards, and related assistive hardware, demonstrating cross-domain applications spanning smart healthcare and assistive technologies. In Changsha, AI digital human news anchors employing high-precision speech synthesis and facial motion capture were deployed as an efficient channel for disseminating health-related information to public audiences. Tianjin's long-term care insurance management guidelines formally referenced potential uses of digital humans in elder care and long-term care services, signalling regulatory recognition of virtual beings as viable instruments in social welfare delivery.

E-commerce and Retail Marketing: Alibaba (阿里巴巴), through its cloud division, supported Jisi Technology in upgrading e-commerce live-streaming capabilities with AI digital humans, targeting the competitive retail live-commerce market for standardised fast-moving consumer goods and daily necessities. Alibaba also separately launched the AI try-on application Lookie, which generates personal digital doubles capable of instantly modelling a wide range of fashion styles—from Mellard to new Chinese aesthetics—creating a social try-on ecosystem with direct integration pathways into e-commerce platforms. In Guangdong, digital human technologies were applied in cross-border growth cases demonstrating their value in international trade promotion and brand building for export-oriented enterprises. In Guangxi, AI digital humans were featured alongside hardware product launches, creating an integrated marketing approach that combined virtual presenters with physical product announcements.

Broadcasting and Media: In Macao, digital human news anchors have become a regular feature in daily and weekly broadcasts, with behaviours that are pre-programmed and adjustable to improve interactivity and editorial control; virtual idols, virtual anchors, and digital employees collectively play a significant role in Macao's broadcasting and media commercialisation. In Hunan, virtual anchors combine local cultural themes with AI technologies to enrich the presentation of news and entertainment programming, while Changsha's AI digital human news anchors specifically employ high-precision speech synthesis and facial motion capture to achieve broadcast-quality delivery. In Beijing, light field imaging and three-dimensional cloud rendering platforms have substantially reduced the production cycle for digital humans, enabling faster deployment across film, live performance, and creative industry contexts. An academic study, "Exploring the Role of AI Anchor Image–News Content Congruency in News-Viewing Experience Among Gen Zers: A Mixed-Method Study in the Chinese Context," examined synthetic news presenters and found that while AI anchors are designed to boost engagement among Generation Z audiences, their effectiveness remains contested, reflecting format and expectation constraints on acceptance of virtual on-air personalities.

Gaming: Tencent (腾讯) has integrated AI-powered non-player characters and procedural generation into long-tail titles to sustain player engagement, aligning character behaviour systems with economy- and retention-focused game design. The mobile title DNF Mobile, published in China, reintroduced classic characters including avatars linked to the Sword Art Online franchise, in which each character carries two distinct appearances—one representing an in-game virtual avatar and one a real-world school uniform—illustrating the blending of virtual identity and narrative continuity as a player engagement mechanism.

Enterprise and Industrial Applications: Bola advanced Chongqing's Jiangwen platform by integrating it with a DeepSeek combined with a local knowledge base system alongside AI digital human services, supporting the city's regional information infrastructure. Shenzhen Yihu Cultural Technology secured a patent for a glasses-free three-dimensional visualisation-based digital human interaction method and system, advancing commercial applications in content production. He Shaohua of China National Nuclear Corporation described XR production involving digital humans as requiring precise adjustments across asset creation and on-site filming to ensure visual realism and a strong sense of spatial depth. An AI Digital Human Experience and Entrepreneurship Salon promoted the integration of AI digital humans with real-scene studios and digital tools as a comprehensive approach to accelerating brand digital transformation and personal image building, while Shanghai's 2025 global ranking of AI digital human interaction companies provided enterprise guidance for technology selection and vendor collaboration.

Cultural Preservation and Research: Shanghai Jiao Tong University (上海交通大学) released the Gen3DHF AI-generated three-dimensional facial quality assessment dataset, leveraging generative adversarial networks and diffusion models as tools for high-precision digital human creation and cultural heritage digitisation. In Shandong, the Qilu Cultural Large Model was combined with a digital human platform to expand applications in local cultural preservation. At the China International Big Data Industry Expo in Guizhou, digital humans were showcased alongside large language models, highlighting their integration with local big data industries for cultural and technological exhibitions. In Beijing, public technical service platforms supported digital human production teams, fostering smart innovation in cultural and creative industries.

Ethical and Regulatory Contexts: The China Securities Regulatory Commission issued a warning highlighting that AI-generated virtual humans can display subtle but identifiable flaws—including abnormal blinking frequency, disproportionate neck-to-body ratios, and inconsistent lighting—and cautioned audiences to critically assess the authenticity of virtual human presentations encountered in financial and public contexts. In the metaverse context, a conceptual framework describing a "virtual biological chain" composed of digital organisms, virtual environments, and user interactions was noted as evolving within closed virtual worlds, with increasingly complex algorithms enabling these entities to behave beyond the scope of simple programmed responses, raising implicit questions about the governance of autonomous synthetic characters.

August 15 News

Enterprise: China's virtual human sector is undergoing a structural shift from appearance-based models toward functional "digital employees" assessed on business expertise, results delivery, and adaptability, with their roles now closely aligned with human job requirements. Enterprise-level platforms have emerged to support this transformation, offering customized virtual human image creation, promotional holographic displays, and integration into merchant, user, supply chain, and management systems. Haier Group (海尔集团) has operationalized this model at its newly built national live-streaming center in Wuhan, where an AI digital human live-streaming studio operates 24 hours unattended using only a computer, providing a cost-efficient framework for continuous commercial broadcasting. Soul App (Soul) has integrated AI virtual human hosts into group chats to energize conversations, guide topics, and reduce social awkwardness, targeting young users as part of expanded engagement-focused platform features. Beijing has additionally adopted digital human technology for integration with conferencing software, enabling enhanced enterprise communication and overseas collaboration support.

Cultural Events and Public Engagement: Fujian's 2025 China AI Gala, organized by Fujian Daily (福建日报) under the Publicity Department of the CPC Fujian Provincial Committee, introduced the AI Turing Digital Human alongside the Zhiyuan Yuan Zheng A2 robot, redefining a traditional gala format through AI-driven virtual presenters. At the China International Fair for Trade in Services, the Beijing Scheme Exhibition deployed a digital human "Beijing Scheme Promotion Officer" capable of AI voice command understanding and gesture recognition to interact with visitors and explain the exhibition's structure and highlights, demonstrating virtual beings in high-profile public-sector engagement roles. In Zhenjiang, the Langya Innovation Port platform was launched at the 2025 High School, Research Institute, and Industry Cooperation Conference and the Third Jinshan Talent Week opening event using a digital human format, targeting artificial intelligence, the digital economy, and education training, and integrating AI computing support, technology display and interaction, and project incubation to promote digital economy development across the Nanjing metropolitan area. In the cultural heritage sector, the virtual digital human "Qunfangzui" guided participants via holographic projection through the history and modernization of Qimen black tea, linking non-material heritage traditions with immersive interactive storytelling.

Education: Changzhou Institute of Information Technology (常州信息职业技术学院), through its School of Digital Economy, developed AI digital humans and course-intelligent agents as part of vocational education initiatives, with deployment connected to Xinjiang-based programs under the institution's industry–education integration strategy. These digital humans function as interactive educational tools designed to modernize curriculum delivery and strengthen frontier technology capabilities, situating virtual beings not merely in commercial or entertainment contexts but as pedagogical instruments aligned with emerging industry needs.

Gaming and Technology Infrastructure: Tencent (腾讯) reported Q2 2025 revenue growth that it linked to ongoing AI investment, with commentary indicating enhanced integration of AI-driven avatars and non-player characters within its gaming ecosystems, reflecting the company's strategic positioning of virtual being technology as a driver of commercial performance in interactive entertainment.

