Virtual Digital Humans: Trends, Challenges, and the Future of AI Avatars

Virtual Digital Humans Reach the Common People

Ordinary users encounter virtual digital humans primarily through platforms like Kuaishou, which recently launched the "V‑Star Virtual Human Plan" featuring virtual anchors such as Fox Lili, Clever Little Panda, and others.

Kuaishou also offers its own "Kuaishou Virtual Broadcast Assistant," a one‑stop tool for "person‑driven" virtual avatars that relies on optical, inertial, and camera‑based motion capture, providing rich 3D scenes and effects.

The assistant enables audiences to interact with live streams via virtual avatars, while the fully automated "Lao Tie Smart Broadcast" product offers AI‑driven live interaction and video creation without a human operator.

These solutions improve streaming efficiency, lower operational costs, and support diverse scenarios such as digital employees, weather reporting, and 24/7 passionate broadcasting.

Enhancing Expressiveness of Virtual Digital Humans

Research from Tsinghua University’s Computer Science department, led by Professor Jia Jia, focuses on four key areas:

Virtual facial synthesis: transitioning from rule‑based parameter synthesis to high‑precision data‑driven models for greater realism and usability.

Body gesture generation: using deep self‑attention networks to produce natural, expressive, and semantically aligned gestures from multimodal context.

Automatic dance synthesis: combining data‑driven 3D dance motion datasets with choreography knowledge to enable diverse interactive applications.

Emotion‑controlled speech synthesis: multi‑dimensional speaker attributes drive voice generation that better matches the avatar’s persona.

What Exactly Is a Virtual Digital Human?

During the round‑table, experts from China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and Kuaishou concluded that Siri does not qualify as a virtual digital human.

They emphasized that a true digital human must possess a humanoid form, sci‑fi aesthetics, intelligent interactive capabilities, and a distinct personality.

Industry participants described current digital humans as being in an early, low‑technology stage with limited market penetration, while academics warned that the field may be entering a bubble‑like low point.

Future visions range from merging avatars with robots to becoming integrated human‑machine partners, but significant technical, rendering, content‑safety, and expressive challenges remain.

CCF C³

The insights above were presented at the 15th CCF C³ event, themed "Virtual Digital Humans" and hosted by Kuaishou. The CCF CTO Club plans to open a Computer Museum in Hengdian in 2024, where visitors can experience virtual digital human technology firsthand.

CCF C³ aims to connect enterprise CTOs, senior technologists, and academic scholars, focusing each session on a cutting‑edge technology topic and visiting leading tech companies.