Subjects

The companies index lists every record by name. This one lists them by what they do: where a company sits in the digital human value chain, and what it puts into it. A record can appear under more than one subject, and up to three; a record with none is one whose place in the chain has not been settled.

The terms below were taken from the records rather than decided in advance, which is why several of them have no equivalent in a Western directory of the same industry. A city commissioning an official face of its own is not the same business as a company automating a service counter; a broadcaster owned by the state is not a provincial cable group; a machine sold with a person already inside it is not an LED wall. Where China’s industry divides more finely than the vocabulary usually allows for, the finer division is the one kept.

Events and organisations are indexed here too. A university or broadcaster that builds or deploys digital humans sits in the chain like any company. Ministries, standards bodies and industry associations hold no place in it, because they set the conditions for every place at once, so they are listed under Governance. An event is where the places meet, so it is sorted under Convening by the kind of gathering it is and who stages it.

Every company record has been read and placed once. That is one pass and not a finished judgement: the terms shifted while it was being made, and some records sit under a general heading because their own account of themselves stays general. A term with few records under it is as likely to mark a gap in this dataset as a thin patch in the industry.

Supply

• Models and generation engines 92 — What runs underneath: generation, voice and motion models, and the engines that drive a face in real time.
• Capture systems 25 — The rigs that record a real body or face — optical motion capture, volumetric stages, light-field arrays.
• Assets, SDKs and wardrobe 14 — What a producer buys in rather than builds — 3D assets, toolkits, and the clothes the avatar wears.
• Compute and real-time rendering 12 — GPU capacity, cloud rendering, and the low-latency transport that gets a rendered face onto a screen.
• Capture venues 2 — A room others book rather than a rig they buy — volumetric shooting bases, several of them the only one in their province.

Production

• Clone-in-minutes SaaS 70 — Self-serve cloning priced for a small seller — an avatar and a voice in minutes, not a production.
• Virtual idol and IP agencies 50 — Characters run as talent — signed, managed and booked, whether or not a performer stands behind them.
• Multi-vertical platform vendors 46 — Specialists selling the whole capability to any buyer, with no one industry dominating the customer list.
• Hyperreal and film-grade studios 38 — Faces built shot by shot, where the cost is justified by how close to real it gets.
• Hyperscaler platforms 10 — Digital humans as one line in a large cloud catalogue, sold beside storage and compute.

Intermediation

• Likeness and IP rights 14 — Brokering the right to a face, and cataloguing and ranking the characters built on it.
• Digital human MCN 9 — Agencies staffing brands with avatar livestreamers, on the model the influencer trade already ran on.
• Industrial parks and bases 4 — Places that concentrate many digital human efforts at once — a designated zone, its accelerator, and the firms clustered in it.

Demand

• Scenic-area service 91 — Guides, greeters and ticketing at the gate of a scenic area or on a provincial tourism platform.
• Government service delivery 73 — The state automating its own counters — service halls, hotlines, policy interpretation, ASEAN-facing desks.
• Classroom and campus 71 — Teachers, lab assistants and campus fixtures, from K-12 through vocational training to university.
• Round-the-clock live commerce 70 — Selling on livestream, where the advantage of an avatar is simply that it never stops.
• State media anchors 66 — Presenters at party and state outlets, from CCTV and Xinhua down to a prefectural daily reading policy briefs.
• Exhibition and museum production 59 — Permanent installations commissioned by museums, science centres and planning halls.
• Historical-figure revival 49 — The dead brought back on site — poets, generals, opera singers, and a terracotta army.
• Finance under the filing regime 42 — Banks, brokers and lenders, where clearing the deep-synthesis filing is as much the product as the avatar.
• Digital employee in industry and infrastructure 41 — The avatar as an operations console — ports, highways, plants and back offices, not a face for customers.
• Brand ambassadors and short drama 39 — Faces that sell — endorsement work, brand ambassadors, and AI-led short drama.
• Customer service and contact centre 38 — Service desks and call centres, inbound and outbound, where the avatar is the one answering.
• Clinical and public health 31 — Hospitals and health platforms, several of them cloning their own named and credentialed physicians.
• Commercial broadcast and IPTV 24 — Provincial broadcasters, cable groups and streaming arms putting avatars into programming they sell.
• Companionship and emotional 23 — Company as the product — companions, emotional support, and digital pets.
• Civic identity 13 — A city, prefecture or province commissioning an official face of its own, named and introduced as such.
• Digital afterlife 5 — The dead rebuilt for their families, from photographs, recordings and chat logs.

Carrier

• Display and holographic hardware 33 — LED walls, transparent panels, naked-eye 3D and holographic fans — the surfaces an avatar is thrown onto.
• Consumer platforms as venues 27 — The platforms a digital human is published onto, and stands in front of an audience on.
• Devices and edge 22 — Handsets, glasses and on-device inference, where the avatar runs without a round trip to a server.
• All-in-one machines and kiosks 19 — The 一体机 — a cabinet sold as one unit with a person already inside it, standing in a bank hall or a service centre.
• Telecom networks and the call itself 17 — The state carriers, and 5G New Calling — where the surface a digital human appears on is the phone call.

Governance

• Ministries and regulators 19 — The state organs — rules on labelling, livestream selling and identity, and the action plans that name digital humans as a sector.
• Industry associations and societies 10 — Ministry-supervised associations that define the terms, hand out the awards, run the competitions and speak for performers.
• Standards and evaluation bodies 6 — Who writes the national, industry and group standards for a digital human, and who tests a product against them.

Convening

• Media, culture and entertainment events 11 — Film, broadcast, publishing, advertising and games — where the digital human is a performer and the labour question is argued.
• State trade fairs 9 — Fairs run by ministries and provincial governments, where digital humans guide buyers and are sold as exhibits.
• Policy and digital-economy summits 8 — State-convened summits where digital humans are released as policy, debated as governance and staged as proof.
• Digital human, metaverse and XR events 7 — The few events whose subject is the virtual being itself, or the metaverse and XR stack it is presented inside.
• Vendor launch stages 7 — One company's own conference, where its digital human line is launched, renamed or put to a live test in public.
• Commercial sector trade shows 4 — Shows run by exhibition companies for one industry — displays, signage, medical equipment — with digital humans as a product category.

Outside the chain

• Market observers and rankers 12 — Who measures the market, sizes it and ranks its characters, without building any of it.
• Known only from a patent filing 9 — Records resting on a filing alone. A patent proves that a claim was made, not that a business stands behind it.
• Other 3 — Records with a real digital human connection that no term here yet describes — each one a term waiting to be found, or a fact waiting to be checked.