above: imma is not real

Walking past a billboard for Charles & Keith, the Singaporean global shoe brand, you’d be hard pressed not to notice the tall, striking Japanese model with her signature pink bob and perfect complexion. She is imma, a virtual human created by the Japanese studio Aww Inc., co-founded by Takayuki Moriya. 

imma, the first virtual human to come out of Japan, is one of approximately 200 virtual influencers around the world who are currently gaining global fame and success by promoting well-known brands. With over 400,000 followers on Instagram, she even has her own verified blue tick.  

It’s a lucrative business. The influencer marketing industry is reported to be worth $16.4 billion, with the virtual influencer market making up $6 billion of that total and growing 26 percent year on year. Aww, which has been pioneering and refining its virtual human technology over the past decade, has been a player in this booming wave since 2018.

“The human desire to transform, share our stories and see personal stories of others continues to grow,” Moriya told me recently. “Our ultimate goal was to create a global icon that comes from Japan yet can communicate with the outside world.”

For Moriya, imma is very much her own person. As storytellers, Aww envisioned her persona, her backstory and passions. She is on social media daily living her life. The company has since introduced new virtual humans to their family, including plusticboy, imma’s younger brother.

“We have worked on creating a virtual human in high quality for 10-plus years as part of game and character development,” Moriya said. “Our characters look very real and they each have a story to tell, which sets them apart.” 

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The blurring of what is real, virtual, authentic and fake has become more relevant over the last six years. With a background in advertising, art and film, Moriya is a deep thinker and observer of the zeitgeist. While he navigates the trends and technology commercially with imma, he’s aware of the significant social and cultural shifts that are happening, and how AI, web3 and the metaverse are challenging our perceptions of what we value most. 

“Inside our company we have a saying, ‘what you believe in is what is real,’” he said. “There is no real. Whatever you believe in is in your head, becomes your reality. Before it used to be that everyone watched mass media and believed in what they were being shown. Everyone was trained to think the same. But now we are doubting mass media. This also relates to the web3 movement, because it challenges these big, centralized industries. We know intuitively if something we see on social media is authentic.” 

It all started more than 20 years ago, when one of Moriya’s friends introduced him to Second Life, an early virtual world that allowed users to interact with each other in avatar form. It left an indelible mark on him. It took more than two decades but now Aww is one of the leading studios birthing virtual humans for major advertising and brand influencer campaigns. 

Moriya believes that the fame of virtual influencers will naturally translate to a deeper desire for people to create their own avatars and digital twins as the metaverse experience becomes more enmeshed in our lives. He feels that virtual humans with their life-like qualities are empowering and will enable us to tell our own stories and express ourselves authentically in new ways.  

“Human desire for this type of virtual experience will keep on growing,” he said. “There will be a desire for people to imagine their optimal physical self and make that come to life as a virtual human. And I think that's going to change the whole world completely when people can transform into anybody, anything.” 

“There is no real. Whatever you believe in is in your head, becomes your reality. “

— Takayuki Moriya

Moriya is open to exploring how artificial intelligence may one day become embedded in virtual humans. 

“We are starting to experiment on various ways virtual humans can exist,” he said. “One of them can definitely be embedded with AI and we can see what happens with it. There are ethical problems arising from deepfakes. But we make fictional characters for entertainment, like anime characters brought to life. They're not body doubles or deep fakes of anybody that actually exists. 

Moriya refers back to seeing Second Life for the first time in 2003 and particularly recalled how Coca Cola’s brand activation inside the game in 2007 was a light bulb moment for him. 

“There's a point in a human's life where you see something and your mind blows up and you see millions of possibilities that can stem from it,” he said. “This happened for me with Second Life. I saw in my mind what could happen in the future. That is, we may be living and breathing in this virtual metaverse.”

How soon we will be living and breathing in virtual spaces will be contingent on them matching the multi-sensory, high-definition entertainment we crave in the real world, Moriya said.

“Right now, we're comparing the real, physical world to the virtual world. And the thing is, the physical world is amazing,” he said. “We're realizing that the more we go into the virtual world, that everything in the real world is actually super high definition.  If you are in the crowd at a concert, you're smelling everything, you're touching, you're feeling it. The desire for that level of entertainment will not change."

On the flip side, Moriya believes there will be an inevitable counter-reaction that will come as we spend more time on our phones and in virtual environments.

“Nature in the real world will hold greater value,” he said. “For example, I went to Gardens By The Bay's Cloud Forest here in Singapore. We’ve come to a point in humanity where we're literally paying to see plants.” He continued, “the more we're on our phones, I think the more we're going to want to go to nature. I think that's a glimpse of what the future is going to be.”

As for Aww, Moriya explains that the company name was chosen to inspire awe in everything they do. He is ambitious about the role that virtual humans will play in our lives and wants to be at the forefront of this technological and creative development.

“Virtual humans are similar to the Internet,” he said, “Before the Internet, no one knew what the fuck the Internet was, but it changed everything. This is where we are with virtual humans right now. Not many people know they exist. But they are going to be the standard in the future.”

He compared the breakthrough of virtual humans to other technology leaps pioneered by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Softbank founder Masayoshi Son.

“I want to do the same for virtual humans,” Moriya said. “That is our vision for the future. And we're always trying to change the world for the better.”