July 2025 News

July 31 News

Commerce and Marketing: China's e-commerce livestreaming sector has seen a notable acceleration in the deployment of AI digital humans as stand-in hosts, with operators leveraging their capacity for round-the-clock operation, consistent branding, and significant reductions in labor costs. One widely cited case involved a late-night skincare demonstration in which a digital human host replicated natural facial expressions and fluent speech so convincingly that viewers only identified the synthetic nature of the presenter after the broadcast. PLTFRM, a platform specialising in AI-enabled commerce for the China market, has deployed AI virtual human livestreaming to drive measurable commercial outcomes, reporting a 30% uplift in sales for BROTHER printer campaigns as a direct result. Uniqlo incorporated virtual image generation into its direct-to-consumer strategy in China, with digital avatars serving not only as marketing visuals but as operational nodes that trigger real-time demand data flows to its production system in Ningbo, illustrating how synthetic characters are being embedded into retail logistics infrastructure rather than confined to front-end promotion. Zhongyin Fashion (中胤时尚) attributed a recovery in its stock valuation to the integration of AI-generated content and virtual humans into its content pipeline, using synthetic characters to drive brand engagement and product interaction and signalling broader investor confidence in virtual human-enabled growth strategies.

Enterprise and Workforce: CITIC Securities has embedded digital twins and digital doubles into its workforce strategy, equipping each employee with multiple synthetic counterparts—including virtual assistants and role-specific bots—designed to augment productivity and integrate human and digital labour within a hybrid workplace model. Fun MarTech (趣丸科技), a Guangzhou-based technology company, developed AI digital human volunteers for large-scale event services, building these virtual beings on voice synthesis and three-dimensional generation models and reporting a 30% reduction in human labour costs alongside a 50% improvement in response efficiency across deployments such as sports events. At the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Shanghai Mobile, in collaboration with Nokia Bell, introduced a "Digital Human Network Assurance Expert" — a digital twin that aggregates multidimensional network data into a three-dimensional interactive support interface, enabling rapid diagnosis and resolution of technical issues and representing a convergence of digital twin technology with real-time enterprise infrastructure management.

Events and Public Services: The 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai served as a significant showcase for operational virtual human deployment, with AI digital human volunteers fielded across the venue to respond to public inquiries and provide logistical and directional assistance, drawing on voice synthesis and large-scale three-dimensional generation capabilities. Digital Domain demonstrated its advanced virtual human production technologies at the same conference, highlighting tools that enable creators to generate realistic virtual humans for visualisation and creative applications, reinforcing the event's role as a proving ground for China's virtual human industry.

Technology and Platforms: Tencent has pursued international expansion of its virtual human offering, bringing virtual human avatars alongside its AI developer platforms to Japan as part of broader efforts to establish commercial traction in that market, demonstrating the cross-border applicability of Chinese-developed virtual being infrastructure.

Gaming: Lillian Studio developed the detective video game Who Is the Inner Persona (《谁是中之人》), in which the narrative is structured around a fictional virtual YouTuber agency whose chief executive dies under mysterious circumstances, with six key-holding employees as suspects. The game integrates VTuber culture and the layered identity structures characteristic of avatar-based online performance directly into its mystery mechanics, making virtual beings both the thematic and structural foundation of the interactive experience and player immersion.

Research: A Chinese study examining virtual human appearances designed three categories of digital figures — neutral, fearful, and pathogen-simulating — to investigate neural and immune responses using a near-body space behaviour paradigm. The research found that the brain integrates multisensory signals to activate early lymphoid responses when subjects encountered pathogen-simulating digital characters, demonstrating that virtual humans can elicit measurable physiological reactions and pointing toward future applications in virtual health assessment and digital therapeutics. A separate academic study by authors B. Yi, D. Shi, and G. Li, published as Real Me or Digital Me? Consumers' Consumption Responses to Online Avatars, examined AI-generated digital human avatars within online hospitality and entertainment environments through four empirical investigations, revealing that digital avatars materially shape user expectations and experiences on virtual platforms such as immersive hotels and tourism services and providing a framework for understanding how the perceived distinction between real and digital selfhood affects consumer behaviour in virtual service delivery contexts.

July 30 News

Healthcare: Ping An (平安) has deployed AI-generated concierge avatars integrated with smart mirrors to assist elderly users navigating China's rapidly growing silver economy, estimated at $4.2 trillion, addressing care demands driven by the country's aging population. Agora (声网), a China-based conversational AI company, showcased its AI agent solutions at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, demonstrating voiceprint-based attention locking technology designed to improve human-AI interactions in noisy healthcare environments, with particular relevance to clinical and elder care deployment contexts.

Commerce: A livestreaming e-commerce event co-hosted by the virtual avatar of entrepreneur Luo Yonghao alongside a second digital human attracted over 13 million views, serving as a high-profile case study in the application of virtual personas to real-time commercial broadcasting in China. More broadly, AI-powered digital human hosts, known in Chinese as 数字人主播, have become deeply embedded in China's live commerce sector, with operators deploying these avatars to run continuous, uninterrupted livestream shopping broadcasts around the clock, surpassing the scheduling and physical constraints of human presenters. One documented case involved a six-hour product livestream hosted entirely by a Chinese digital human, illustrating the scalability that such virtual beings offer as persistent sales agents in an industry where the trend has been described as irreversible.

Finance: The Chinese brokerage Guotai Haitong (国泰海通) has integrated digital human technology into its retail investment advisory service through the Lingxi app, creating a hybrid advisory environment in which human financial advisors present investment strategies while digital human avatars handle real-time interactive responses to customer queries. The implementation positions these AI avatars as what the company characterises as "invisible employees," capable of multiplying human advisor productivity by engaging clients continuously through virtual assistance and live communication, demonstrating a concrete enterprise deployment of digital beings in client-facing financial services.

Entertainment: The Chinese tech company Lingyun Guangyuan has developed a light field reconstruction platform called Yuanke Shijie that industrialises the production of highly realistic 3D digital humans using optical capture and AI-driven rendering. The system has been applied to media productions including The Legend of Zhen Huan Prequel and Wang Bo VR Edition, spanning applications across XR virtual production, virtual performances, large-scale VR environments, and AI filmmaking. Separately, AI-generated virtual idols such as TaTa, built entirely through AI modeling combined with 3D modeling, motion capture, and virtual reality technologies, have gained popularity across Chinese entertainment platforms, with some platforms enabling real-time human operation behind the avatar façade to support live interactive performance. Baidu (百度), through its digital human product Huibo Xing (慧播星), has released its next-generation digital human technology under the name NOVA, with a planned commercial launch in October, underscoring Baidu's continued investment in enterprise-grade digital human deployment for applications such as virtual assistants and AI-driven digital staff.

Civic and Education: In Shenzhen, a "virtual digital human counselor" (虚拟数字人辅导员) has been deployed as part of an anti-corruption and integrity education initiative, offering interactive question-and-answer sessions and aggregating current anti-corruption guidance from both central and local government sources. The avatar is intended to provide immersive, accessible educational interactions with the public, forming part of a broader model for integrating digital human technology into civic communication and public governance, and demonstrating that synthetic characters in China are being applied to institutional and social functions beyond purely commercial contexts.

July 29 News

Entertainment: Digital Domain (数字王国), in partnership with the Teresa Teng Cultural and Educational Foundation, presented a virtual human rendition of the late singer Teresa Teng at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2025), where the digital figure performed "The Moon Represents My Heart" in a scene-based demonstration of digital human reconstruction technology. The virtual idol Luo Tianyi, created using computer-generated vocals and stylised 2D imagery, continues to attract large audiences through holographic concerts that combine real-time motion capture and interactive technologies, producing emotionally resonant performances with entirely synthetic performers. A live performance in Yancheng integrated a virtual character named Du Xiaoxi alongside a real-stage setup, creating a hybrid entertainment experience that grounded a digital persona within traditional regional storytelling, illustrating the localisation of virtual human design in cultural contexts. The digital human Xingtong performed alongside human entertainers at the 2025 China AI Gala, demonstrating advanced integration of digital human technology within a major nationally broadcast entertainment event.

Marketing: Baidu (百度) deployed a digital avatar of public figure Luo Yonghao to host a seven-hour live broadcast during the 618 shopping festival, drawing over 1.3 million viewers and generating more than 55 million yuan in sales, with approximately one-third of gross merchandise value attributed directly to the virtual host. JD.com (京东) has deployed AI-driven digital humans as 24/7 live-streaming hosts, enabling continuous automated customer interaction and sales at scale without reliance on human presenters. Baidu's Huiboxing division launched NOVA, a next-generation digital human platform showcased at WAIC 2025, which has been adopted by over 100,000 businesses for creating virtual livestreamers in e-commerce and marketing contexts, with a full public release scheduled for October. A China-focused academic study analysing consumer sentiment toward virtual influencers on Instagram using text mining methods identified key themes in both positive and negative user responses, providing empirical evidence for how virtual influencers function as strategic marketing assets within the Chinese consumer market.

Enterprise: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) introduced AI-powered smart glasses featuring avatar interfaces to facilitate wearable AI applications in industrial and enterprise settings, extending the deployment of virtual human interaction beyond screen-based environments. Tencent (腾讯) unveiled interactive 3D digital human models as part of its digital human innovation initiatives, positioning these developments within China's broader national agenda to advance AI capabilities. CITIC Securities (中信证券) presented its AI employee system at WAIC 2025, comprising three categories of synthetic personnel — "digital twins," "role-specific digital employees," and "digital assistants" — designed to apply expert-level knowledge to internal workflows, streamline operations, and improve organisational decision-making, reflecting the evolution of digital humans into synthetic knowledge workers within large financial institutions.

Healthcare: At WAIC 2025, an AI virtual human terminal with multimodal interaction capabilities was showcased as part of the Yangtze River Delta innovation zone in Hangzhou. The system is specifically designed for healthcare scenarios, supporting role versatility, enhanced patient interaction, and customised IP services, with the aim of optimising patient experience and healthcare workflows. The platform represents a concrete deployment of digital human technology in service design, patient intake, and potentially diagnostic support contexts.

