The 2020 academic record points to China’s “digital human” development moving in three coordinated directions: market-facing virtual personas and avatar-mediated commerce, human-centric affective interaction research, and institutional/cultural deployment studies, with work spanning both Chinese and international venues and often grounded in Chinese platforms, datasets, or cultural settings. Studies on virtual influencers and virtual streamers treat China as a distinct media economy shaped by fan-community consumption logics and rapid infrastructure change, while consumer-technology research tests adoption of avatar-based retail tools such as virtual fitting rooms with Chinese samples, indicating an applied focus on commercialization and user acceptance alongside theory. In parallel, multiple Chinese-authored contributions emphasize affective virtual agents, including reviews of emotion modeling for virtual humans and experiments where high-fidelity virtual human voice interaction is used for anxiety soothing, signaling a push toward emotionally responsive, embodied interaction in VR and related HCI settings. A smaller but salient thread analyzes AI-mediated “humanoid” agents in governance and religion, such as discussions of AI judges in China’s internet courts and analyses of robot-monk media practices in contemporary Chinese Buddhism, showing that 2020 scholarship also framed digital humans as socio-technical instruments embedded in institutions and cultural systems rather than only entertainment products.
Feng, L., Zhang, Z., & Li, X. (2020). Maintenance operation control of virtual human in collaborative virtual maintenance. Journal of System Simulation, 32(7), 1201–1210.
Guo, Q., Deng, Z., Cheng, S., & Liu, X. (2020). The man-machine interactive workload evaluation method based on motion capture. Journal of Computer-Aided Design & Computer Graphics, 32(10), 1697–1706.
Hao, Q., & Guo, Z. (2020). Analysis of virtual human in body schema. Journal of Computer-Aided Design & Computer Graphics, 32(7), 1080–1086.
Li, A., & Xu, Y. (2020). A study of Chinese consumers’ adoption behaviour toward virtual fitting rooms. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, 13(2), 140-149.
Ting-Ting, L. I. U., Jian, L. I. U., Hui-Huang, X. U., Jin, Y. U., Yan-Jie, C. I., & Jing, L. U. (2020). Modeling Virtual Humans’ Emotions Based on Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Emotions: A Review. Journal of Psychological Science, 43(1), 53-59.
Travagnin, S. (2020). From online Buddha halls to robot-monks: New developments in the long-term interaction between Buddhism, media, and technology in contemporary China. Review of Religion and Chinese Society, 7(1), 120-148.
Wang, N. (2020, November). “Black Box Justice”: Robot Judges and AI-based Judgment Processes in China’s Court System. In 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS) (pp. 58-65). IEEE.
Yi, Y., Weng, D., Song, X., & Mo, S. (2020). Study of virtual human voice interaction on the soothing effects of anxiety. Journal of System Simulation, 28(10), 2578-2585.
Zhou, X. (2020). Virtual Youtuber Kizuna AI: co-creating human-non-human interaction and celebrity-audience relationship.
Zhuang, J. (2020). Will virtual livestreamers replace humans in China. Jing Daily. Retrieved July, 15, 2024.