Supporting Immersive Viewing Experience in Virtual Streaming （VTubr)

Since late 2016, the public launch of virtual influencers foreshadows sensation soon after its release, receiving critical acclaim worldwide. Recently, one of the remarkable VTuber, Kizuna AI was selected as one of Asia's top 60 influencers. This highlights the potentiality of this field with the advancements of skyrocketing technology. Influenced by the big market share of ACGN (anime, comic, game, novel) culture, VTubers’ behaviors are more acceptable than real-person YouTubers. Many audiences are motivated to engage with virtual Youtubers (VTubers) as they would like to interact with favorite anime characters. In consequence, VTubers can provide relaxation and entertainment for viewers. Yet, a higher sense of distance is found between viewers and virtual avatars contrary to the variety of video genres in traditional streamers. Whereas VTubing has limited genre and content diversity under its performing style, Nakanohitos can hardly build unintuitive content under identity management. These directly affect the performance and quality of VTubing. This bottleneck leaves unsolved consequences for supporting immersive viewer engagement with VTuber. This project proposes a novel design in creating agents to share the workload of Nakanohitos and an innovative user interface in virtual reality. Significantly, possible measurements and functionalities in virtual live streaming are designed for assisting the management of characters’ persona in order to match the viewers’ expectations.

While this is a current project working on, let me share some demonstration here.
I have designed the virtual character both in traditional 2D and novel 3D design. Her name is Forever Your Partner (FYP).

2D design of the avatar, 2021
The 2D VTuber avatar in the project.
*It is able to triggered under VTube Studio or FaceRig with her Live2D design, same as typical virtual streamer.

3D VTuber Agent in the project. , 2022
Unlike the 2D version, 3D is triggered in Unity.

3D VTuber Agent Movement Demonstration , 2022
In the current stage, 3D FYP is able to dance and do simple movement. My next step is to code on the speech and voice of FYP.