July 28 News

Marketing: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) presented its AI-driven smart-glasses product Quark at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, positioning AI avatars as viable alternatives to human influencers in advertising. At the same conference, Baidu (百度) staged a six-hour live broadcast hosted by an AI avatar modeled on a popular human streamer, accompanied by a second digital human co-host, demonstrating the capacity of virtual beings to independently lead commercial content delivery in China's livestream shopping format. Baidu's new-generation digital human platform NOVA, launched under its HuiBoxing (慧播星) brand at WAIC 2025, generated particular industry attention through a seven-hour livestream on Baidu Youxuan (优选) in which an avatar modeled on celebrity Luo Yonghao (罗永浩) served as virtual anchor. The broadcast attracted over 1.3 million views and produced more than 55 million RMB in gross merchandise value, with the avatar's replication of Luo Yonghao's physical appearance, speaking patterns, and characteristic humor prompting viewers to question whether they were watching a human or synthetic host. Baidu plans to open the NOVA platform to public access in October, enabling individuals and businesses to generate and operate their own digital human anchors for livestreaming and other commercial purposes. Separately, Baidu's digital human Du Xiaoxiao (度晓晓), integrated with the large language model Ernie Bot (文心一言), launched a pop-up store titled Xiaoxiao AI Everything Shop (晓晓AI万事屋) on Taobao during the Double 11 shopping festival, focusing on emotionally driven consumer goods and positioning the virtual being as an agent of sentiment-oriented retail engagement rather than purely transactional interaction.

Healthcare: At WAIC 2025, Kusa Technology (库萨科技) demonstrated a multimodal AI virtual digital human terminal designed for deployment in healthcare scenarios, capable of performing functions including appointment assistance, medical explanations, and emotional support for patients. This application frames the digital human as an AI companion embedded within clinical workflows, improving patient experience while reducing demands on human medical staff. JD Health (京东健康) is advancing its AI Thousand Doctors Plan (AI千医计划), which involves deploying over 500 smart-agent digital doubles of expert physicians. These avatars are designed to incorporate individual clinicians' diagnostic reasoning, domain knowledge, and personal communication styles, creating personalised AI-powered medical assistants grounded in the identities of real practitioners and extending specialist medical access beyond the constraints of physical availability.

Entertainment: The VR interactive livestream platform 229mcc直播入口 launched a program in 2025 enabling viewers to engage with virtual hosts through VR headsets in a fully immersive audiovisual environment, representing a concrete implementation of virtual human technology in entertainment broadcasting where audience presence and real-time interaction are central design objectives. The Chinese science-fiction film Moon Man (独行月球) features a fully synthetic character named Golden Rat Kangaroo (金刚鼠), built with detailed anatomical modeling comprising 1,331 target models for skeletal and muscular animation to achieve lifelike motion and emotional expression. The virtual character Ganyu (甘雨), prominent across anime and gaming fandoms, exemplifies the continuing rise of virtual avatars as iconic entertainment figures valued for their aesthetic design and narrative presence within Chinese and East Asian virtual spaces.

Cultural and Ethical Contexts: The emergence of AI-generated virtual hosts in China has generated public debate about emotional authenticity and labor displacement in the media industry. The creation of a virtual version of celebrity Yang Chaoyue (杨超越) as a digital host prompted criticism that synthetic presenters erode the warmth of genuine human interaction and risk displacing human presenters from professional broadcasting roles. Despite these concerns, companies continue to invest in advanced emotional modeling for virtual hosts, seeking to simulate empathetic communication at scale. At WAIC 2025, an AI interaction zone featured virtual digital human photo booths where visitors could pose with synthetic characters and participate in AI brain-interface demonstrations, situating digital humans within a public science education campaign and illustrating their role in shaping broad societal awareness of AI identity and neural interface technologies. Baidu has framed its NOVA platform explicitly around the concept of the digital double, or shuzi fenshen (数字分身), envisioning a scalable framework in which users delegate tasks and maintain a virtual presence through AI-powered counterparts that replicate personal appearance, speaking style, and professional identity for commercial, educational, or representational purposes.

Academic Research: X. Zhan's 2025 paper on oral English training through human-machine collaboration examines the integration of digital virtual humans into language education, focusing on control interfaces and multimodal interaction modules that enable virtual humans to exhibit adaptive and responsive behavior within collaborative learning systems. Research by Y. Gu, Z. Guo, and J. Hao published in 2025 investigates AI-generated virtual streamers specifically within the context of Chinese livestream e-commerce, identifying characteristics including realism, interactivity, and emotional expression as significant drivers of viewer patronage intention, and framing virtual streamers as a distinct category of digital human deployed in commercial marketing with measurable effects on consumer trust and purchase behavior.

July 27 News

Marketing: Baidu Huiboxing (百度慧播星) unveiled its next-generation digital human technology, NOVA, at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). NOVA introduces three core capabilities: a master-level script mode, real-time decision-making via an integrated AI brain, and high-efficiency digital human replication completed within ten minutes. A demonstrable application of NOVA was the creation of a digital clone of influencer Luo Yonghao (罗永浩), showcasing ultra-realistic virtual livestream hosting for commercial e-commerce contexts. NOVA is scheduled for public availability in October 2025 and has been widely covered across financial and technology media as a significant step toward mass deployment of AI-driven virtual hosts. The social platform Soul (Soul平台) is also preparing to beta-test a full-duplex conversational model integrated with AI digital humans, further embedding synthetic personalities into social interaction and content delivery.

Enterprise: Baidu Huiboxing's NOVA system operates on Wenxin 4.5 (文心4.5), a multimodal foundational model supporting high-quality script generation and real-time coordination among multiple virtual humans, constituting a full-stack solution from content generation to synthetic performance. Separately, Baidi Technology (百付科技) offers a comprehensive virtual image software toolchain that spans appearance generation through to live-streaming operations, enabling dynamic real-time interaction and production for virtual figures. Both platforms reflect an industrial-grade ambition to transform static avatars into fully operational interactive entities deployable at commercial scale.

Entertainment: Virtual musicians made their debut at the Dongfang Fengyun (东方风云) Music Festival, where they co-hosted the event and announced awards alongside professional human presenters; their participation was paired with a Million Debut Support Program aimed at promoting emerging talent and appealing to younger audiences. The character Ganyu (甘雨), a virtual world host from game aesthetics, participated in an event called Carrot Travel, blending interactive digital storytelling with performative presence. On Bilibili (B站), the artist known as 小苍老师 has established recognition as a virtual UP主 (virtual content uploader), with traditionally styled portrait artwork gaining broad appreciation across the platform's user community.

Cultural: Virtual personas including 米娜学姐, 御梦子, and 糖心米娜学姐 have developed well-elaborated backstories that foster narrative immersion and strong personal identification among their fan communities. The character 糖心米娜学姐 in particular has prompted public reflection on the boundaries between digital and real life, illustrating the depth of emotional investment audiences place in synthetic characters. These figures represent an emergent form of digital folklore in which avatars and virtual characters are woven into contemporary Chinese online storytelling and mythology.

July 26 News

Broadcasting and Entertainment: Virtual idols are increasingly appearing at televised cultural galas and on video platforms in China, where they merge traditional performance formats with contemporary digital aesthetics to create novel audiovisual experiences. Regional television stations and integrated media centers across China have begun deploying AI digital humans in the role of program hosts, signaling a structural shift in broadcasting practices that moves beyond human presenters toward synthetic on-screen figures. These developments are not without tension: a cultural critique notes that digital human intellectual properties in China frequently expose a mismatch between technological capability and cultural understanding, as virtual idols entering traditional Chinese media formats may conflict with established aesthetic or ethical norms, posing challenges for their sustainable integration into mainstream content production. Liu Yifei's AI-generated face composite was used in the film industry to construct a digital persona intended to enhance visual storytelling through synthesized appearance, generating both attention for its audiovisual novelty and debate about authenticity. A fictional digital entity called 向上可爱香椿 (Upward Cute Xiangchun, or UPC), conceived as an aesthetically pleasing and gentle digital organism embodying positivity, further reflects how China's virtual being landscape extends into speculative and imaginative forms of entertainment that blend escapism with creative worldbuilding.

E-commerce and Marketing: The 618 shopping festival provided a high-profile test of AI-generated celebrity likenesses in commercial livestreaming, when the digital persona of Luo Yonghao was deployed in a seven-hour e-commerce broadcast on Baidu (百度) Youxuan. Despite the scale and novelty of the event, the virtual counterpart's engagement and conversion performance fell below that of mid-tier human influencers, illustrating the gap that remains between spectacle and commercial effectiveness. Florasis (花西子) developed a proprietary virtual brand ambassador bearing its own brand name as the character's identity, while L'Oréal created a virtual figure named "M姐" to serve as its digital spokesperson; both operate across social media and e-commerce channels as tailored representatives of their respective brand identities. Research into these virtual endorsement strategies indicates that effectiveness is shaped by consumers' sense of physical presence and perceived image distance, underlining the importance of psychological realism in virtual brand representation. Separately, China Consumer News published findings implicating AI-generated figures in fraudulent advertising practices, prompting calls for stronger consumer protection frameworks and regulatory oversight of virtual marketing tools. Yizhi Intelligence's CTO has identified two persistent bottlenecks limiting virtual influencers in livestream e-commerce: nuanced responsiveness and contextual adaptation within vertical domains, noting that even as DeepSeek and other foundation model developers push virtual human applications into what industry observers call the "3.0 era," these interaction limitations continue to constrain commercial viability.

Enterprise and Smart City: FlashHire Turing (闪聘图灵), headquartered in Hangzhou, has filed a patent for a multidimensional evaluation system for virtual workplaces built on deep reinforcement learning, in which one participant takes the role of a dialogue host—effectively a virtual assistant—while another acts as the user; the host is designed to maintain controlled camera framing and restrict physical movement, creating a structured virtual interaction environment applicable to HR screening and corporate training. Baidu Smart Cloud presented a portfolio of customized virtual digital human solutions at the 2025 Spatial Intelligence Application Conference, encompassing smart scene generation and digital content management systems, with the platform supporting interactions spanning 2D to 5D modalities and anchored by full-stack technical infrastructure designed for diverse enterprise deployments. iFlytek (科大讯飞) contributed to the development of a proprietary virtual digital human installed at Gubei Water Town, a tourist destination, where the avatar operates through large-screen terminals to deliver daily information services, product recommendations, and voice-based interactions, representing a practical application of AI avatars in tourism management and smart city ecosystems.