August 14 News

Entertainment: Taikoo Properties launched TK Mates in Sichuan, featuring the AI digital human Amber, who publishes personalized and fashion-oriented social media content to deepen consumer-brand engagement. In Wuhan, a digital human-themed music festival brought together virtual star APOKI and girl group V.luv for a multimedia water-screen concert, highlighting the use of virtual performers in tourism-driven live events. Douyin (抖音), the short-video platform operated by ByteDance, produced Peacekeeper Elite: Night of Stimulation in Sanya, integrating virtual character skins, stage performances, and collaborations with celebrities and key opinion leaders to merge in-game virtual personas with real-world entertainment. In Hangzhou, Shiyou Technology produced AI digital human versions of notable figures and brand characters including the Hangzhou Asian Games torchbearer, the Brain Platinum elderly couple, Haier Brothers, Yili Yoghurt's "Xiaoyou," and Xiaomi's "Xiao Ai," demonstrating cross-industry deployment of digital humans across advertising and live events. Separately, mixed-reality productions in China have integrated a digital human referred to as "Li Li" within complex XR workflows spanning asset creation and on-site filming, enabling lifelike visual presentations in broadcast and entertainment contexts.

Marketing & Commerce: The livestreaming commerce sector has seen significant virtual human activity, with the AI avatar of entrepreneur Luo Yonghao hosting a livestream in Henan that generated 50 million yuan in sales, signaling a major commercial inflection point for AI-driven presenters in e-commerce. In response to the rapid expansion of digital human livestreaming, Taobao Live—operated by Alibaba (阿里巴巴)—introduced "Digital Human Usage Specification Implementation Rules" to enforce quality control and regulate improper use of AI avatars in live sales environments. Derived Everything Digital Humans released customizable, copyright-free digital human templates for commercial use in Shanghai, offering professional-grade adjustments in speech pacing, facial expressions, clothing, and backgrounds to serve new media marketing campaigns with unlimited promotional applications. Kuke Technology has actively promoted its commercial digital human products as revenue-generating business opportunities, while Five Pearls Company in Shenyang has specialized in virtual digital human solutions aimed at improving customer acquisition efficiency and reducing operational costs for business clients. The 2025 Gold Touch Marketing Awards recognized the role of virtual digital humans in an era of hyper-automation, where AI systems integrate programmatic creative generation, intelligent ad placement, and real-time data feedback, with virtual human interfaces serving as persistent, adaptive brand representatives across platforms.

Enterprise & Government Services: Tencent (腾讯) and Alibaba have both launched virtual digital humans for intelligent government and enterprise services, deploying these AI-driven systems across administrative platforms to provide interactive citizen support and streamline service delivery at scale. Baidu (百度) Smart Cloud is advancing AI digital humans for domain-specific business applications including automotive sales, commercial promotions, and education consultancy, with an emphasis on measurable performance outcomes. Nanjing-based Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), identified as a leader in China's AIGC digital human industry, secured hundreds of millions of yuan in Series D funding to accelerate the deployment of its "silicon-based workforce" solutions. Shenzhen-based Zhongguang Shuke has incorporated AI digital humans into its product portfolio alongside AI-enabled hardware to strengthen regional digital industry capabilities. Shandong Digital Human Technology has pursued legal action related to intellectual property use, reflecting the growing commercial and legal stakes in the sector. In Guangzhou, the AI policy service assistant "Sui Xiaoxin" was deployed to help businesses rapidly understand relevant policies, representing a targeted government-facing application of virtual assistant characters.

Public Sector & Citizen Services: The Beijing China International Fair for Trade in Services showcased interactive digital human installations across city governance, healthcare, and education scenarios as part of broader smart city solution promotion. In Fuzhou, the Justice Bureau launched the virtual legal educator "Moli Fairy" on Douyin to deliver public legal education to citizens, while the city's museum incorporated an AI recreation of historical figure Zuo Zongtang for immersive historical engagement. In Ningxia, the AI assistant character "Lianlian" was deployed as a "fingertip classroom" to distribute family education content, expanding digital outreach across rural and urban communities. These deployments collectively reflect a pattern of Chinese public institutions adopting named, persona-based digital human characters as accessible interfaces for civic communication and public education.

Cultural & Heritage: In Guizhou, the tourism-focused AI character "Huang Xiaoxi," developed using a provincial tourism large model, was launched to promote local travel experiences through AI-driven interaction with prospective visitors. Shanghai's museum offered an immersive 18-minute visual experience in which the digital human "Dong Qichang" guided visitors through five historical eras, blending historical storytelling with embodied virtual human presentation. In Hangzhou, students have produced creative works merging classical poetry with AI avatars, demonstrating cultural and educational uses of digital human technology at an individual and community level. The APOKI and V.luv performance in Wuhan further linked virtual performer culture to regional tourism programming, showing how digital human entertainment events are being deployed as tools for destination promotion.

Regulatory Contexts: The regulatory environment for digital humans in China is evolving in step with market growth. Taobao Live's introduction of formal specification rules for digital human use in livestreaming represents a direct institutional response to the commercial mainstreaming of AI avatars in e-commerce. Broader industry commentary, including discussions framed around "digital immortality" and the long-term evolution of digital twins into deeply personalized AI entities, has surfaced alongside emerging trends in the sector, suggesting that governance considerations are increasingly being discussed in parallel with technological development. Shandong Digital Human Technology's pursuit of legal action over intellectual property use adds a litigation dimension to the regulatory landscape, indicating that IP disputes are emerging as a practical consequence of the rapid proliferation of digital human products and templates across the Chinese market.

August 13 News

Livestreaming and E-Commerce: China's virtual human livestreaming market has undergone rapid commercial expansion, with Luo Yonghao's AI-generated avatar achieving RMB 50 million in sales through a single livestream e-commerce session, a result widely cited as a potential industry inflection point. Taobao Live (淘宝直播) has responded to this trajectory by codifying formal usage guidelines for virtual human hosts, establishing operational and compliance frameworks that govern how synthetic presenters are deployed within mainstream online retail. Kunlun Wanwei (昆仑万维) launched SkyReels-A3, a digital human video generation model engineered for more efficient and personalized interactive content production, with direct applications in AI-powered livestreaming at scale. A further documented case involves an AI digital human–based parenting content channel in which virtual characters designed to resemble real people sustained audience engagement without featuring any actual human presenters.

Healthcare: AKA Virtual, in collaboration with BytePlus, the enterprise technology platform operated by ByteDance (字节跳动), has developed multilingual digital humans capable of real-time interaction across languages, with deployment contexts including patient support, medical information dissemination, and cross-border healthcare services. At the DIC 2025 International Virtual Reality Technology and Digital Display Forum, Yichu Shijie presented an AI+XR medical platform in which mixed-reality virtual digital humans serve as clinical interface components, while Yuanyuan Technology showcased an Intelligent Medical Six-Piece Suite that similarly incorporates virtual digital human systems as part of an integrated advanced healthcare solution.

Public Services and Tourism: In Wuxi, digital human AI companions have been deployed for tourism guidance and intelligent explanation services, providing interactive visitor experiences across cultural and tourist destinations in the city. These same digital human technologies have been extended into the Wuxi Public Security Metaverse Service Hall, where virtual agents handle public administration engagement and resident-facing service functions around the clock.

Entertainment and Virtual Idols: Chinese celebrity Yang Chaoyue adopted AI face-swapping technology to construct a dreamlike virtual idol persona, contributing to wider industry momentum around ultra-realistic digital virtual characters in Chinese entertainment. The virtual streamer known as Red Peach CV achieved substantial public popularity by delivering high-quality live streaming content entirely through AI-generated avatars, without a physical on-camera presence. The operational model supporting virtual idols at this level involves maintaining character personas, coordinating performances, managing brand partnerships, and handling fan interactions, all underpinned by technical teams responsible for ensuring consistent and high-fidelity visual representation.

