YoYo Lumi, the super smoothly animated Vtuber using motion capture we introduced back in July, turned out to be a project by miHoYo, the company behind Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact.On August 4, the download link for an animated desktop was shared by Lumi's account on her official Discord. That's when everyone there realized the connection with miHoYo, as the program is hosted on their servers and is miHoYo copyrighted. The program was later published on Twitter as well:

I was personally sure miHoYo was linked to Lumi somehow as it was too much of a coincidence for a miHoYo staff member and a certain artist who already worked for the company to be on Lumi's official Discord. The way Lumi's name is stylized, YoYo Lumi, like miHoYo, was a hint too. This is part of why I wrote about Lumi in the first place as I expected such an interesting development.

We now also learned that N0VA Desktop stands for "Number 0 Virtual Actress Desktop", the actress being Lumi.

Once you've installed the program, it adds Lumi to your desktop, where she'll sleep if you switch focus to a window, but wake up and play on her swing if you look at the desktop. her animations are extremily smooth as usual and she's super cute. Though you'll just think it's creepy if you aren't an anime otaku.

Some of Lumi's dance videos can also be played as an animated desktop, and more behavior patterns should be added later on; it's highly possible more characters will be coming in hte long run. Seeing Lumi is the "Number 0 Virtual Actress" of the project.

miHoYo also launched a survey to ask how did you first hear about Lumi's videos. I'm personally not sure anymore where did I first see them, probably on Twitter. Be sure to mention DualShockers if you've discovered Lumi with us.

A new video has also been released. miHoyo publishes the YoYo Lumi videos on Chinese site bilibili with Chinese subs, and later on, YouTube with English subs. Lumi is still obscure on the English scene, and her biggest audience by far is in China, with her bilibli account having more than 91K followers. The BGM used in Episode 7 wasn't well received by some bilibili watchers, which prompted Lumi to promise to do a Chika Fujiwara Dance video one week later.

Personally speaking, I'm interested in the animation itself and didn't pay much mind to the music, but it's nice the staff listens to the fans. As for the animated desktop program, while I'm a huge anime otaku since birth, I've never been too much into thinking 2D characters are real and the like. I won't be one of those claiming "it's like Lumi is real and watching you" and all that, but the desktop program is definitely an interesting idea.

I hope this different and original VTuber project and miHoYo's hard work will get recognized, and looking forward to future updates. Though I'm sure miHoYo is focusing on Genshin right now as it'll launch before September on PC and mobile, and in Fall on PS4.

Note that we recently participated in Genshin Impact's latest Closed Beta, and we'll be sharing our impressions on the game soon. Spoilers: It's pretty good.