July 25 News

Livestream Commerce: Chinese AI virtual human hosts have emerged as commercially significant players in the live e-commerce sector, with reports from NetEase (网易) documenting individual sessions in which AI-driven virtual hosts generated livestream sales exceeding ten million RMB in a single broadcast. These synthetic characters compete directly with human streamers, handling product introductions, audience interaction, and purchase facilitation at scale and without fatigue. In parallel, creator Dong Dong of Digital Xusheng (数字栩生) has leveraged MetaHuman Creator by Epic Games—cited in Chinese-language reporting from 观察者 as a benchmark tool for high-fidelity digital character production—to develop synthetic figures described as possessing a sense of "soul," distinguishing them from earlier, less expressive virtual human designs deployed in commercial settings.

Enterprise: Yuanguang Software has deployed its virtual digital human product across a range of enterprise applications, integrating AI-driven avatars on mobile, large-screen, and XR devices for use cases spanning business marketing, corporate training, and metaverse platforms. The underlying technology stack combines artificial intelligence, blockchain, 3D modeling, real-time rendering, and streaming communication, enabling deployment at scale across device types and organisational contexts. ByteDance (字节跳动), through its AI and cloud infrastructure arm Volcengine, has announced preparations to launch a dedicated platform for digital humans, positioning synthetic characters as a core component of its content, commerce, and productivity workflows and leveraging the broader distribution capabilities of its ecosystem.

Cultural: Reporting from 新浪财经 documents a distinct consumption trend among Generation Z in China centered on "paper people" (纸片人), a form of virtual idol or avatar functioning simultaneously as personal identity expression and emotional companionship. These digital figures serve as proxies for self-representation under conditions of academic and social pressure, with spending on associated merchandise, interactive platforms, and digital content reflecting the deepening integration of avatar culture into everyday youth life. The trend positions virtual beings not merely as entertainment products but as affective extensions of personal identity within Chinese digital culture.

Governance: Chinese provincial and municipal authorities have begun institutionalising virtual humans as components of public administration infrastructure. Bozhou in Anhui Province has implemented a system designated "数字人社" (Digital Human Resources and Social Security), deploying digital human interfaces to streamline administrative services for citizens. At the provincial level, 新浪财经 reports that Hebei Province has initiated a formal selection process for exemplary metaverse products, with virtual humans identified as one of three principal categories alongside XR interfaces and holographic displays, reflecting a policy-level recognition of synthetic characters as a foundational layer of metaverse technology development in China.

July 24 News

Media and Entertainment: AI-driven digital humans have become an established presence on Chinese television and integrated media platforms, where local broadcasters have deployed AI-generated anchors and virtual idols as hosts and performers on cultural variety shows. One prominent example is Luo Tianyi (洛天依), a virtual idol whose image blends traditional Chinese aesthetics with contemporary digital production, illustrating how virtual beings in China serve both entertainment and cultural signalling functions simultaneously. Critical commentary has emerged alongside these deployments, noting a persistent gap between the technological sophistication of the digital humans and the depth of their narrative or symbolic content, raising questions about the long-term viability of current virtual human intellectual property models in the Chinese market. Concerns surrounding "中之人"—the human operator behind the avatar—also remain a live issue, particularly in cases where shifts in a virtual character's on-screen behavior suggest a change in the person controlling it, undermining audience trust and continuity.

Enterprise: Far Light Software (远光软件) has developed and commercialised an award-winning virtual digital human creation platform that is integrated with its broader suite of enterprise products. The platform supports deployment across mobile devices, large-format screens, and XR hardware, and has been applied to corporate marketing campaigns, internal employee training programmes, and intelligent broadcasting workflows. Its compatibility across diverse hardware ecosystems is identified as a core competitive advantage for enterprise-scale adoption, positioning Far Light Software as a significant provider of virtual human infrastructure for Chinese organisations seeking to scale digital human applications across multiple operational contexts.

Commercial and Marketing: According to iiMedia Research, China's core virtual human market reached 12.08 billion RMB in 2022 and is projected to reach 48.06 billion RMB by 2025, underscoring the scale and velocity of commercial investment in the sector. Qingfou (青否) is one of the companies facilitating this expansion, offering one-click cloning and rapid virtual human generation tools aimed specifically at livestream e-commerce operators, where virtual humans function as automated sales anchors conducting product promotions at scale. Academic research corroborates the commercial significance of this context: Liu, Sheng, and Man's study "Trust, Emotion, and Purchase: Why Human Streamers Still Matter in the Age of Virtual Commerce" analyses user purchase intentions in livestream commerce, finding that human streamers retain a measurable advantage through emotional satisfaction and perceived social compatibility, even as virtual streamer adoption grows—a finding with direct implications for Chinese platforms that have invested heavily in virtual anchor technology.

July 23 News

Commerce and Livestreaming: ByteDance (字节跳动) developed the Chimera platform through its Volcano Engine AI model infrastructure, officially launching it in April 2023 at the Volcano Engine FORCE Conference. The platform offers three categories of digital human model: interactive, broadcast, and livestream-focused, with capabilities described as enabling digital humans to "listen," "speak," and "think." Chimera has received foundational capability certification from China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and is deployed across major Chinese e-commerce and content platforms including JD.com (京东), Taobao (淘宝), ByteDance's own Douyin (抖音), Baidu (百度) E-commerce, and Kuaishou (快手). Brands using the platform have reported an approximately 80% reduction in livestream operating costs alongside a 62% average increase in gross merchandise volume. Baidu's e-commerce operations alone deploy more than 100,000 digital human hosts across commercial sectors, reflecting the depth of AI avatar integration in Chinese retail. In parallel, Qingfou (青否) introduced highly realistic digital human models capable of real-time dialogue with zero latency, specifically engineered for smooth interaction and deployment in business-facing scenarios, illustrating the competitive technological race among Chinese firms to produce increasingly lifelike AI companions for commercial use.

Policy and Industry Strategy: Local governments across Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Anhui, and Chongqing have issued policies to actively support the expansion of digital human applications, with particular focus on virtual anchors and AI-powered customer service agents. At the national level, a policy framework enacted on June 15, 2025 formalised the treatment of personal data as a convertible digital asset within a national ecosystem, positioning virtual humans as key interfaces and embodiments of digital identity across smart governance, retail, and public services. These policy moves reflect a coordinated state-level strategy to embed synthetic characters within China's broader digital infrastructure and commercial economy.

Cultural Heritage: During the 2025 Beijing Quyi Creative Performance Week, a virtual Nezha interacted playfully with a human host on stage, while a speculative 2077 version of the Grand View Garden was extended into cyberspace, bringing renewed attention to traditional Chinese storytelling and operatic performance through virtual human integration. Youku (优酷) advanced comparable work through cultural programming that combined extended reality with digital human characters, with director Wang Xiaonan emphasising the technical precision required to achieve lifelike realism and depth in such scenes. Xiangtan University undertook a heritage preservation initiative by creating a virtual character named "Saluo," depicted as a young Dong ethnic boy, to serve as the central narrative figure documenting the traditional architecture, costumes, dance, and legends of the ancient Shangbao Dong Village. Saluo is accompanied by a digital companion character called "Axuan the Tree Guardian," together forming an animated storytelling framework designed to represent intangible cultural heritage elements in educational and public outreach contexts.

July 22 News

Entertainment: Fengshang Culture (丰尚文化), a company active in the entertainment technology sector, is expanding into the virtual digital human space by developing high-precision avatar technologies intended to augment live entertainment production with AI-powered performance and media creation capabilities. At the Dongfang Fengyun Music Awards, a virtual musician is scheduled to make their debut stage performance, marking a concrete instance of AI-generated performers entering mainstream music events in China. These virtual performers are being assigned roles ranging from hosts to award presenters and commentary contributors alongside human participants, signalling growing acceptance of synthetic characters as legitimate entertainers within China's music industry.

Enterprise and Media Technology: Volcano Engine (火山引擎), the cloud and AI platform subsidiary of ByteDance (字节跳动), is preparing to launch a digital human platform named Chimera, which will support multiple categories of AI-driven digital human, including interactive, broadcast-style, and livestream personas. Since 2024, Volcano Engine has partnered with Huafa Group (华发集团) to deploy comprehensive AI digital human solutions across business operations, covering corporate communication, virtual services, and customer interaction at enterprise scale. Separately, Shenzhen-based Kukai Network Technology Co., Ltd. has filed a patent for a virtual host program control method, proposing mechanisms by which virtual hosts autonomously manage program playback and deliver personalised viewing experiences, reflecting ongoing commercial efforts to automate media delivery through AI-generated presenters capable of adapting content to individual user preferences.

Cultural Heritage and Tourism: At the Dahecun Site Museum in Zhengzhou, more than thirty digital humans have been created using AI simulation to portray historical figures within immersive exhibition environments. These AI-generated characters are dynamically rendered with lighting and shadow effects inside space video technology settings, enabling interactive engagement that blends cultural education with digital storytelling. A separate immersive VR tourism application, powered by 4D Gaussian Splatting technology, enables real-time interaction between AI-driven digital humans and three-dimensional heritage scenes, integrating avatar-based guided experiences into cultural and tourism spaces through environmental adaptability and personalised navigation.

Fashion and Design: In Beijing, the Future Design Laboratory presented garments produced through an AIGC platform centred on traditional Hanfu fashion. The platform employs AI algorithms that simulate aesthetic decisions based on dynastic style data, demonstrating a use case in which synthetic design agents generate fashion inspired by historical and cultural motifs, with the underlying system functioning as an AI-driven creative avatar operating within the domain of cultural heritage design.

Commerce and Live Streaming: Academic research has begun to formalise the role of virtual streamers as synthetic commercial figures in live streaming commerce, a sector in which China is a dominant market. R. Na et al., in their study on virtual streamer characteristics and consumer purchase intention, apply source credibility theory to examine how expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness as projected by virtual streamers affect consumer purchase decisions on live streaming platforms, treating virtual streamers as distinct synthetic figures deployed specifically to drive commerce. P. Pardosi et al., in their thematic review of digital labour in the live streaming economy, identify how work performed by or involving virtual avatars is reshaping the online marketplace, with particular relevance to regions where live commerce is most prevalent.