Performing Arts: Hong Kong Ballet collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor and Hong Kong Baptist University to merge classical ballet performance with AI systems and immersive cinema, producing a hybrid live environment in which AI functions as a supportive creative layer rather than a substitute for human artistic contribution. This project situates Hong Kong within a broader regional effort to integrate AI-driven virtual production techniques into established performing arts institutions.

Production Infrastructure: Beijing's municipal science and technology authorities, in coordination with the Zhongguancun Administrative Committee, have constructed shared technology platforms for light-field imaging and 3D cloud rendering that have reduced digital human production costs from the million-yuan level to tens of thousands of yuan, compressing content creation timelines substantially. This public infrastructure supports cultural and tourism integration projects by enabling local production teams to generate high-quality, human-like avatars for exhibitions, performances, and promotional campaigns. Shenyang Five Pearls is among the companies leveraging this platform, combining it with established overseas distribution networks to expand the international reach of domestically produced virtual humans. Fengyuzhu has applied virtual digital human hosts alongside VR/AR, holography, naked-eye 3D, and human-computer interaction technologies to create immersive multimedia corporate experiences for enterprise clients.

Enterprise and Training: In Tianjin, digital human classrooms have been developed in which AI-driven avatars deliver technical and industrial training content, with data-driven instructional modules covering battery manufacturing processes serving as a concrete documented deployment. Parallel infrastructure in the form of dedicated digital talent training bases is being constructed to embed digital human technologies into professional education pipelines, enabling standardized yet customizable learning delivery across industrial sectors at scale.

August 12 News

Healthcare: Inno.EcoS developed large-model AI agents including "BrainBrain Doctor," a digital human incorporating multimodal psychological assessment and intervention systems with digital biomarkers, deployed in collaboration with schools and top-tier hospitals for applications in education and healthcare. In Shanghai's Jiading District, the digital human "Jia Xiaokang" was launched as part of the upgraded "Healthy Jiading" platform, providing residents with interactive health consultations and public health information delivery. In Guangzhou, the Ling Mou Zhi Yi volunteer team from the School of Computer Science and Network Engineering introduced a 3D sign language digital human anchor designed to support accessibility in public communication for the hearing-impaired community. A Shanghai-based study conducted in an augmented reality environment validated the role of photorealistic avatars in bridging generational gaps and facilitating cross-generational emotional recognition and communication.

Government and Public Services: The Wuxi Public Security Bureau introduced the "Xijing Metaverse" mini-program, integrating metaverse-based government service halls with police digital humans to streamline citizen-facing administrative interactions. The Fuzhou Municipal Market Supervision Bureau applied virtual digital humans to construct diverse public legal education scenarios, offering citizens engaging, technology-enabled awareness content. In Guangzhou, exhibition hall design companies have adopted virtual digital humans alongside AI large models, digital twins, and smart guides to transform exhibitions from passive viewing into interactive engagement experiences.

Cultural Heritage and Memorialization: Pudong Middle School showcased a digital twin of martyr Zhang Mingsheng, enabling the figure to deliver motivational messages to students during a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the victory in the War of Resistance against Japan, positioning virtual beings as instruments for preserving historical memory and emotional connection. At the 2025 Osaka Expo's China Pavilion, Hunan enterprises and Japanese experts discussed integrating AI-driven virtual digital humans into cultural heritage preservation, demonstrating how intelligent avatars and big data can digitally archive and present heritage content. In Zhejiang, the "ZheBA" cultural IP initiative introduced the AI digital human "Aijia" as a smart partner for sports events, delivering interactive audience services across all 11 prefecture-level cities in the province. A Wuhan-based team developed AI digital humans showcased to visiting Taiwanese university students, highlighting applications in the city's short video and esports industries.

Marketing and E-commerce: SkyReels, based in Guangdong, released the SkyReels-A3 model, enabling zero-frame startup digital human livestreaming for use cases including virtual idols, online teachers, interviewers, and gaming assistants, driven by audio-based generation for versatile and cost-effective content delivery. The AI-generated avatar of entrepreneur Luo Yonghao conducted e-commerce livestream sessions that generated sales of 50 million yuan, illustrating the commercial potential of digital human influencers. Qingfou launched AI-powered virtual digital human livestreaming combining artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and speech synthesis to produce high-fidelity avatars for live broadcasting. Gaode Map's 2025 AI transformation introduced a feature allowing users to upload photos to generate personalized digital humans rendered in hand-drawn, comic, or 3D textured avatar styles, reflecting the role of personalization in consumer engagement.

Media and Broadcasting: CCTV (中央广播电视总台) introduced its first ultra-realistic digital human anchor "AI Wang Guan" as part of its virtual host lineup, extending its on-air presentation beyond human anchors. Shandong Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd., headquartered in Jinan and publicly listed since 2020, operates across digital human applications spanning marketing and media, representing an established commercial presence in the sector.

Enterprise and Exhibition: Shenzhen-based Liuxing Technology introduced an interactive digital twin point cloud model generation system using its Odin1 multimodal sensor fusion technology, producing instant volumetric avatars at exhibitions for real-time human representation. In Guizhou's Guiyang and Gui'an New Area, digital humans and large AI models are among the key emerging technologies integrated into the region's high-quality digital economy development strategy, forming part of broader smart city and industrial innovation initiatives.

Technology and Platforms: Baishan Social Work, formerly known as Baishan Care, developed a fully in-house AI digital human customization algorithm offering advanced 3D modeling and rendering to produce unique, user-specific digital humans for deployment by content creators and businesses. CCTV's "AI Wang Guan" and SkyReels-A3 both employ advanced speech synthesis and high-fidelity rendering pipelines, reflecting a convergence of natural speech generation and photorealistic visual production in Chinese digital human platforms.

Ethical Contexts: AI-generated foreign expert personas were identified in Chinese social media content creation, revealing the accessibility of synthetic character generation while also raising ethical concerns regarding the use of fabricated digital identities in online discourse. This development underscores the dual nature of advances in avatar and digital human technology, where the same tools enabling accessible content production also lower barriers to the creation of deceptive or misleading synthetic personas.

August 11 News

Healthcare: Jiading district in Shanghai launched "Jia Xiaokang," a digital human integrated into the Health Jiading public health service platform to provide upgraded and more accessible healthcare interactions for residents. At the Osaka Expo 2025 China Pavilion during Hunan Activity Week, participants discussed how increasingly lifelike virtual digital humans could enhance the delivery of medical services, linking cultural showcase activities with the practical potential of digital humans in clinical and patient-facing contexts. Xushi Technology, designated as a strategic training partner by the National Health Commission for professional courses, launched a long-term care nurse training program delivered entirely by AI digital human instructors, offered free of charge to partner organisations including Beijing Ren'ai Ruikang Hospital Management Company and the Hainan Provincial Association for Community Elderly Care and Health Services, with the programme aimed at improving talent development efficiency across the long-term care sector.

Governance and Public Services: The public security bureau of Wuxi city introduced what is described as China's first public security metaverse service hall featuring three metaverse police digital humans, integrating digital twin technology, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and large language models to enable the handling of 109 high-frequency police and government services with greater efficiency. The system additionally provides multilingual intelligent interaction to support overseas talent, increasing the city's appeal to international professionals. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government's Digital Policy Office, in collaboration with Hong Kong Cyberport, convened an "AI + Governance" technical forum to examine the deployment of digital humans in public administration as part of an agenda for advancing smart governance. At the Second Computing Power Capital Developer Conference held in Ningxia, an intelligent digital human reception and guidance system was deployed to assist attendees with event navigation through voice interaction, demonstrating how digital humans are being applied to improve the intelligence and efficiency of large-scale professional events.

