Huazhong University of Science and Technology
- Chinese name
- 华中科技大学
- Pinyin
- Unified Social Credit Code
12100000441626842D- Website
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (华中科技大学), in Wuhan, is the builder and operator of two of China’s better-travelled cultural-relic digital humans: Chuyin (楚音) and Chutie (楚铁), created with the Hubei Provincial Museum by Professor Cai Xinyuan’s (蔡新元) team at the School of Design and the Key Laboratory of Light-and-Shadow Interactive Service Technology of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Chuyin’s form is drawn from the phoenix of the museum’s signature Tiger-Seat Bird-Frame Drum (虎座鸟架鼓), coloured after Chu-state lacquerware; generated with AIGC and driven through 3D modelling, skeletal rigging, motion capture and multimodal interaction, the pair hold real-time voice dialogue with museum visitors, and both are connected to DeepSeek for second-level response. Chuyin debuted at Hubei’s 2025 “Zhongming Chutian” Lantern Festival night, then covered the 2025 national Two Sessions as a special AI reporter in a collaboration with Hubei Radio and Television, with the associated topic passing five million views and pickup by central and foreign media; the character also fronted the Audio-Visual Yangtze River communication week as an AIGC-generated virtual host. The same team’s Optics Valley AI Creativity Technology Research Institute released ARTIOO (爱吾), a multimodal AI production platform for AI cinema and digital human facial and motion control, whose first showcase was the Wuhan cultural-tourism piece “Xin Jianghan Lansheng Tu”. The university’s holographic metaverse smart swim-lane training system was separately selected as a 2025 Metaverse Typical Case, and Cai has written for the People’s Daily theory page on lifting cultural innovation with AI.