July 21 News

Entertainment: The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is set to host AniSonic, its first full-scale holographic concert featuring virtual idol performers, scheduled for August 30 at the Guangzhou Nansha Sports Center. The event employs immersive holographic projection technology to enable digital human idols to perform in real time before live audiences, representing a regional commitment to advancing large-scale entertainment through virtual beings. The production illustrates how holographic display infrastructure is being deployed in mainland Chinese venues to deliver concert experiences centered entirely on synthetic characters rather than human performers.

Government and Public Communications: "Kangkang Jie," a digital human persona developed by Hubei province's government media, has successfully transitioned from an official virtual representative into a nationally recognized virtual companion for citizens. Her role within a public media initiative was to build emotional rapport and relatability with online audiences, leveraging her virtual identity to foster engagement and trust at scale. The case demonstrates a deliberate strategic deployment of digital humans in Chinese government-facing communications and public branding, using avatar-based personas to bridge institutional messaging with everyday citizen interaction.

Enterprise: Baifu Technology has developed a 3D Digital Human Software platform that uses real-time rendering and three-dimensional modeling to move beyond conventional 2D avatar representations, offering 360-degree display capabilities and immersive interaction across livestreaming, e-commerce, and education applications. The platform reflects a broader corporate shift in China toward dynamic, enterprise-grade digital human interfaces for customer engagement and experiential design. The integration of extended reality (XR) with digital humans in this context is described as technically demanding, requiring close coordination across content production and live shooting workflows to sustain realism, a complexity highlighted by Baifu Technology senior vice president Ma Hongbin in reference to XR industry deployment.

July 20 News

Healthcare: Sichuan University's West China Second Hospital has introduced a digital doctor system that replicates a physician's clinical reasoning process, enabling it to serve as an auxiliary presence during diagnostic consultations. Hospital party secretary Huang Yong characterised the system as a clinical "replica" rather than a simple avatar interface, underscoring the ambition to embed genuine medical expertise within a virtual human form and to extend access to high-quality diagnostic support. Separately, the AI brain health initiative Weiming Brain Brain (未名脑脑) is developing a platform for the precise diagnosis and early warning of neurological diseases in which digital agents are configured with wearable brain-machine interface devices. By analysing multi-omics data, the system identifies digital biological markers indicative of neurological circuit damage, enabling disease prediction up to three years in advance, and represents one of the more technically sophisticated deployments of digital agent frameworks in Chinese preventive medicine.

Enterprise: Aurora Polaris (北冥极光) has filed a patent in China for a real-time interactive synthesis processing method and system built around replicated digital humans, with the stated objective of improving the interactivity and personalisation of target virtual digital humans to raise user satisfaction. The patent signals a technical push toward more lifelike and responsive avatars intended for customer engagement and personalised digital services in enterprise settings. Kayi Cloud (客易云) has developed an AI-powered short video and live-streaming system in which digital humans are the central production asset; the platform integrates smart editing and one-click video generation, enabling monetisation through digital-human-led content and positioning the company as approaching commercial profitability in enterprise media. Xingan Technology Co., Ltd. (新感科技), operating the @aidigitalhologram account on TikTok, markets an AI Digital Human Interactive system oriented toward holographic projection and augmented reality applications, targeting real-time interactive deployments in commercial and public-facing environments.

Technology and Patents: Siji Technology (思极科技), based in Hubei, has applied for a patent on a digital human animation generation method that encompasses both a model training process and the supporting computing equipment required to run it. The patent is specifically aimed at enhancing the anthropomorphism of digital humans, producing more lifelike and emotionally expressive avatars suited to a range of applications including education, entertainment, and enterprise training. Together with the Aurora Polaris filing, this activity reflects an accelerating wave of intellectual property development around digital human generation and interaction technologies within China's technology sector.

Entertainment: Guangzhou Nansha will host the Greater Bay Area's first holographic concert featuring a virtual idol, an event framed as breaking the "dimensional wall" between the digital and physical worlds. The concert is a component of Nansha's broader strategy to integrate digital humans with intellectual property content and immersive digital scenes, with the explicit aim of driving the local digital entertainment and cultural industries and positioning the district as a destination for virtual-human-centred urban tourism.

Cultural and Educational Contexts: In Hunan, a digital human named Lingling (零零) has been deployed in patriotic education campaigns that combine the virtual human with real people and interactive storytelling techniques. Developed under the guidance of instructor Yang Tingyu, the Lingling project has been recognised as part of a national-level ideological campaign, with the character appearing in schools and rural communities to convey historical narratives such as the "Two Bombs, One Satellite" programme to younger audiences. Chongqing's municipal government has simultaneously issued a call for metaverse case studies that explicitly identifies virtual digital humans as a priority area, seeking to map typical applications across interactive terminals, toolkits, and industry contexts as part of a wider effort to cultivate a locally rooted metaverse industry ecosystem in which digital humans function as core assets.

July 19 News

Enterprise: KeYiYun (客易云) developed a suite of high-fidelity digital human technologies encompassing advanced facial replication, voice biomimicry, and intelligent video synthesis, collectively underpinning a proprietary digital human creation ecosystem aimed at driving AI innovation across enterprise sectors. Onezhin Intelligence (一知智能), led by founder and CEO Chen Zheqian, built a full-stack digital human service engine whose AI-powered staff are capable of empathetic interaction and reasoning-based task execution, with deployment extending to Fortune 500 clients including Ant Group and Luckin Coffee. ZEGO (即构科技) introduced AI Agent 2.4, a system able to generate lifelike digital humans from a single photograph and support real-time interactive video conversation, positioning digital humans as scalable tools for live customer engagement and automated service workflows.

Cultural and Tourism: In China's cultural and tourism sector, a digital human named Wang Bo was initially deployed as a virtual judge for poetry evaluations before being upgraded to serve as an AI tour guide at a scenic area, where it leads visitors across elevated terrains while delivering historically rich narratives. This deployment illustrates the potential of interactive digital humans to deepen visitor engagement with cultural heritage sites and represents a broader institutional shift toward AI-driven characters as vehicles for immersive, informative tourism experiences.

Technology and Production: Tianyu Digital Technology (天娱数科), an established early entrant in China's digital entertainment industry, has committed institutional resources to digital human and metaverse technologies as core components of its internet services portfolio, reflecting growing corporate investment in avatar-based applications at scale. In Macau, separately reported XR production initiatives have integrated digital human characters into extended-reality content pipelines, with precise postproduction coordination cited as essential to achieving the level of visual realism and immersion demanded by combined XR and digital human outputs.

July 18 News

Entertainment: Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) integrated virtual idol broadcasts into its coverage of the 2025 eSports World Cup, illustrating the emotional resonance virtual beings generate within gaming communities and the communal bonding they facilitate during major competitive gaming events. Virtual idol Lanyin (兰音Reine), a virtual UP host distinguished by her versatile artistic capabilities and distinct Chinese cultural style, is scheduled to perform at an offline concert, reflecting the growing cultural influence and commercial viability of virtual entertainers in the Chinese market.

Marketing and E-commerce: The digital human avatar of entrepreneur Luo Yonghao generated sales of 55 million yuan during the 2025 618 shopping festival, achieving a 48% increase in conversion rates and underscoring the cost-effectiveness and commercial efficiency of virtual salespersons in live e-commerce contexts. Bangyan Technology (邦彦科技) developed the digital human platform Nuwaai, which was showcased at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) and features three core modules—image creation, talent empowerment, and personality cultivation—positioning digital humans as instruments for brand promotion, interactive consumer engagement, and marketing activation.

Enterprise Technology: ZEGO (即构科技) released AI Agent 2.4, introducing a capability that enables the rapid generation of interactive digital humans from a single image to support real-time video interactions, significantly improving accessibility and deployment speed for business communications and customer service applications.

July 17 News

Commerce & Cost Efficiency: Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能) completed a significant D-round financing and expanded its virtual human product portfolio to four core lines: the DUIX intelligent interaction platform, a virtual live streaming platform, a video production platform, and an intelligent customer service system. The company had served more than 500,000 digital human users across medical, educational, judicial, cultural, and e-commerce sectors, claiming the top market share position in China's digital human sector. Industry data concurrent with this period showed that the cost of a virtual streamer conducting 24-hour live broadcasts had fallen to below one-tenth the cost of a human streamer, driven in part by large model inference costs dropping nearly 60-fold over one year.

E-Commerce & Live Streaming: Baidu's (百度) digital human livestream business, operating under the brand Huiboxing (慧播星), achieved a notable commercial milestone when a digital human modeled on tech personality Luo Yonghao conducted a livestream on Baidu's e-commerce platform, generating a gross merchandise value exceeding 55 million yuan and outperforming Luo Yonghao's own live human debut in May on certain 3C product and food categories. JD.com's (京东) digital human livestreaming technology, branded JoyStreamer under its JoyAI umbrella, reduced costs to one-tenth those of human streamers, achieved conversion rates 30% higher than human-led streams, and was actively deployed across more than 5,000 brand live rooms, accumulating over 700 million yuan in GMV.

Platform Governance: Douyin (抖音) disclosed that advances in AI technology had enabled digital humans to operate large numbers of accounts impersonating real human streamers, prompting the platform to enhance its AI streamer detection systems. Cumulatively, Douyin processed over 170,000 pre-recorded livestream rooms, closed more than 30,000 accounts, and took enforcement action against over 2,800 black-market syndicates exploiting digital human technology.

Industry Scale & Investment: China's digital human sector recorded 23 financing deals in the first half of 2025, approaching the full-year total for 2024, with aggregate funding reaching 3.507 billion yuan and an average deal size exceeding 150 million yuan, according to IT桔子 data. Gartner senior analyst Fei Tianqi noted that in their 2025 survey of China's AI market, digital humans ranked among the applications with the highest user activity and industry engagement, with strong performance observed across e-commerce, entertainment, finance, and education verticals. The China Internet Association (中国互联网协会) projected China's digital human core market to exceed 48 billion yuan in 2025, with the broader associated industry value surpassing 640 billion yuan.

Policy & Industry Coordination: The China Internet Association convened the 2025 Digital Human Work Symposium on July 18, 2025, drawing representatives from more than 20 leading digital human companies including Beijing Mobile (北京移动), Xiaoice (小冰), Baidu, Mofashe Technology (魔珐科技), Shiyou Technology (世优科技), Zhipu Huazhang (智谱华章), and Fantuo (凡拓). Discussions covered the AI-plus-digital-human technology trajectory, innovation in application scenarios, and industry challenges. The association also outlined its Digital Human Vanguard Plan (数字人领航计划) priorities for 2025, organized around four pillars: technology, applications, safety, and talent development.