Entertainment and Culture: The Versatile BoCai AI Virtual Production Base in Deqing County, Zhejiang Province, uses AI-assisted tools to enable scene generation and collaborative three-dimensional content creation for digital environments, positioning virtual production infrastructure within China's film and entertainment industry. Designer Hu Sheguang collaborated with media and entertainment partners to integrate virtual digital humans into fashion shows, merging theatrical performance, runway presentation, film production, drama, and broadcasting technology into a single cross-disciplinary event. In Wuhan, summer nighttime economy programming incorporated digital human elements including a digital human electronic music festival, beer barbecue events, and themed fireworks shows, using virtual figures to increase interactivity and draw visitors to cultural and commercial districts. The National Supercomputing Center in Changsha introduced the cartoon digital human "Ling Yi" and featured the digital human Zhu Xi in cross-time interactive dialogues with citizens and tourists as a mechanism for promoting regional historical culture and tourism. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang, AI entrepreneur Xiao V and her team launched "Soultie," an AI digital human project designed to integrate with the local rural cultural environment and explore new social interaction applications combining community engagement with digital personas. Workshops held in China alongside counterparts in Poland and India examined how virtual immortality concepts and AI-based memorial avatars interact with local cultural traditions, connecting digital human technologies to heritage preservation and the digital afterlife.

Commerce and Marketing: Baidu has developed a "live broadcast + digital human + AI" strategy designed to reshape its e-commerce growth narrative by combining live streaming infrastructure, AI-generated digital human presenters, and broader AI capabilities to create more dynamic and engaging shopping experiences. Virtual AI-driven streamers are increasingly deployed in Chinese live commerce to deliver continuous 24-hour broadcasts without human operators, with research indicating that their responsiveness and constant availability influence consumers' impulsive purchase intentions through heightened social presence and emotional connection. Kexiyun Group is developing proprietary digital human products for diverse commercial applications and has positioned its AIGC traffic system as an intelligent content hub supporting the production and distribution of digital human content, with the system described as having demonstrated distinctive capabilities in digital human technology rankings.

Technology and Industry: Silicon-based Intelligence (硅基智能), headquartered in Nanjing and regarded as one of China's pioneers in digital human technology, has evolved from offering low-barrier digital human content creation tools to launching personal digital twin services and AI companionship applications, reflecting a strategic shift from selling tools to selling end results in order to make advanced digital human technologies accessible to households. The company recently completed a Series D funding round worth hundreds of millions of RMB, backed by the Jiaxing High-tech Zone Industrial Fund, with its commercial focus now oriented toward generative AI digital human products and industry-specific deployments.

Ethical Contexts: In Shanghai, a man was defrauded of 200,000 yuan by a group that used photographs of an influencer to construct a convincing virtual girlfriend persona, synthesising a complete set of lifestyle images that were then reused systematically to deceive multiple victims. The case highlights how virtual human synthesis technologies can be misappropriated for social engineering fraud, raising concerns about the verification and governance of AI-generated personas in personal and social contexts.

August 10 News

Healthcare: Tianjin has deployed digital humans within mobile applications to provide rapid, interactive responses to health-related inquiries, including explanations of acupuncture points. In Wuhan, the AI digital human "Kangkang Jie" engages visitors at food safety exhibitions by answering nutrition-related questions in real time, combining public health communication with interactive AI-driven engagement.

Public Services and Governance: Multiple government bodies across China have integrated digital humans into public-facing administrative services at municipal and provincial levels. In Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, the public security bureau launched a metaverse-based digital human platform as part of the "Xijing Metaverse" initiative—described as the first of its kind in China's public security sector—combining digital twin, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing technologies; connected to the "Taihu e-Police" WeChat mini-program, the system enables citizens to process identity documents, residence permits, passports, and legal certificates through interaction with a "digital police officer." In Hefei, the municipal government services center operates an integrated digital human inquiry-and-processing machine supporting over 1,000 administrative tasks. In Hong Kong, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer presented a "Digital Human Customer Service × Intelligent Meetings" showcase at a governance-focused AI forum, illustrating the adoption of digital human interfaces at the regional government level. In Ningxia, an intelligent digital human greeter and guide system offers voice-interactive navigation for event attendees, and Guangzhou introduced AI digital human volunteers to provide information and logistical services for the 15th National Games. In Xinjiang, experts participated in discussions on the role of digital humans in smart science venue construction, reflecting the geographic breadth of China's public-sector deployments.

Cultural Heritage and Tourism: Digital humans are being deployed extensively across Chinese provinces for cultural preservation, historical education, and heritage tourism. In Fujian, the "AI Digital Human Zuo Zongtang" interacts with visitors at the China Shipbuilding Culture Museum, delivering AI-driven responses to questions on historical topics. In Guangxi, the "Liu Sanjie" digital human performs in both Zhuang and ASEAN languages to greet audiences at sports and cultural events, serving as a cross-cultural digital ambassador. In Hunan, a digital human rendering of the neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi engages visitors in Changsha, blending historical education with tourism programming. In Hainan, the AI microfilm 百年回访：萨维纳海岛黎缘 features a digital human protagonist whose narrative centers on her discovery of her own nature as a digital being, functioning as a public campaign for local cultural heritage. In Qinghai, a digital human expert named Ran Honglin guides visitors through a simulated Sanxingdui archaeological excavation. In Shanghai, a patented virtual cultural tourism platform integrates digital twin technology with virtual digital humans for immersive heritage experiences. CCTV (中央电视台) has employed a virtual depiction of the Tang dynasty literary figure Han Yu for audience interaction in educational and cultural programming. Baidu Smart Cloud (百度智能云) launched AI "Digital Companions" in Tibet designed for deployment across vertical cultural and tourism services, while Qingfou AI's digital human platform provides continuous interactive content delivery in the same region.

Entertainment and Media: In Zhejiang, a digital human news commentator named Xiaoxin delivers editorial content in an online broadcasting context. In Jilin, media company Jishi Media implemented AI systems capable of generating a digital human and a complete short video from a single photograph, significantly accelerating short-form content production. The Shandong-based digital human "Xiaoshan Xiaoshui" serves as the nation's first environmental protection broadcaster in the ecological media sector, while a separate Shandong digital human named "Dunbao" delivers civil defense education through interactive storytelling that adapts its narrative based on repeated audience engagement. Silicon-based Intelligence (硅基智能), the successor entity to Sogou's AI operations, has contributed virtual host solutions to mainstream television stations, leveraging its technology to reduce operational broadcast costs for commercial clients by approximately 80%.

Enterprise and Commerce: Qingfou AI offers "digital doubles" engineered for continuous livestream e-commerce, large-scale short video production, and virtual brand ambassador roles, with lightweight consumer tools enabling individuals to create personalized digital doubles within hours using short video capture. Silicon-based Intelligence has partnered with over 30 banks and insurance companies to deploy intelligent customer service digital humans at scale. SenseTime (商汤科技), speaking through vice president Zhao Feng in Shanghai's Minhang District, highlighted the role of large language models in advancing digital human intelligence and the emergence of combined "human and digital employee" models for human resources services. Xiao-i Robot (小i机器人) deployed a cloud-based virtual persona as a virtual host at the 2018 Big Data Expo, delivering event introductions and attendee reminders in an early enterprise use case. In Beijing, a technology-driven cultural innovation initiative brought digital human production costs down from millions to tens of thousands of yuan through light-field imaging and 3D cloud rendering platforms. Alibaba Pictures (阿里巴巴影业) combined extended reality content with digital human technology for high-fidelity immersive productions requiring precise calibration across material creation and on-site filming stages. In Guangzhou, Quyan Network Technology patented a conversational system for virtual digital humans that modulates proactive engagement based on detection of users' negative emotional states, addressing interaction design at a technical level. In Harbin, the "Happiness Laboratory" integrates real-time interactive digital humans with large language models and AI agents to deliver combined offline and online services to consumers. In Shanxi, MasterAgent was highlighted for its evolution from a digital human supplier into an advanced AI agent system. Hebei-based companies developing AI digital humans have incorporated their offerings into broader initiatives spanning metaverse applications, blockchain integration, and spatial computing, while digital human solution providers in Henan and Hunan participated in cross-border trade exhibitions alongside other AI and big data service companies, and counterparts in Guizhou and Heilongjiang presented digital human products at regional big data and AI industry expos.

