Pantheon Lab Develops Digital Human Avatars
Created on March 9|Last edited on March 9
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A Hong Kong AI startup called Pantheon Lab, founded in 2019, is developing digital human avatars. Why? Their product is versatile when it comes to anything marketing related.
These digital avatars can serve as brand ambassadors and even take part in advertising campaigns. They seem like a cost-effective and professional way to generate traffic to a company without having to pay a team of people to create something for them. They use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create hyper-realistic faces.
This is certainly a unique application of generative AI. Applying generative AI to advertising and ambassadorship would alleviate a lot of the roadblocks, money, and precious time spent curating a real team of professionals. What's interesting here is that the idea of virtual avatars is nothing new. Lots of virtual reality tools allow for virtual avatars and avatar customization. Instead, this application is directed towards the corporate world with the goal of delivering a fast, efficient method for marketing.
There may be a few difficulties along the way, though. GANs seem to be lagging slightly behind Diffusion-based models. Each have their pros and cons. What makes leveraging generative AI for virtual avatars so difficult is the ability to not just generate images, but videos of humans where each detail and pixel of the video is extremely important. Not only does the visual component of this avatar have to be pixel perfect, but the audio aspect, that is the audio generated by the avatar, has to be audible, understandable, and human. What might seem like a task that already has pre-existing solutions (generating faces -> GANs/Diffusion models, audio -> AudioLM, Imagen Video -> Video Generation) is actually an intricate marriage of all 3 works.
This cyberpunk, Blade Runner-like application of AI could be very useful and perhaps not just in marketing but also in virtual reality.
References
Shen, Xinmei. “Hong Kong Start-up Pantheon Lab Is Creating Digital Humans for Companies.” South China Morning Post, 9 Mar. 2023.
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