July 16 News

Healthcare: Digital Domain (数字王国) collaborated with a youth named Zijian Chen (梓键), known by the nickname "Snail Kid" (蝸牛仔), who lives with a rare disease, to create a personalized AI virtual human designed to transcend his physical limitations and support the continuation of his aspirations. The avatar was constructed using facial motion capture tools to accurately reproduce Zijian's appearance and expressions, and integrated AI-driven voice technology alongside Digital Domain's proprietary real-time multimodal virtual human engine, Momentum Cloud. Beyond this individual humanitarian application, Digital Domain's AI virtual humans have been presented more broadly as performance benchmarks for telemedicine, with the technology positioned as a foundation for future remote healthcare delivery applications.

Marketing: China's market for virtual digital humans is projected to reach 10.24 billion yuan, fueled by the rapid commercialization of privatized digital human livestream systems. Reports from NetEase (网易) and Sina Finance (新浪财经) describe a growing trend in which companies are deploying proprietary digital human platforms to enhance profitability and operational control within livestream-based e-commerce. Luo Yonghao's digital avatar has achieved notable commercial success through livestream product promotions, serving as a prominent example of the model and stimulating increased capital investment in dedicated digital human livestream studios across the country.

Ethical Contexts: A case documented by Beijing Daily (北京日报) and Sina Finance involved a 75-year-old man named Jiang who mistakenly believed that an AI digital human, modeled after a well-known female television host, had expressed genuine romantic interest in him. The incident drew attention to the psychological risks that entertainment-style AI virtual humans pose to elderly and vulnerable users, particularly when realistic synthetic personas are deployed in emotionally engaging contexts without adequate safeguards. The case prompted broader debate regarding the responsibilities of developers and platform operators in preventing emotional manipulation and ensuring transparent disclosure of synthetic identities.

July 15 News

Broadcasting: Baifu Technology developed the Zhihu AI Unmanned Broadcast System, which deploys a virtual host equipped with a "cold field report" function that automatically inserts pre-written content during technical failures or script gaps, ensuring continuous broadcast operations and reducing reliance on live human presenters. In the Chinese television production "Fengqi Dongfang," Extended Reality technologies were combined with digital human characters, with the production requiring real-time blending of XR assets with synthetic personas to achieve seamless visual and narrative integration—representing a significant step in the deployment of digital humans within domestic broadcast media.

Commerce: Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD.com (京东), has deployed a personalized AI avatar modelled on his own likeness and communication style to conduct live-streaming e-commerce broadcasts on the platform at scale, demonstrating the commercial utility of executive-grade synthetic personas in Chinese retail environments. The Yuanqi team has separately developed an AI digital human capable of replicating a real person's voice with precision, advancing synthetic identity capabilities for applications spanning entertainment, education, and commercial contexts within China's digital economy.

Entertainment: Research into virtual YouTubers in China traces the development of the VTuber subculture from 2016, documenting fan resistance to commercialization, strategic platform migration, and the active preservation of niche community identities as defining characteristics of the ecosystem's evolution. Studies of Gen Z audiences in China have further examined the overconsumption of virtual idols, identifying parasocial attachment and fear of missing out as the primary psychological mechanisms through which sustained emotional bonds with synthetic celebrities are formed, with digital intimacy and media exposure identified as key mediating factors. Comparative analyses have also assessed China's virtual human development alongside those of South Korea and Japan, mapping differences in economic strategy, cultural integration, and national policy frameworks governing the synthetic character industry across the three markets.

Enterprise: Zhongyin Fashion and Xinchangyuan Technology are each developing virtual digital human systems grounded in AIGC and three-dimensional digital reconstruction, with commercial applications targeting branding, fashion, and e-commerce. Huitao Jinyuan has launched a digital twin initiative oriented toward enterprise-level avatar integration across multiple sectors, reflecting the growing institutional investment in high-fidelity synthetic personas as operational infrastructure within China's broader digital economy.

AI Companions: Xiaoice (小冰), a Chinese AI companion platform that was spun off from Microsoft as an independent company, simulates friendship and interactive social communication, providing users with a synthetic social presence designed to approximate the emotional dynamics of human relationships. The platform represents a distinct category of virtual being deployment in China—one centred on ongoing personal companionship rather than transactional interaction—and has been cited alongside commercial avatar deployments as part of the broader spectrum of virtual beings in Chinese digital life.

Social Good: Digital Domain, a Hollywood-based visual effects company, collaborated with Hong Kong's DMD Teen advocacy project to create a personalized AI virtual human named Tszkin, capturing the subject from multiple camera angles to produce a photorealistic digital version deployed in public communications promoting social awareness and youth engagement. The project was enabled by Digital Domain's Momentum Cloud platform, a real-time control system for photorealistic virtual humans offering biometric rendering fidelity and precise animation control over facial expressions and body language, which the company positions as foundational infrastructure for digital human creation across both entertainment and humanitarian applications.

July 14 News

Education: Changsha Blue Sky Vocational School has embedded virtual digital human operations into its e-commerce livestreaming curriculum, training students in multi-camera livestream directing alongside synthetic presenter management. This integration into formal vocational education reflects how Chinese professional training institutions are preparing a workforce capable of deploying AI-driven livestream hosts and virtual human systems within commercial media and e-commerce production environments.

Healthcare: Shandong Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (山东数字人科技有限公司) was awarded a procurement contract with Peking University Health Science Center, indicating institutional adoption of digital human technologies within a leading academic medical context. The deployment suggests applications in areas such as clinical training, patient communication, or public health engagement, representing a notable instance of China's formal healthcare and academic sectors incorporating synthetic human interfaces into institutional operations.

Production: 隆扬电子 (Longyang Electronics) has undertaken projects addressing the technical complexity of integrating XR (Extended Reality) assets with lifelike digital characters in real-time filming environments. The work foregrounds the need for precision across depth perception, realism, and production workflow, illustrating the level of technical sophistication required when deploying digital humans within extended reality content pipelines for visual production.

Brand and Marketing: GIGABYTE introduced its first official brand avatar, named 雕妹, at the BW (BiliBili World) exhibition, presenting the character in multiple costume variations including maid, student, and traditional qipao outfits. The virtual persona functions as a digital brand representative within Chinese fan communities and expo culture, demonstrating how hardware and technology companies are leveraging avatar characters for promotional visibility and product identity in Chinese market contexts.

July 13 News

Cultural: Guangxi province has allocated nearly 100 million yuan in funding across seven major AI scenario projects, with the virtual digital human "Liu Sanjie" (刘三姐) serving as a flagship public-facing deployment through which citizens can interactively engage with regional cultural content. The Guangzhou National Archive has similarly adopted virtual digital humans to provide real-time responses to public inquiries about cultural information and historical documents, with Archive director Zhang Weitao citing the role of such technology in making historically dormant cultural heritage more accessible amid the pressures of rapid technological change and expanding communication boundaries. The Xixia Imperial Tombs in Yinchuan, now a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site, are employing AI restoration technology to generate virtual representations of historical figures and cultural artifacts, illustrating how virtual beings are being applied at heritage sites to bridge historical preservation with contemporary digital accessibility.

Enterprise: Jiangsu Zhihui Xijian Engineering Project Management Co., Ltd. implemented a pioneering "digital human + one-time bidding competition selection" model in Xinwu District, Jiangsu province, marking the entry of intermediary professional services into AI-assisted virtual human workflows within the public procurement sector. In the e-commerce domain, a factory specializing in underlayer garments worked with the content platform Xianzhi AIGC Super Factory (显智AIGC超工厂) to produce short video content driven by AI digital human hosts, combining virtual presenters with dynamic swimwear product demonstrations to generate measurable traffic and sales on major short-video platforms. Zhangtong AI Digital Human positions itself as a comprehensive solution provider targeting the full spectrum of enterprise virtual human applications with dedicated partner support infrastructure, while Huaxin Jiahua AI Digital Human addresses the same enterprise market by promoting AI digital humans as intelligent "super employees," framing its offering as a means to unlock significant commercial value by embedding autonomous virtual agents into business workflows.

Entertainment: Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou entered the Douyin platform through his virtual avatar "Zhou Tongxue" (周同学), with a debut video using artificial intelligence to narrate his journey from childhood to fame, accumulating over 6.3 million likes within four hours of release and demonstrating the commercial reach of celebrity-linked virtual avatars on Chinese short-video platforms. The AORUS brand developed the virtual character "Diaomei" (雕妹), whose animated performances were synchronized to electronic music and attracted audiences at the intersection of gaming culture and virtual entertainment, illustrating the use of branded virtual beings within the Chinese esports and gaming ecosystem. Basketball player Yang Hansen's virtual representation in 2K games provides a further instance of real-world athletic performance being translated into a licensed digital avatar product within commercially distributed gaming titles.

Marketing: Research by H. Li, W. Li, and T. Ma examines how varying intelligence levels among AI-powered virtual idols influence impulsive buying intentions among digital natives, framing virtual idols as commercially significant actors with measurable impact on consumer psychology and affirming their high commercial value. Complementary work by J. Chen and Y. Wang finds that consumers perceive AI influencers as offering superior experiences compared to human influencers across dimensions including reliability and trustworthiness, while also demonstrating that virtual influencers enhance freshness perceptions of promoted products. H. Xia, Y. Yang, and X. Wang investigate how the physical appearance of virtual influencers, specifically beauty levels, shapes consumer reactions and perceived threat, contributing to an expanding body of scholarship on synthetic figure psychology in digital marketing contexts. TikTok, the international short-video platform operated by Beijing-based ByteDance, is upgrading its recommendation algorithms to enable businesses to deploy virtual influencers described as AI clones for product promotion through video and livestream formats, providing platform-level infrastructure support for virtual being-based commercial activity at scale.

July 12 News

Healthcare: Morpho Technology (魔珐科技) partnered with Qianhai Life Insurance's Guangxi Hospital to deploy digital humans across multiple departments, where these AI-powered figures deliver medical information using natural voice, precise facial expressions, and professional tones calibrated to replicate real healthcare professionals. The implementation operates as a "medical expression matrix," supporting multi-role and multi-department use cases and improving both the accessibility and consistency of medical knowledge communication to patients and staff.