Legal and Ethical Contexts: A court in Zhejiang ruled in favor of the plaintiff in a case involving the unauthorized commercial use of a virtual digital human video, establishing a legal precedent in the adjudication of AI-generated content rights and the ownership boundaries surrounding virtual digital human productions in China. Separately, a Beijing-based initiative reducing digital human production costs to tens of thousands of yuan has broadened access to the technology, raising attendant questions about governance of proliferating AI-generated likenesses; Guangzhou-based Quyan Network Technology's patent for emotionally responsive virtual digital human conversation systems reflects growing industry attention to behavioral design standards as digital humans are deployed in increasingly intimate commercial and service contexts.

August 09 News

Entertainment and Cultural Performance: The 2025 opening ceremony of a major live sports event in China featured an AR digital production in which a 3D animated version of the popular Chinese mythological character Nezha was projected onto giant screens, enabling real-time interaction with the audience as part of the live performance. Soul (Soul) has developed AI virtual humans as a central component of its "human–AI symbiotic social" vision, evolving from AI-assisted content creation to AI virtual influencers, intelligent Q&A communities, and emotional recommendation systems, positioning synthetic characters as integral to its social entertainment platform.

Navigation and Consumer Applications: Gaode Map (高德地图) introduced a 2025 platform update enabling users to generate custom digital human avatars in hand-drawn, comic, and 3D styles from uploaded photos. These avatars are embedded directly into the navigation experience, engaging users through intelligent Q&A during active routing and adding a layer of personalization and entertainment to everyday map usage.

Government and Public Administration: The Hong Kong Government hosted the "AI + Government Affairs" technology forum under the theme "The New Era of Smart Governance: Digital Human Customer Service × Intelligent Meetings Leading an Efficient Future," attracting over 1,300 professionals from more than 100 public and private organizations. The forum showcased deployed digital human customer service agents and AI-enabled meeting systems as operational tools for improving service delivery and administrative efficiency across public sector contexts.

Enterprise Deployment: DeepBrain AI's predecessor entity, 深元人工智能, has supplied more than 80% of digital human solutions in its sector since 2018 and has evolved its technology into the MasterAgent system, which integrates the X-Studio engine with VirtualHuman creation capabilities to serve enterprise needs across industries. In the domain of immersive production, 艺展鸿图 develops online–offline immersive projects that incorporate digital humans through complex XR asset creation and on-site filming workflows, requiring precise visual calibration to maintain realistic integration of virtual characters within physical environments.

Cultural Heritage and Smart Venues: Domain experts in China have identified digital human narrators as a defining feature of "smart venue" construction, describing them as "digital employees" that merge virtual and physical spaces to deliver immersive explanatory content and improve visitor engagement in cultural heritage and tourism settings. This model positions virtual beings not merely as display elements but as active, responsive guides capable of sustaining visitor interaction throughout physical site experiences.

Emotional Interaction and Patent Innovation: Guangzhou Quyan (广州趣燃) has filed a patent for a conversation method driven by users' negative emotional states, enabling a virtual digital human to initiate dialogue in a manner that is proactive while remaining non-intrusive. The patented method encompasses the creation of a conversational link between the virtual human and the user, real-time detection of emotional states during interaction, and dynamic adjustment of engagement strategies in response to detected affect, representing a technically specified approach to emotionally adaptive virtual beings.

August 08 News

Entertainment: The Vup phenomenon within the virtual YouTuber scene, a concept with strong Chinese cultural framing, illustrates the layered relationship between a virtual persona and the human performer known as the 中之人 ("person inside the suit"). Audiences engage with the virtual character as a distinct identity, yet the human performer remains exposed to reputational risks if their offline actions or real identity become publicly known, a dynamic referred to as "character collapse." The Chinese artist Lu Yang created a posthuman 3D avatar named Doku in 2018, positioning it as both an autonomous creative entity and an interpretive artwork. Operating within a conceptual framework that draws on philosophical ideas such as the Buddhist wheel of life, Doku integrates cultural and AI-generated narrative experiences, with Lu Yang framing the avatar as an independent creator rather than a representational tool. The "Forbidden Real-Life Elf" (禁漫真人精灵) concept represents an entertainment-focused virtual persona designed to bring fictional characters into real-world contexts through digital technology, gaining popularity among younger audiences as an interactive, visually embodied mode of character engagement.

Marketing: The virtual human AYAYI, launched in 2021, has become a prominent figure in luxury brand marketing in China, serving as an ambassador for companies including Louis Vuitton and Porsche. AYAYI's deployment marked a significant milestone in using virtual humans for high-end brand endorsements, and the character employs facial capture technology to produce micro-expressions that heighten emotional engagement with audiences, demonstrating how virtual beings can simulate nuanced human affect to reinforce brand-consumer relationships.

Memorial & Cultural Practices: Virtual idols and digital human services in China have expanded into highly personalized and culturally specific applications, driven in part by the commercial success of "Life Story Book" short dramas. By 2024, this sector had evolved to include funeral-oriented digital humans, enabling users to commission digital replicas for deployment as funeral hosts. This development followed a 2023 trend in which virtual humans operating in the funeral sector offered "digital immortality" features, including the revival of old photographs, virtual memorial services, and personalized digital employees, with the broader industry moving toward user-generated and customizable virtual beings integrated with personal and cultural rituals.

Enterprise: Baidu's (百度) Xiling Digital Human platform provides programmatic access for generating AI assistant-driven digital human videos, incorporating voice cloning capabilities that allow the deployment of human-like agents within third-party applications. The Kexiyun Group (科西云集团), through its subsidiary Chuangwuzhe Artificial Intelligence (创无者人工智能), has introduced an AI short video product capable of generating a digital human from a single photograph and producing content autonomously. This product integrates real-time interaction, voice communication, and autonomous navigation capabilities, powered by large-model digital human applications, enabling automated and intelligent commercial services.

Financial Services: Tianjin Bank (天津银行) has initiated a project to build an intelligent digital human platform designed to establish a unified virtual human image across the organization, with planned deployment across intelligent customer service, business processing, and video production functions, aiming to standardize and scale virtual human usage for operational efficiency and brand consistency. The Bank of Communications (交通银行) has similarly begun integrating digital doubles into financial services, combining audio-visual systems with AI technologies to deliver remote service interactions. These digital doubles function as virtual service representatives, enhancing customer accessibility while maintaining consistent service quality across channels.

August 07 News

Healthcare: Gushengtang (固生堂), a traditional Chinese medicine company, has accelerated its AI commercialization strategy by launching ten "national medicine digital twins" (国医分身), which are AI-generated expert avatars constructed through systematic collection of diagnostic approaches, clinical cases, and consultation habits of experienced practitioners, forming replicable models for AI-based medical consultation at scale. At the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) held in Shanghai, banks exhibited AI applications including digital twins designed for seamless customer service delivery, pointing toward a convergence between enterprise financial services and AI-driven virtual human interfaces in China.

