Dancing, singing digitally

Digital avatars are stealing airtime in China, where they appear on TV shows, billboards and even news programmes

Beijing: Liu Jun has long been a fan of a Chinese star called Amy, a teenage pop singer with red hair whose autograph he treasures – and who only exists in the digital world.

On Saturday “Amy” won a breakthrough virtual talent show in China, where computer-generated entertainers perform in front of real-life judges and tens of millions of online viewers.
“You can’t see what they are like in real life, so you can have more fantasies about them,” said 28-year-old Liu, who has attended more than ten of Amy’s concerts and fan events in recent years. “The virtual idol is indestructible – as long as the image is still there, she can stay in your heart forever,” he added.

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Amy found fame on ‘Dimension Nova’, which claims to be the world’s first talent show bringing together digital performers to dance and sing in front of celebrity judges. But Liu has followed Amy’s career from the start and said he cried when he saw her on the talent show, feeling the performer would finally get the bigger platform she deserved.

The virtual stars in the show are created by a mixture of computer animation and actors – Amy’s clothes, hairstyle and appearance are created by animators, before her human actor takes on everything else. Real-time motion capture and rendering technology mean as the human moves it is reflected by the on-screen idol. To prepare for Amy’s performances, the actor had to take extra dance training. But creators avoid all mention of the existence of the actor behind the idol.

Amy belongs to a booming virtual idol industry that is expected to be worth 1.5 billion yuan ($230 million) within the next two years, according to Beijing-based market researcher Newsijie. Video-sharing website Bilibili reported a 200 percent increase in viewing hours of its virtual idol live streaming channels in the first ten months of this year. Some experts worry that if too many companies pile in on the market the quality could suffer.