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.

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 43 — What runs underneath: generation, voice and motion models, and the engines that drive a face in real time.
• Capture systems 19 — The rigs that record a real body or face — optical motion capture, volumetric stages, light-field arrays.
• Compute and real-time rendering 12 — GPU capacity, cloud rendering, and the low-latency transport that gets a rendered face onto a screen.
• Assets, SDKs and wardrobe 10 — What a producer buys in rather than builds — 3D assets, toolkits, and the clothes the avatar wears.
• 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 44 — Self-serve cloning priced for a small seller — an avatar and a voice in minutes, not a production.
• Multi-vertical platform vendors 39 — Specialists selling the whole capability to any buyer, with no one industry dominating the customer list.
• Virtual idol and IP agencies 37 — Characters run as talent — signed, managed and booked, whether or not a performer stands behind them.
• Hyperreal and film-grade studios 26 — Faces built shot by shot, where the cost is justified by how close to real it gets.
• Hyperscaler platforms 9 — Digital humans as one line in a large cloud catalogue, sold beside storage and compute.

Intermediation

• Digital human MCN 8 — Agencies staffing brands with avatar livestreamers, on the model the influencer trade already ran on.
• Likeness and IP rights 6 — Brokering the right to a face, and cataloguing and ranking the characters built on it.
• Industrial parks and bases 3 — Places that concentrate many digital human efforts at once — a designated zone, its accelerator, and the firms clustered in it.

Demand

• Round-the-clock live commerce 41 — Selling on livestream, where the advantage of an avatar is simply that it never stops.
• Scenic-area service 35 — Guides, greeters and ticketing at the gate of a scenic area or on a provincial tourism platform.
• Digital employee in industry and infrastructure 32 — The avatar as an operations console — ports, highways, plants and back offices, not a face for customers.
• Brand ambassadors and short drama 30 — Faces that sell — endorsement work, brand ambassadors, and AI-led short drama.
• Finance under the filing regime 29 — Banks, brokers and lenders, where clearing the deep-synthesis filing is as much the product as the avatar.
• Government service delivery 28 — The state automating its own counters — service halls, hotlines, policy interpretation, ASEAN-facing desks.
• Classroom and campus 26 — Teachers, lab assistants and campus fixtures, from K-12 through vocational training to university.
• Customer service and contact centre 25 — Service desks and call centres, inbound and outbound, where the avatar is the one answering.
• Exhibition and museum production 25 — Permanent installations commissioned by museums, science centres and planning halls.
• Historical-figure revival 23 — The dead brought back on site — poets, generals, opera singers, and a terracotta army.
• State media anchors 18 — Presenters at party and state outlets, from CCTV and Xinhua down to a prefectural daily reading policy briefs.
• Clinical and public health 13 — Hospitals and health platforms, several of them cloning their own named and credentialed physicians.
• Companionship and emotional 13 — Company as the product — companions, emotional support, and digital pets.
• Civic identity 11 — A city, prefecture or province commissioning an official face of its own, named and introduced as such.
• Commercial broadcast and IPTV 9 — Provincial broadcasters, cable groups and streaming arms putting avatars into programming they sell.
• Digital afterlife 5 — The dead rebuilt for their families, from photographs, recordings and chat logs.

Carrier

• Display and holographic hardware 21 — LED walls, transparent panels, naked-eye 3D and holographic fans — the surfaces an avatar is thrown onto.
• Consumer platforms as venues 20 — The platforms a digital human is published onto, and stands in front of an audience on.
• Devices and edge 14 — Handsets, glasses and on-device inference, where the avatar runs without a round trip to a server.
• Telecom networks and the call itself 13 — The state carriers, and 5G New Calling — where the surface a digital human appears on is the phone call.
• All-in-one machines and kiosks 10 — 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.

Outside the chain

• Market observers and rankers 8 — Who measures the market, sizes it and ranks its characters, without building any of it.
• Known only from a patent filing 8 — Records resting on a filing alone. A patent proves that a claim was made, not that a business stands behind it.