Public Services: Desun Technology developed an AI Agent engine supporting a digital human system integrated into social security services in Dongguan, China. Since its deployment in April 2021, the platform has served over 3.41 million users and handled more than 9 million inquiries, achieving a response rate exceeding 90%, demonstrating the capacity of digital human systems to scale public service delivery while sustaining quality and responsiveness at a government-level operation.

Cultural and Policy: A state-level initiative in China positions virtual digital humans—generated through AI, computer graphics, and natural language processing—as cultural and economic assets, encouraging entities to submit digital human cases with clear intellectual property rights and framing these technologies as central to metaverse product development. This initiative reflects a national strategic orientation toward virtual beings as drivers of both cultural production and digital economy growth.

Ethical and Legal Contexts: Legal scholars Li Hao and Xu Yaoming have conducted analysis of civil rights issues arising from virtual digital humans in China, focusing specifically on likeness rights and copyright. Their work addresses the legal status of highly realistic digital recreations of individuals, including deceased persons, noting that while such recreations may exhibit lower originality, they may nonetheless qualify as protected works under copyright law. The involvement of real human performers, referred to as "中之人," introduces additional complexity around property rights, personal identity, and the terms of employment or identity disclosure in virtual human production.

July 11 News

Entertainment: Douyin (抖音), China's dominant short-video platform, has seen the rapid emergence of virtual influencer accounts such as "周同學," which accumulated tens of thousands of followers without publishing any content, illustrating the commercial and cultural appeal of stylized avatar-based virtual celebrities in short-form video formats. Building on this trend, production guilds including 听潮阁 and 造梦师 have developed variety-style programming in which virtual performers participate in games and challenges using animated avatars, reflecting a broader industry shift toward fully virtual media talent and original digital programming within China's entertainment ecosystem.

Enterprise: Baidu Smart Cloud (百度智能云) developed an AI sign language digital human named Xiling, which integrates high-precision speech recognition with sign language translation capabilities to deliver real-time sign language generation, video-to-sign-language conversion, and manuscript sign language broadcasting; the platform was recognized by the United Nations with the "AI for Good – Innovate for Impact" award for advancing communication accessibility for the hearing impaired, and has been cited as a leading example of highly natural user interaction driven by generative AI including diffusion algorithms. AutoNavi (高德地图), China's major mapping and navigation service, has deployed virtual avatars within augmented reality navigation features, using digital human presenters to enhance spatial storytelling and guide users through immersive, interactive map exploration experiences.

Policy and Economy: China's 2025 metaverse case collection, initiated by four government departments, identifies virtual digital humans as a core infrastructure element alongside industrial digital twins, cultural tourism virtual performances, and XR-based interactive displays encompassing AR, VR, holography, and glasses-free 3D technologies, with these applications projected to yield measurable economic benefits and generate new professional categories. Silkroad Vision (丝路视觉), publicly listed on China's stock exchange, is formally categorized among virtual digital human and metaverse concept stocks, reflecting active capital market participation in this sector. Economist Pan Helin has observed that virtual digital humans have already reached commercial deployment at scale and are expected to reshape economic structures by producing new professions and consumption models, positioning virtual beings as catalysts for structural transformation in employment, productivity, and digital governance.

July 10 News

Entertainment: Baidu (百度) deployed a digital human version of entrepreneur and live-streaming personality Luo Yonghao on its e-commerce platform, generating a gross merchandise volume exceeding 55 million yuan and attracting 13 million viewers in a single broadcast. This case establishes a concrete benchmark for the commercial performance of digital humans in live entertainment formats, demonstrating that virtual human presenters can sustain large-scale audience engagement and drive significant transactional volume in real time.

Marketing and E-Commerce: Digital human livestream commerce has become an increasingly structured deployment area, with Baidu's Luo Yonghao broadcast serving as a leading example of virtual humans conducting real-time product promotions at scale. Private deployment of digital human livestream systems is gaining traction among businesses seeking personalized and technologically self-managed solutions, with growing interest in system privatization methodologies that allow enterprises to operate virtual presenters independently. Virtual try-on and virtual tourism applications further extend the functional scope of digital humans in retail and promotional contexts, supported by mature multimodal interaction technologies that integrate advanced voice recognition and natural language processing.

Technology and Platforms: Baidu's Xi Ling Digital Human (曦灵数字人) platform provides MCP-compliant APIs capable of generating 2D digital human videos, synthesizing speech, and cloning voices, supporting a wide range of enterprise and creative deployment scenarios. Baidu additionally operates Xiaokan Planet (小看星球), an AI-based virtual human chat application that uses open-domain conversation models to deliver 24/7 AI companionship, representing a distinct product line targeting social interaction and emotional engagement use cases. XR technology is increasingly integrated with digital humans through meticulous real-time production calibration, enhancing visual authenticity and delivering more immersive extended reality experiences. Gaode Maps (高德地图) incorporates AR functionalities that allow users to interact with digital avatars tied to specific geographical and temporal contexts, illustrating the application of virtual representations in consumer-facing navigation and location services.

Enterprise and Investment: The virtual digital human sector in China's financial markets has seen notable growth, with Fengshang Culture (丰尚文化) attracting investor attention and capital inflow exceeding 1 billion yuan, reflecting strong confidence in expanding application scenarios and market potential. Industry forecasts project the virtual digital human market reaching 10.24 billion yuan, underscoring the scale and commercial growth trajectory of the sector across entertainment, marketing, and enterprise verticals. China has also actively encouraged institutional development in virtual beings by initiating the selection of representative metaverse case studies for 2025, with particular emphasis on intellectual property compliance, technological sophistication, and the tangible innovativeness of digital human applications.

July 09 News

Cultural Tourism: The Tengwang Pavilion in Jiangxi province features a virtual human guide named "AI Wang Bo," designed to digitally reenact the Tang dynasty poet Wang Bo and deliver guided tours recounting the cultural and literary heritage of the site. This deployment offers visitors interactive, immersive storytelling experiences that combine historical education with AI-driven character performance, exemplifying how synthetic characters are being applied at culturally significant destinations across China to deepen visitor engagement.

Policy and Regulation: China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the National Radio and Television Administration jointly launched a 2025 initiative to identify and recommend exemplary metaverse applications, with digital humans designated as a central category. Case studies considered for recognition must demonstrate full intellectual property ownership over the virtual characters involved, a high degree of technical maturity, and verifiable application success. Separately, Shanghai has published dedicated support policies for foundational research in digital human technologies, with particular emphasis on advances in AI, graphics, modeling, and natural language processing. Multiple provinces have additionally begun deploying new digital human products in administrative and public-facing capacities, reflecting a broad governmental commitment to integrating synthetic characters into official and enterprise-facing operations throughout the country.

Commerce and Livestreaming: Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) has developed a virtual human system integrated with the Tongyi Qianwen large language model to support livestream e-commerce, enabling the automated generation of livestream scripts and interactive conversation templates for real-time viewer engagement and sales facilitation. This implementation marks a meaningful transition from static avatar presentations toward intelligent, conversational AI companions capable of performing dynamic content and sales functions within live commerce environments. An additional case involves an AI-generated digital human persona modeled on entrepreneur Luo Yonghao, deployed for culturally resonant humor and meme commentary within Chinese online media, illustrating the expanding social roles of synthetic characters beyond transactional contexts.

Enterprise and Infrastructure: Baidu (百度) operates the Xiling Digital Human Open Platform, a comprehensive development ecosystem for digital humans that includes integration with the MCP protocol and is available on PyPI for Python-based implementations, supporting the creation and deployment of digital humans across multiple sectors. Baidu has also been granted a patent for a deep learning-based system to generate virtual personas, further consolidating its investment in AI-generated identity technologies. In Guizhou province, entrepreneur Dong Bo has led the establishment of a metaverse-oriented digital human filming base developed in collaboration with more than ten local enterprises, providing professional production infrastructure and backend services for the commercial creation of digital personas in support of China's broader metaverse ecosystem ambitions.

Security and Research: Published research details significant vulnerabilities in expressive human pose and shape models used in digital human generation systems, introducing a targeted adversarial attack framework called TBA that systematically exploits weaknesses in these generative pipelines. The findings highlight the need for enhanced security measures as digital humans grow more sophisticated and are deployed in sensitive or high-profile applications, identifying a pressing area of technical risk for an industry increasingly embedded in commercial and governmental contexts.

Industry Assessment: NetEase (网易) has published a critical analysis of the current state of virtual human technologies in China, concluding that most products remain at a stage of superficial usability—capable of visual plausibility but functionally limited by stiff facial expressions, inaccurate movement rendering, and high barriers to user adoption. This assessment articulates the gap between technological ambition and commercial readiness in synthetic character systems and signals the key areas where substantive improvement will be required as the sector moves toward more interactive, lifelike, and widely accessible virtual human applications.

July 08 News

Enterprise: Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), a leading AIGC company, completed a Series D funding round and reported revenues of several hundred million RMB from its digital human business, serving over 500,000 users through its DU·IX platform. The platform encompasses virtual live broadcasting, video production, and intelligent customer service systems, with its digital human broadcaster solution delivering approximately 80% cost reductions for commercial clients. Silicon Intelligence has deployed intelligent customer service avatars in partnership with over 30 financial institutions, including banks and insurance firms, and collaborates with mainstream television stations to produce virtual hosts, demonstrating the breadth of enterprise deployment across media and financial sectors.

Healthcare: Chinese companies are actively developing healthcare-oriented AI agents that pair advanced AI capabilities with highly anthropomorphized virtual human appearances and individualized names, with the explicit goal of improving patient interaction and building trust in clinical and care settings. The AI companion EVE, developed for emotional support applications, enables real-time video and voice conversations and delivers emotionally calibrated responses tailored to individual users, with a reported use case in which EVE successfully provided a virtual "milk tea" experience as a form of digital comfort, illustrating how virtual beings in China are being deployed to address companionship and wellbeing needs through humanized, scenario-specific interactions.

Gaming: NetEase (网易) has integrated virtual characters into its game Nishuihan (逆水寒), with the resulting deployment examined in a case study published in Highlights in Business, Economics and Management, which investigates how these virtual characters shape user expectations and influence game design decisions. The research positions NetEase's implementation as a substantive example of how virtual beings function within large-scale commercial game environments to structure player experience and emotional engagement.