Entertainment: Kuaishou (快手) deployed an AI-generated digital human named Kuaixiaohua (快小花), developed using its proprietary large language model, as a virtual host for the "启智未来学堂" science-themed summer camp. Designed with a child-friendly image, Kuaixiaohua assumed full hosting duties for the camp, introducing students to advanced technology through an accessible, AI-embodied persona. In gaming, discussions circulated in Chinese media referencing the concept of in-game AI characters evolving into "digital beings with will" (有意志的数字生物), a development framed as injecting authentic realism into metaverse environments by moving characters beyond pre-scripted behavior toward entities with personality and apparent autonomy.

Marketing: Mi Da Tou (米大投科技有限公司) filed a patent for a "Multimodal AI Digital Human Livestream Generation System," a technology designed to enhance the liveliness, interactivity, and safety of real-time digital human performances in e-commerce livestreaming contexts. More broadly, AI-powered virtual hosts referred to as "AI digital humans" or "虚拟数字人" have become a prominent feature of Chinese e-commerce ecosystems, where they operate around the clock using integrated visual, speech, and text generation capabilities to deliver personalized product recommendations and maintain continuous customer engagement without human intervention. The trend also extends to fashion, where AI-generated figures have begun appearing in promotional contexts, including in VOGUE magazine, raising ethical debates while streamlining commercial visual production.

Enterprise: Baidu Smart Cloud (百度智能云) introduced a suite of AI digital employees equipped with large language models, digital human technologies, and domain-specific knowledge bases, marketed as ready-to-deploy workers capable of immediate integration into vertical business scenarios including customer service and internal enterprise workflows. Quantum Bit (量子位) reported that the first cohort of digital employees had been formally onboarded across large Chinese companies, with performance benchmarks validated across seven distinct job roles; these avatars are generated using 4D scanning technology capable of capturing high-fidelity facial muscle data with over 1,200 control parameters, enabling lifelike visual fidelity and nuanced emotional expressiveness. At WAIC 2025, digital twin demonstrations by financial institutions further illustrated the expanding role of AI virtual agents in enterprise-facing service delivery in China.

Education and Cultural Contexts: The University of Posts and Telecommunications deployed AI digital humans as part of its "智教1+N" program in Anhui province, using interactive AI-embodied characters and Q&A formats to introduce complex scientific concepts to children in rural communities, demonstrating the application of synthetic characters as pedagogical tools in underserved educational settings. In state-run media, the 2025 Host Competition integrated virtual studios and AI-driven digital characters into a professional broadcasting training and cultural exhibition context, supported by veteran anchors and journalists, reflecting the institutionalization of virtual humans within China's public media infrastructure. Separately, synthetic characters have also been deployed in metaverse-driven cultural exhibitions combining digital artifacts with immersive XR experiences, though precise visual realism requires careful calibration to sustain technological credibility and audience engagement.

Tourism: Yunnan Tourism has been identified in Chinese financial and industry reporting as exploring the integration of AI-generated virtual digital humans as part of its regional branding and customer interaction strategy, positioning virtual beings as an innovation theme associated with the company's future commercial development.

Ethical Contexts: A Chinese media discussion addressed the philosophical and societal implications of in-game AI characters transitioning into "digital beings with will," entities no longer constrained by scripted behavior but exhibiting personality and a degree of apparent autonomy within metaverse environments. This development has prompted concern among commentators regarding the psychological, ethical, and societal impacts of deploying such lifelike simulations at scale, particularly as the boundary between scripted software and synthetic personhood becomes increasingly indistinct in consumer-facing digital ecosystems in China.

August 06 News

E-commerce and Livestream Commerce: Silicon-based Intelligence (硅基智能), a unicorn-stage Chinese AI company, has built a substantial commercial operation around virtual livestreamer technology, generating several hundred million yuan in revenue from its digital human business and supplying virtual livestreaming solutions to more than 5,000 e-commerce enterprises. These synthetic sales agents are deployed across livestream commerce platforms to conduct product presentations and transactions autonomously. In a high-profile application of the same model, technology entrepreneur Luoyonghao deployed a digital human likeness of himself to host a seven-hour livestream during China's 618 shopping festival, attracting over 1.3 million viewers and generating more than 55 million RMB in gross merchandise value, with one-third of the listed products exceeding his May sales figures.

Enterprise: Baidu's Smart Cloud division introduced seven new AI digital employees framed explicitly as accountable business agents responsible for enterprise KPIs rather than as conversational or decorative interfaces. This repositioning reflects a deliberate strategic shift, distinguishing these virtual beings from basic interactive avatars and embedding them as operational assets within corporate workflows. The emphasis on measurable performance metrics signals an industry-wide evolution in how Chinese enterprises conceptualize and deploy synthetic characters as functional contributors to business outcomes.

Education and Public Service: The University of Electronic Science and Technology of China has integrated virtual digital humans into classroom environments, deploying them as virtual teachers to facilitate lessons and as institutional IP representing university branding, thereby reshaping conventional pedagogical structures. Tianjin Mobile developed a virtual digital human named Xiao Hai specifically for anti-drug public education, equipping the character with natural language processing capabilities, a narcotics-prevention knowledge base, and dynamic interactivity to shift outreach from passive information delivery to two-way engagement. The city of Qingdao deployed a virtual digital human called Qingdao Xiaoman, developed by Shandong Jindong Digital Creative Co. (山东金东数字创意股份有限公司), combining heritage-themed environments with a futuristic digital presentation to promote municipal services and new productivity initiatives.

Entertainment and Cultural: Haofeisi Technology (好飞思科技) and Emergence Think Tank jointly presented a virtual being concept at AI WAVE SHOW 2025, merging celebrity intellectual property with digital twins powered by generative AI and multimodal technologies, and introducing a new standard for emotional connection and brand identity through synthetic characters. In the gaming sector, the title 虚环 integrates narrative scenarios that reflect the real-world experiences of VTuber performers, using gameplay as meta-commentary on the lives of the individuals behind virtual characters, while another game featuring the character Lao Ma employed VTuber voice actors extensively to deepen narrative immersion.

Marketing: Xiaomi (小米) launched MiDashengLM-7B, a voice AI model developed specifically for smart home and automotive markets, with avatar-based voice interaction positioned as a core strategic differentiator in Chinese consumer technology sectors. The model is designed to enable more natural, character-driven voice engagement within connected devices, reflecting the broader integration of virtual being frameworks into product-level AI experiences for Chinese consumers.

August 05 News

Broadcasting: Liaoning Radio and Television Station has deployed a virtual host within its XR (extended reality) smart media studio, developed in collaboration with AET Altai. The virtual presenter is integrated into immersive broadcast environments featuring mixed reality elements such as floating wheat imagery and live sporting event visuals, demonstrating how synthetic presenters are being adopted in mainstream Chinese broadcast infrastructure. Windoor Technology similarly positions virtual hosts at the centre of its immersive broadcasting solutions, combining holography and interactive 3D displays in studio setups supported by multiple patents and software certifications, signalling a growing commercial ecosystem around virtual human broadcasting technology in China.

Cultural: The Red Star Yang digital human has been deployed in a museum context to conduct historical dialogue experiences with visitors, using AI-driven character interaction to reinforce cultural memory and heritage engagement. In a cross-cultural educational setting, Oxford University students visiting Wuhan participated in an interactive session with digital humans, highlighting the use of realistic AI-driven characters for immersive, internationally oriented cultural exchange in a Chinese institutional context.

Education: Hubei Preschool Teachers College introduced a virtual teacher named Xiao Qiao on its official Douyin (抖音) account, where the AI-powered synthetic instructor delivers lessons and engages with students, illustrating the adoption of virtual human pedagogical tools within Chinese higher education. The deployment of Xiao Qiao on a short-video platform reflects a broader trend of Chinese educational institutions using consumer-facing social media channels to distribute AI-avatar-based instructional content.

