Wednesday, June 14, 2023
VTubers are online personalities who interact with the world using motion-capture-powered manga and anime-inspired avatars in games, on YouTube, and elsewhere. They have grown to be a significant industry, with the most well-known of them amassing hundreds of millions of hours of monthly viewership, as well as devoted fan bases, lucrative sponsorships, and demand for more.
It now seems that big tech is beginning to pay attention. Amazon and other major investors, including some well-known figures in the content and avatar production industries, have invested in a startup called Hyper that has developed technology to make the creation and use of these avatars a much easier (and less expensive) business.
Although the startup has not yet released usage statistics, the bakers here attest to some intriguing traction. Two Sigma Ventures is leading the $3.6 million seed round, which also includes MakersFund, Twitch owner Amazon’s Alexa Fund, and individuals like Robin Raskza, CEO and founder of Facemoji (an avatar platform acquired by Google), Trevor McFedries, founder of Brud, Inc. (creator of Lil Miquela), Dan Romero, CEO and founder of social media platform Farcaster, and Trevor McFedries.
But Hyper thinks it can tap into a new market for creating and using VTuber-style avatars on these platforms by ditching the customary fussy setup of motion capture suits, expensive computer and camera equipment, and bandwidth overhead. Instead, Hyper will use just an iPhone and an app.
The Winter ’21 cohort of YCombinator incubated the San Francisco-based Hyper, which is leveraging the most recent funding to expand both its current business and develop new products based on its avatar technology.
The most recent addition to the platform is Hyper AI, a tool for building AI-based characters that may appear to be exactly like some of Hyper’s existing VTuber avatars but are built entirely from AI. They can be employed as personal chatbots, as storytelling characters that appear alongside VTuber avatars wherever those avatars may be utilized, or simply on their own to drive activity when the human VTuber just wants to take a break but fans do not.
While VTubers normally power their avatars with their energy, Hyper AI figures are propelled by generative AI based on OpenAI’s GPT, and tailored by Hyper to reply to comments and inquiries in plain English. While OpenAI’s APIs were the most accessible and practical, according to Ng, the startup will probably eventually collaborate with other companies as well.
You can see how Hyper might be appealing, whether that means integrating its tools into Twitch, leveraging its technology to create characters based on the IP that Amazon owns, using it on other platforms owned by Amazon, or something else entirely.
The “synthetic influencer” platform Superplastic, another startup in the Alexa Fund portfolio, may provide some insight into what Amazon has in mind here. There, the goal is to create a larger media empire centered on some of Superplastic’s characters. That may also be the course that Amazon chooses to take with Hyper.
In the meantime, innovations like Apple’s Vision Pro headset introduction are certain to shift consumer expectations once more in terms of digital interaction, providing additional opportunities for businesses to produce digitally native content and the resources to produce more of it.
[Source of Information: Techcrunch.com]
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