Policy and Capital: Shanghai's municipal government has issued explicit policy support for digital humans (数字人), digital twins (数字孪生), and virtual reality (虚拟现实), framing these technologies as strategic assets within a broader initiative to expand application scenarios across industries and accelerate development of the city's software and information services sector. Chinese financial media outlets Securities Daily and Yibang Power have reported on the deepening integration of digital human technologies within a "technology–market–capital" synergy framework, reflecting sustained capital investment that is driving the deployment of virtual beings across diverse real-world sectors and reinforcing institutional momentum behind China's digital human industry.

July 07 News

Cultural Heritage: In Jiangxi province, a digital human modeled on the Tang dynasty poet Wang Bo has been deployed as an AI-powered tour guide at Tengwang Pavilion. The virtual figure delivers narrated historical accounts of the site and generates personalized touring routes based on individual visitor preferences, combining heritage interpretation with adaptive interactivity. The Online Shandong Anti-Japanese War Memorial has similarly installed virtual representations of wartime heroes to enable simulated interactions with historical figures, extending its function beyond passive commemoration. The memorial platform incorporates real-time strategy gameplay in which users command troops on a virtual battlefield, alongside an intelligent interaction zone that supports participatory red song sing-alongs, integrating emotional and educational engagement within a single immersive environment.

Media and Journalism: Shang Hailong, a Legislative Council member and executive at SenseTime (商汤科技), created a digital human version of himself to deliver a broadcast report on the aircraft carrier Shandong. Using the AI digital anchor as the on-screen presenter, Shang conveyed an immersive first-person account of his visit to the carrier, demonstrating the adoption of synthetic characters in official and journalistic communication roles. The deployment reflects a convergence of political engagement and virtual embodiment, with the digital human functioning as both a technical showcase and a vehicle for public-facing institutional messaging.

Entertainment: At the 2025 SCO Film Festival, more than forty Chinese companies exhibited capabilities spanning virtual production, motion capture, and AI-driven digital human systems. The China Film Artificial Intelligence Research Institute was among the exhibitors, presenting AIGC-generated short films in which digital humans perform within virtual production environments, illustrating a shift toward synthetic actors in professional filmmaking pipelines. One company executive, Yin Qiang, described the trajectory of digital human technology as having advanced from surface-level visual rendering to deep functional modeling, with current systems now capable of identifying and responding appropriately to over ten thousand distinct objects—a development that substantially broadens the behavioral range of synthetic characters in cinematic contexts.

Technology: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has published research on OmniAvatar, a voice-driven virtual human system that allows users to adjust both character tone and visual background through text-based commands. The system is capable of generating virtual singing performances complete with synchronized lip movements and rhythmic accuracy. Its underlying architecture, detailed in a paper released on arXiv, employs multimodal learning that integrates audio, visual, and textual data streams to produce enhanced realism and interactivity, representing a substantive advance in generative avatar modeling within Chinese AI research and development.

Regulatory: Shandong Digihuman Technology (山东数字人科技股份有限公司), a Beijing Stock Exchange-listed company developing digital anatomy technology for medical education, received an administrative supervisory measure from the CSRC Shandong Regulatory Bureau on June 30, 2025. The bureau issued the company an order to rectify alongside a warning letter, following the identification of inaccurate financial data disclosures across its 2021–2023 annual reports, stemming from improper revenue recognition methods and deficient internal controls. The company's chairman, CEO, board secretary, and CFO were each individually issued warning letters and recorded in the securities market integrity database. While the company's core business — digitized human body modeling and visualization for medical and educational applications — sits at the intersection of virtual representation and institutional deployment, the case is primarily one of securities compliance rather than sector-specific digital human regulation.

July 06 News

Entertainment: China's immersive cinema sector demonstrated notable integration of digital human performances at the Future Cinema section of the Shanghai International Film Festival, which showcased 16 immersive productions incorporating technologies including VR opera and AR-enhanced visuals such as AR tigers. These experiences blend synthetic characters with immersive environments, illustrating the convergence of AI and extended reality storytelling in live cultural formats. The deployment of digital characters within XR frameworks in China is recognised as technically demanding, requiring precise adjustments across content creation, live shooting, and broadcast stages in order to sustain both realism and audience immersion.

E-commerce and Marketing: China has emerged as a leading market for deploying digital humans in commercial livestreaming, with a documented case in which AI-driven digital human clones generated $7.6 million in a single live sales session, illustrating how synthetic characters can match or exceed the sales performance of human presenters in e-commerce contexts. The broader Chinese digital human industry has achieved rapid scalability through advances in large language models, computer vision, and speech synthesis, enabling AI-generated virtual characters to replicate human appearance, voice, and expressions while delivering real-time interactivity. These capabilities have made digital human hosts and virtual influencers core assets in video production and customer-facing roles, helping brands reduce operational costs and increase efficiency across platforms. The ongoing commercialisation of virtual hosts further entrenches their role in digital marketing and e-commerce strategy within China.

Enterprise: Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), a leading AIGC unicorn, has built a multi-product digital human business comprising the DUIX interactive platform, a virtual livestreaming platform, a video production platform, and intelligent customer service solutions. Having completed its Series D financing, the company has served more than 500,000 users and collaborates with over 30 banks and insurance companies to deploy digital human-based AI customer service systems, significantly reducing operational costs. Silicon Intelligence promotes the concept of "silicon-based labour" and has introduced the idea of "silicon-based life" as the philosophical and commercial foundation for its AI-driven digital human services, underpinned by its resources in computing power, financial capital, and electricity.

Companion and Social: China's expanding single population has driven demand for AI-powered digital human companions, particularly within metaverse and virtual environments oriented toward emotional support. A report by Biyie.com (币界网) describes the virtual digital human industry as rapidly evolving to meet individual emotional and companionship needs through personalised interaction. Forecasts indicate that China's virtual human market could reach ¥270 billion by 2030, with an estimated global creation rate of one virtual human per day by that time, reflecting increasing societal normalisation of AI companions among younger and digitally native demographics in China.

Research and Academia: Academic research with a focus on Chinese e-commerce and livestreaming practices has increasingly examined the behavioural and psychological dimensions of virtual streamers. Han et al. (2025) investigate how disclosure of a virtual streamer's AI-generated identity in e-commerce livestreaming affects consumer trust and purchasing behaviour, finding that transparency around the use of virtual streamers improves consumer perceptions of corporate social responsibility. Liu and Zhang (2025) analyse how the anthropomorphic design of virtual streamers heightens social presence and drives purchase intentions among viewers. Cheng et al. (2025) examine how virtual cultural ambassadors—digital personas designed to convey heritage—affect tourists' intentions to visit destinations, identifying two forms of perceived authenticity—objective (technical realism) and constructive (cultural symbolism)—that jointly influence tourism behaviour and suggest that well-designed virtual cultural influencers can enhance destination appeal through both symbolic and technical means.

Technology and Industry: Beijing's three-year AI roadmap includes prioritised investment in virtual cells and digital twins, with applications concentrated in life sciences and computational biology, aligning with the broader digital human ecosystem through synthetic modelling of human biological systems. A study published in China describes the use of synthetic musculoskeletal gait modelling for general medical applications, emphasising its value in daily activity analysis and establishing a foundation for a new generation of digital biomarkers.

July 05 News

Entertainment: During the "Naraka: Bladepoint" professional esports league press conference, a virtual host deployed via motion capture technology engaged in real-time interaction with a human co-presenter, with the broadcast drawing over ten million viewers. This case illustrates how synthetic characters are employed in high-visibility competitive entertainment formats in China, where hybrid human-avatar hosting combines the spontaneity of live presentation with the visual precision of digital performance. At the Golden Melody Festival, AI star Mila appeared in a public forum addressing digital persona authenticity, marking a visible entry of AI-generated characters into Chinese-language music culture and raising early questions about the place of virtual performers within live cultural programming.

Marketing and Commercial Livestreaming: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has developed OmniAvatar, an AIGC platform that allows users to generate expressive virtual humans with precise lip-syncing and nuanced emotional gestures, with character actions, tones, and background scenes adjustable through text prompts. At the 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organization Film Festival held in Chongqing, Chinese companies presented AI technologies including "One Person, Many Faces," a system supporting highly adaptive synthetic characters through advanced facial synthesis; Xinhuanet (新华网) covered these exhibits, characterising the displayed digital humans as possessing the qualities of embodied emotional experience in the context of marketing and public exhibition. The Chinese commercial livestreaming sector has seen the emergence of "AI Gold-Standard Anchor" systems designed to simulate top-tier host behaviors through refined motion simulation and interaction intelligence, representing a significant leap in the commercial deployment of synthetic characters. A prominent case in this space involves Luo Yonghao (罗永浩), a high-profile figure in China whose digital human variant has attracted commercial scrutiny while simultaneously illustrating the business opportunity in privatised digital human deployment across brand and sales contexts.

Gaming and Social Platforms: Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) has made substantial investments in generative AI and digital avatar technologies, targeting applications in real-time interaction and avatar customisation within gaming and livestreaming ecosystems. China's first native metaverse platform, 宙世代 (Zhou Shidai), is a WebGL-based environment compatible across PC, mobile, and VR devices, enabling users to construct virtual avatars and scenes and participate in cross-domain social, creative, and commercial activities; the platform exemplifies the convergence of user-generated synthetic characters with immersive digital environments in the Chinese market, supporting a broad range of avatar-mediated interactions.

Education: Hikvision (海康威视) has developed WonderHub, an EdTech platform powered by AI avatars that function as pedagogical agents capable of guiding students, responding to questions, and delivering adaptive instruction. Representing a new generation of intelligent tutoring systems in China, these avatars embed interactive digital characters directly into learning environments to deliver personalised educational support at scale, reflecting broader institutional momentum toward AI-driven instructional interfaces in Chinese digital education.

Enterprise and Industrial: Digital Domain Holdings (数字王国集团) is expanding its Digital Humans Division with a focus on business-to-business applications, targeting customer interaction, service automation, and real-time human-like engagement, while pursuing strategic alliances and extended distribution channels to broaden commercial adoption. In a distinct industrial deployment, a logistics centre in China launched an initiative in which a uniformed virtual digital human performs safety inspection songs as part of employee education and compliance training, demonstrating the use of synthetic characters in operational workflow communication and workplace safety culture.