Enterprise: At WAIC 2025, AI digital humans were showcased as enterprise solutions for customer service, with demonstrations emphasising personalised and efficient user interaction at scale. KSY Cloud has integrated digital human APIs across multiple sectors including tourism, foreign trade, e-commerce, and finance, enabling automated and personalised service workflows across diverse industry verticals. BaiFu Technology (百服科技) has introduced a fitness-sector platform in which digital twins of trainers simultaneously generate promotional content across multiple gym branches, increasing operational scalability and brand presence. Bangyan Technology's (绑言科技) Nuwaai platform frames intelligent agent-based digital humans as core instruments of corporate digital transformation, positioning synthetic characters as autonomous operational assets within enterprise environments.

Gaming: The Chinese game Code: Atom features a narrative environment called Totobia, a floating city set within an information network, where players encounter synthetic entities known as Aitemon. These digital beings are central to gameplay progression, requiring players to achieve resonance with them to advance, blending AI-generated avatar design with story mechanics to foster emotional investment in non-human characters. Separately, the Minecraft modification known as 自定义NPC MOD (Custom NPC Mod) was actively discussed on Bilibili (哔哩哔哩), with players exploring its capacity to create personalised, role-play-focused non-player characters, reflecting the active Chinese gaming community's engagement with user-generated synthetic character tools.

Research: Y. Huang and J. Zhang's study "Human or AI? The Mediating Role of Perceived Risk and the Moderating Effect of Product Type on Purchase Intention in Livestreaming Commerce" investigates consumer responses to AI virtual beings used as streamers in e-commerce livestreaming contexts, a format that has seen significant commercial development in China. The research finds that virtual streamers elevate perceived risk among consumers relative to human hosts, with risk levels varying according to product category, providing empirical guidance for brands deploying digital humans in Chinese-style livestream commerce environments. Y. Guan, S. Pan, and Y. Mou's study "The Ritual of Objectivity vs. the Ritual of Emotionality: Emotion Display and the Credibility of Virtual Newscasters" evaluates how emotional display by AI-driven synthetic news presenters affects audience perceptions of credibility, a question with direct relevance to the expanding use of virtual anchors in Chinese broadcast media. The findings indicate that calibrated emotional expression can enhance credibility while excessive emotionality undermines trust, offering actionable parameters for the design and deployment of virtual news hosts in professional media contexts.

August 04 News

Entertainment: Beam Theater (光束戏剧) staged the digital play Jingyanggang (《景阳冈》) in Beijing, featuring a live collaboration between virtual digital humans and human actors, demonstrating how synthetic characters can be integrated into traditional performing arts through real-time or AI-driven performance. Luo Tianyi (洛天依), the widely recognized Chinese virtual singer, continued to expand her presence in the entertainment sector with a debut appearance in Chengdu and a subsequent appearance at ChinaJoy in collaboration with Nubia; her performances combine voice synthesis technology and animated projection, and her fanbase draws heavily from youth demographics within the ACG cultural sphere.

Enterprise and Commerce: Tencent's (腾讯) Qimiao Digital Human (奇妙数字人) was deployed during a livestream marketing event, where the AI system accessed its knowledge base approximately 13,000 times and generated nearly 97,000 characters of product explanation in a single session, the equivalent of approximately 18 hours of human typing, underscoring the commercial efficiency of AI digital humans in live e-commerce contexts. A BBQ restaurant on Wuhan's Jiqing Street independently deployed a virtual human livestreamer named Kaoge (烤哥), operating on the Xingyao (兴尧) Digital Human platform, to handle late-night sessions after human staff departed; in a single session, Kaoge generated 83 takeaway orders, illustrating how AI avatars are used by small businesses to extend operational hours and sustain customer engagement continuously.

Cultural Heritage: SenseTime (商汤科技), in partnership with Sanmenxia Cultural Tourism Group (三门峡文化旅游集团), introduced China's first digital human representation of Laozi, the ancient philosopher, as part of a cultural heritage project intended to promote Chinese philosophy through immersive digital media. Separately, academic research published by Tao Zhaoli et al. in 2025 documented the deployment of digital virtual humans in both online platforms and offline consumption scenarios to revitalize intangible cultural heritage, identifying avatar-based technology as a concrete mechanism for supporting cultural continuity and commercialization in the Chinese context.

Healthcare and Research: A computational framework described in an environmental epidemiology study employs agent-based modeling to assign each resident a digital twin (数字分身), enabling simulation of individual daily activity patterns and detailed tracking of environmental exposure, a method developed to address data sparsity in large-scale cohort studies. The World Artificial Consciousness Association (世界人工意识协会) reported separately that digital twin technology has been integrated into active medical systems, supporting the fusion of artificial consciousness with proactive healthcare monitoring and prediction.

Experimental and Conceptual: TheoriqAI was characterized in social media commentary as a form of evolving synthetic life (数字生物), explicitly distinguished from traditional smart contracts and described as capable of adaptive learning, interaction, and environmental responsiveness. This framing positions the construct as a self-adjusting digital organism rather than a static programmatic agent, reflecting an experimental frontier in the conceptualization of synthetic characters within AI ecosystems.

August 03 News

Cultural: A virtual digital human modeled on Tang dynasty poet Wang Bo has been deployed as an AI tour guide at the Tengwang Pavilion in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, using holographic projection technology to deliver historical narratives and create immersive tourism experiences that integrate classical Chinese culture with contemporary AI. Fan-participatory intellectual property characters, exemplified by LABUBU, illustrate a parallel development in which avatars and virtual identities have become central to fan culture and emotional co-creation between users and public figures, reflecting broader shifts in how virtual beings mediate cultural participation in China.

Marketing: NetEase (网易) has incorporated digital avatars into a short-video matrix marketing system, positioning virtual digital humans as scalable commercial tools for content production. Baifu Technology (百孚科技) applied a digital avatar framed as a digital twin to a florist's promotional campaign for the Qixi Festival, enabling the virtual being to ingest marketing inputs such as limited-time offers and autonomously generate customer-facing promotional materials. Keyiyun Group (客易云集团) is actively promoting its virtual human application programming interface in international markets, targeting emerging economies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America through a model of technical export and ecosystem development, reflecting an enterprise-level strategy to standardize Chinese digital human technologies for global AI applications.

Enterprise: Beijing Wuxian Zhihui Technology Co., Ltd. (北京无限智慧科技有限公司) has filed a patent for an AI agent-based virtual human interaction system that incorporates multimodal sensing capabilities, advancing the development of context-aware digital humans for enterprise deployment. Keyiyun Group's simultaneous domestic and international API commercialization further underscores the drive among Chinese technology firms to systematize and scale virtual human infrastructure beyond individual use cases into replicable, platform-level enterprise solutions.

August 02 News

Healthcare: Baidu (百度) Health launched a large-scale initiative called the "Starry Sky Public Welfare Plan," under which the platform is collaborating with 10,000 doctors to produce over 100 million AI-generated medical science education entries and to build 100 expert-level IP personas; separately, 1,000 doctors are receiving free digital twins as part of the programme, with the stated goal of democratising access to credible medical information through authoritative digital personas. Ant Group (蚂蚁集团), through its AI health application AQ, deployed a digital twin of Chinese Academy of Sciences academician Wang Jian'an and reported a nearly 280% increase in consultations within three days of the twin's launch, illustrating how high-profile virtual replicas of medical experts can rapidly amplify patient engagement in remote healthcare settings. Research reported by TechNews 科技新報 further documented a measurable biological dimension to virtual human interaction: participants in a study who encountered avatars appearing to be sick demonstrated increased activity in their innate lymphoid cells, suggesting that immersive virtual human simulations may carry physiological implications relevant to medical training and therapeutic applications.

