Back in October, BBC published an article about VTuber phenomenon in Japan, and it went viral, they published anther article about CGI celebrities and how vtuber is related to western culture on the 14th of this month. This 2nd article is more deeper than the 1st one.

CEO of VR news website called PANDORA explain that the half of the viewers are from overseas and VTuber is now very popular in especially Europe, US, Thai and Korea.

Kizuna Ai is one of the very first VTuber since 2016, but there are lots of different kind of unique vtubers such as the hose wearing suits “ばあちゃる”, the girl with a man’s voice and so on.

Another interesting things about vtuber phenomenon is that there is a woman who lives in UK posting videos as virtual character Ami Yamato , she actually collab with actual human in the video and getting people’s attention.

Also Luna Kaguya did concert in VR space and people got confused about reality and virtual characters.

BBC categorize VTuber as CGI celebrity and features Miku Hatsune, CGI Instagrammer Lil Miquela and Shudu Gramas similar example.

The pictures they post on instagram are taken by professional photographer and we can say that there are not much difference between CGI character and the models that tend to captured as picture perfect.

Shudu Gramas once collaborated with Japanese clothing brand  and went very successful besides the fact that the creator of the character bashed due to discrimination topic.

And BBC talks about how important anonymity is for Japanese people. Because they resist to show their face on internet, so they becomes virtual character. But being a virtual character could be better than just showing your own face in Japan, because the culture itself is into manga, anime sort of things especially for companies when they wanna do collaboration.

So that company can create their own character to match their needs for advertisement purpose.

Can’t wait to see VTuber’s future.