Cultural Heritage: The RiverEcho project, documented by Wang et al. (2025) under the title "Real-Time Interactive Digital System for Ancient Yellow River Culture," employs interactive digital avatars to guide users through historical narratives of Yellow River civilisation, with avatars simulating ancient figures and cultural artefacts. The system integrates real-time interaction and immersive storytelling with heritage preservation objectives, representing a substantive application of virtual beings as cultural narrators and agents of historical transmission within the Chinese context.

Ethical Contexts: Baidu (百度) has developed the digital idol Xi Jiajia, who has become a reference point in Chinese public discourse on the ethical dimensions of AI beings, particularly regarding the realism of digital personas and the appropriate boundaries of their public presence. At the Golden Melody Festival, AI star Mila's participation in debates on digital persona authenticity brought further attention to concerns over misrepresentation, identity confusion, and the potential for manipulation as avatars in the Chinese-language cultural sphere acquire increasingly human-like appearance and behaviour. These discussions frame virtual beings not solely as technological products but as entities that carry social and cultural accountability, warranting ongoing scrutiny as their capabilities and visibility expand.

July 04 News

Broadcasting: China's broadcasting industry has deployed AI anchors as fully digitized clones of existing presenters, with a notably human-like anchor from Hangzhou already fulfilling active media duties. China Daily (中国日报) operates Yuanxi, an AI-powered virtual journalist functioning as a digital being across online platforms, while Baidu (百度) has developed Xi Jiajia, a digital idol similarly deployed within China's media and online entertainment ecosystem. Digital Domain (数字王国), a visual effects and AI virtual human company headquartered in Hong Kong, has contributed to reshaping China's media production landscape through high-end digital human technology developed over three decades, reinforcing the institutionalization of synthetic characters in broadcasting workflows.

Marketing and E-commerce: Virtual humans have generated measurable commercial outcomes across China's e-commerce and livestreaming sectors. Baidu's Youxuan platform recorded an eleven-fold year-over-year increase in gross merchandise value from digital human-hosted livestreams, and brands utilizing AI-driven synthetic characters reported a 50% increase in conversion rates alongside a threefold increase in vehicle test drive appointments within automotive livestreaming contexts. Topview introduced Topview Avatar 2, which employs intelligent algorithms to simulate realistic product interactions, enabling close-to-real visual experiences for items such as vacuum cleaners and fitness equipment. AI influencer Mia Zelu gained heightened social media visibility through a controversy involving celebrity engagement, illustrating the cultural and commercial prominence of virtual characters as brand personas in China's digital environment. AI-powered virtual streamers in China are frequently constructed from models' likenesses and voice samples, with their broad popularity across online platforms drawing ongoing attention to questions of authenticity and regulatory compliance.

Entertainment and Culture: The 12th International Love and Sex with Robots Conference is scheduled to take place in China and highlights the convergence of virtual beings with immersive technologies including virtual reality and the metaverse, underscoring the role of synthetic characters in exploring human-robot intimacy and future social interaction. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Film Festival, the film "Bazaar Festivities" integrated immersive virtual environments into live stage performance alongside human celebrity hosts Ren Luyu and Huang Xiaoming, exemplifying the merging of synthetic and human elements within China's cultural broadcasting landscape.

Technology and Infrastructure: Zhijuxinlian launched its first-generation digital human prototype in late 2023, enabling rapid avatar generation based on user display devices, though broader industry scaling remains constrained by high hardware costs and technical limitations in glasses-free 3D display technology. NVIDIA's RTX Pro 6000 has enabled life-sized digital humans with holographic projection and high-resolution, low-latency XR capabilities, demonstrated through the Hologram Box display device in enterprise communications and digital twin contexts within China. Digital Domain has expanded its collaboration with higher education institutions in China through an industry-academic cooperative initiative aimed at streamlining creative workflows, cultivating specialized talent, and advancing innovation in AI-driven virtual beings, visual effects, and visualization techniques.

Market Development: Analysis from iiMedia Research (艾媒咨询) and other Chinese industry sources projects the market size for AI-based digital humans in China to reach 10.24 billion RMB, driven by growing adoption across livestreaming, marketing, and digital services. Qingfou has emerged as a key supplier of digital human broadcasting infrastructure, while entrepreneur Luo Yonghao's deployment of his own digital human likeness for livestreaming represents a high-profile early adoption case within China's commercial virtual human sector. The industry remains in a transitional phase as enterprises navigate between cautious hesitation and proactive investment, with technological readiness increasingly aligned with commercial strategy.

Ethical Contexts: China Daily has highlighted that virtual idols and AI-powered streamers raise significant ethical hazards, particularly concerning content authenticity and intellectual property rights. The widespread practice of constructing virtual streamers from models' likenesses and voice samples, in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks governing consent and representation, has intensified scrutiny of synthetic identity practices across China's digital media environment.

July 03 News

Enterprise: 263 Network Communications (263网络通信) has deployed AI digital humans across a range of industry-specific scenarios, with notable examples including "Yun Xiaoduo," a virtual employee, and "Chang Xiaoping," the virtual ambassador for Changping District in Beijing. These synthetic characters perform client-facing roles such as virtual hosting, broadcasting, and front-desk reception in digital showrooms, reflecting a deliberate enterprise strategy to leverage AI-driven avatars for digital transformation, operational efficiency, and reduction of human resource costs in public-facing functions.

Live Commerce: Luo Yonghao's livestreaming commerce campaign, which featured a digital human modelled on himself, attracted widespread attention and functioned as a catalyst for broader adoption of synthetic avatars as commercial hosts in China's livestream retail sector. In the wake of that campaign, Baidu's e-commerce platform reported a measurable increase in the deployment of its "Huiboxing" digital human system, establishing AI-generated virtual hosts as scalable, cost-effective alternatives to human presenters within the country's fast-evolving live commerce economy.

Film and Entertainment: "Fengshen II," a Chinese mythological epic film, integrated digital biological characters and digital humans into its visual effects pipeline, blending live-action performances with post-processed digital overlays to produce high-fidelity synthetic entities. The production illustrates the expanding capability of virtual production techniques in Chinese cinema to create complex, visually seamless virtual beings that serve narrative and spectacle functions in large-scale commercial filmmaking.

Education: Digital Domain Holdings Limited (數字王國), a visual effects and AI virtual human company with operations in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, launched an industry-academic collaboration initiative centred on virtual human technology, talent development, and technological innovation. The programme introduces ESG-aligned teaching models across partner campuses in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, with the stated aim of cultivating future expertise in synthetic character technologies and embedding AI-driven virtual human content into formal educational curricula.

Legal and Cultural: Xu Weikun published an analysis in "Jiefang Daily" examining the copyrightability of digital products generated by virtual humans within the metaverse, framing virtual digital humans as digital avatars of real individuals with the potential to emerge as independent creative subjects. The discussion situates synthetic characters as central agents in a mainstream mode of virtual creation, signalling an active policy and scholarly discourse in China around how authorship, identity, and intellectual property rights are to be conceptualised and regulated as virtual beings assume greater roles in digital production and interaction.

July 02 News

Entertainment: In China's livestream e-commerce sector, Baidu (百度) partnered with entrepreneur Luo Yonghao to deploy a digital human counterpart for sales livestreaming on Baidu Youxuan, its e-commerce platform. The digital Luo Yonghao replicates the host's personal style through voice cloning, lip-syncing, and motion design, enabling real-time audience interaction in his precise likeness. Alongside this digital double, a second synthetic co-host named Zhu Xiaomu was introduced to expand the virtual hosting format, demonstrating how celebrity identity and advanced character synthesis are being merged to reshape China's livestream commerce culture under the concept of the "digital double" (数字分身). Separately, a project combining ChatGPT with AI-generated art has produced intelligent multi-platform virtual digital humans (智能虚拟数字人), designed to deliver responsive and personalised interactive experiences across entertainment interfaces, pointing to increasing sophistication in how synthetic characters are deployed for real-time user engagement in China.

Healthcare: China's Smart Medical Network has reported on the use of voice, video, and phone sensor data to continuously track users' emotional states, forming part of the technological foundation for emotionally responsive AI companions and synthetic care assistants. This approach, leveraging wearable technologies and digital biomarkers, is positioned to enable virtual beings capable of adaptive emotional support within therapeutic and monitoring contexts, signalling their growing integration into China's digital health infrastructure.

Cultural: At Hubei Vocational College of Art in China, students are trained in traditional dance by mirroring a "digital person" (数字人物) displayed on a responsive screen. AI cameras track students' movements in real time and provide corrective feedback, enabling the synthetic figure to function as an interactive instructor that responds dynamically to each learner. This application illustrates how China's cultural education sector is deploying virtual humans to preserve and modernise intangible heritage arts, using synthetic figures as pedagogical intermediaries between traditional performance disciplines and AI-driven instruction systems.

Ethical Contexts: In Shanghai, interdisciplinary calls have emerged for structured governance of virtual digital humans (虚拟数字人), as their widespread deployment raises complex societal concerns. Proposed regulatory frameworks address emotional algorithm ethics, dynamic copyright management, and the integration of technology, humanities, and law into cohesive governance models. These discussions reflect a recognition within China of the need to manage issues ranging from emotional manipulation through AI-driven synthetic characters to the legal and intellectual property questions arising from the proliferation of digital human platforms.

July 01 News

Gaming: A Qinghai-based development team, in active collaboration with a Beijing gaming studio, is converting regionally specific cultural assets—including historical architecture and material artifacts—into interactive digital beings for deployment within gaming environments. The partnership uses digital avatars as the primary vehicle for cultural storytelling, enabling players to engage with locally distinct heritage through immersive, avatar-driven gameplay experiences.

Marketing: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has deployed a virtual avatar system within its Metaverse Mall platform, using digital avatars to perform product modeling functions for consumer goods including footwear. The platform integrates avatar technology to deliver interactive digital try-on experiences, embedding virtual human representations as a structural component of its broader e-commerce and consumer engagement strategy.

Cultural: Taiwan's deployment of augmented reality within immersive theater productions uses avatars to support archaeological education, constructing interactive environments in which participants engage with cultural heritage content through digital representations of historical contexts. This application positions avatars as active instruments of cultural preservation and educational participation, using virtual beings to make archaeological subject matter accessible and experientially engaging for audiences.