Enterprise: Baidu has identified digital humans as a core pillar of its growth strategy, with internal plans indicating intensified investment in digital human technologies from the second half of 2025 onward and a particular focus on broader enterprise deployment of AI-driven customer service avatars designed to raise interaction quality. Shanghai-based Pran Financial Services is pursuing a comparable direction by combining voice recognition, computer vision, and virtual digital human technologies to create more natural and immersive customer-facing interactions, positioning agentic AI interfaces as the next phase of business communication. MetAI has released two products targeting corporate clients: the "AI Virtual Human," which replicates voice, facial expressions, and gestures for real-time interaction, and the "AI Persona Studio," which generates consistent, identity-rich digital characters intended for personalised branding and visual communication. Huaxing Chuangye (华兴创业) and Fangzhi Technology (方智科技) are continuing to invest in metaverse, virtual reality, and digital human development, with their positioning in capital market updates alongside blockchain and AI concepts indicating growing investor confidence in virtual human technology sectors in China. At the AI Wave Show held in China, Jia Shang Technology — operating under the Reallusion brand — exhibited Camilla, a high-performance AI virtual assistant that draws on Character Creator for high-fidelity 3D avatar generation, iClone for animation, and an Interactive Agent Architecture for real-time control logic; the deployment across an event featuring 200 corporate exhibitors and 400 booths demonstrated the readiness of advanced AI-driven avatars for large-scale public enterprise showcases.

Marketing: Across Chinese short-video and content platforms — Douyin (抖音), Kuaishou (快手), Xiaohongshu (小红书), and Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) — AI-generated digital personas are now embedded in influencer marketing and live-commerce operations at scale, with these virtual personas capable of being cloned 1:1 from real individuals, replicating exact voice characteristics and synchronised lip movements. This capability provides businesses with a scalable and consistent marketing presence, enabling virtual influencers to operate continuously without the logistical constraints of human talent, and is actively reshaping content production workflows and live-commerce sales strategies across these platforms.

Entertainment: The XR project "Wind from the East" combined extended reality visuals with a digital human character named Li Li, though production teams encountered technical complexities in synchronising digital content with the live or filmed components of the work, reflecting the practical challenges still inherent in integrating digital persona technology into narrative-driven cultural productions in China. In the children's education and entertainment space, AR installations reported via Hubei Daily (hubeidaily.net) feature interactions with digital lifeforms and dinosaurs, blending virtual and physical environments to enhance engagement and learning, and representing a deployment of virtual being technology specifically oriented toward younger audiences within Chinese informal education settings.

Cultural and Ethical Contexts: Academic research on the talent show Alter Ego, examined in the paper "Human–technology entanglement in digital-human themed talent shows programmes: multi-interactivity of biopower in Alter Ego," analyses how biopower is distributed among contestants, judges, and hosts through the medium of digital avatars, in a format where performers appear as animated virtual alter egos rather than as themselves; this framework frames digital humans not only as technological artefacts but as instruments of social and cultural power that complicate questions of identity, agency, and representation. The phenomenon of VTuber communities engaging in linguistic hybridity also surfaces in relation to Chinese internet vernacular: research on translanguaging in subtitling communities documents an instance in which a VTuber's praise of an avatar's appearance was rendered in subtitle form as "噂嘟" (zuò dū), a neologism derived from Chinese online vernacular, illustrating how virtual identities and avatar culture interact with Chinese-language digital communities to generate new forms of mediated expression and cross-lingual fan practice.

August 01 News

Entertainment: Baidu (百度) has developed NOVA, described as a next-generation digital human technology designed to bring enhanced realism to virtual interactions. In a demonstrable application of this technology, Baidu conducted a livestream featuring a digital human replica of Luo Yonghao, leveraging virtual human cloning to reproduce the subject's likeness for an interactive broadcast context. Baidu Vice President Yuan Foyu highlighted the technology's potential for enriching game operations and IP interaction across diverse scenarios to improve user experience. Research by M. Duan et al., in a study on multimodal emotional misalignment in virtual streamers, examines how mismatches between verbal and nonverbal emotional cues in avatar-based streamers affect audience engagement, directly addressing the limitations of facial expression rendering in animated virtual hosts. Separately, X. Lyu, S.S. Ramasamy, and F. Ying investigate the user acceptance of digital virtual anchors—including presenters and singers—within the entertainment sector, finding that shifting consumer behaviour is driving new paradigms in live performance and digital events. The presence of over 32,000 virtual hosts on Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) further illustrates the industrial scale of avatar-based entertainment labor in China, with synthetic figures functioning as scalable representatives in streaming, events, and automated communication roles.

Marketing: Research on virtual influencers in the Chinese market context reflects both commercial scale and academic attention. The article "Metaverse Concept Gains Traction in China" notes the popularity of CGI-based virtual influencers in fashion and beauty sectors, highlighting high user reach and brand visibility. M.R. Do and J.I. Choi analyze how virtual influencer content—crafted to transcend reality through narrative flexibility—shapes consumer purchase intention, with their findings emphasizing the role of narrative coherence and digital persona identity in decision-making. X. Dong et al. study how danmaku (on-screen comment) rituals interact with influencer type on Chinese streaming platforms, concluding that virtual influencers produce distinctive engagement effects relative to human influencers. G. Ilieva and T.P. Yankova project the global virtual influencer market to surpass 45 billion USD by 2030, with their research touching on the emotional engagement these synthetic personas generate, a dynamic particularly relevant to the Chinese market given the scale of platform-based virtual influencer deployment.

Enterprise: Baidu's digital human cloning technology has been explicitly positioned for enterprise use cases beyond entertainment, with Yuan Foyu citing applications in game operations and IP interaction as primary deployment scenarios. Biyinlefen (比音勒芬), a Chinese clothing company, stated as of 31 July 2025 that it had not yet deployed virtual digital human livestreaming, though discussion of its potential involvement reflects broad industry awareness of virtual humans as an emerging tool in digital retail and marketing operations. The scale of virtual host deployment on Bilibili—exceeding 32,000 active virtual hosts—demonstrates that avatar-based labor has reached enterprise integration in China, with these synthetic figures used for customer-facing interaction, streaming operations, and brand communication at platform scale.

Cultural: Soul App's AI director, Yin Shunshun, described the platform's virtual companions as "a new species in the AI social era," articulating their function as participants in simulated romantic conversations and emotionally resonant relational experiences. This framing reflects an emerging cultural paradigm in China in which AI-driven virtual beings serve not only functional but also emotional and social roles, contributing to new forms of human-computer interaction centered on companionship and intimacy. H. Lin and R. Zaborowski, in their analysis of Douyin (抖音), examine how that platform's gamified environment—including virtual pets and status indicators—simulates sociality and fosters parasocial relationships, illustrating how virtual beings are embedded into everyday digital social culture in China beyond dedicated companion applications.

Ethical Contexts: R. Jalalinejad's work on generative AI in advertising addresses governance mechanisms and ethical oversight for fully AI-generated marketing campaigns, including virtual influencer disclosures and bias-audit routines, raising questions of transparency relevant to the Chinese virtual influencer market. K. Militsyna examines the legal challenges surrounding AI-based content generation, including the definition of ownership and fairness in virtual human performances, a concern directly applicable to the growing volume of synthetic host and virtual influencer output produced on Chinese platforms such as Bilibili and Douyin. K.X. Liao's paper, "The Emotional Cost of Hyper-Meritocracy," indirectly addresses the cultural conditions that drive adoption of virtual companions in high-pressure societies, lending a sociological dimension to the proliferation of emotionally oriented virtual beings on platforms such as Soul App. Together, these works reflect an urgent and growing need for governance models that account for the increasingly autonomous, persuasive, and emotionally engaging nature of virtual characters operating at scale within the Chinese digital ecosystem.