As the title of the post suggests we will try to cover AR Avatars experience in smart phone camera and some popular social media apps.
According to Oxford Languages: Avatar in modern context is defined as
an icon or figure representing a particular person in a video game, internet forum, etc.
We can extend this little more, for our convenience and add mobile camera, social media app lens and stickers.
Last 3- 4 years most of the mobile devices have started using AR elements in some capacity.
AR emoji maker and editor in Samsung mobile devices.
Samsung devices cameras are fast and by default they beautify skin tone unless you go to setting and remove or reduce beautify parameters the same beautify sense is reflected in the AR emoji creator/editor. This may be due to eastern Asia, (Korean peninsula) beauty aesthetics. Their 3D models look BTS like celebrity so if you create your emoji avatar it will look a character from a fantasy world some people may like the idea of facelift look but it doesn't feel that it's your character or caricature so connection to self image may vary.
Google Pixel Phone AR Stickers (also known as Playground)
Strangely enough Google Pixel Phone never had customisable AR emoji or avatar. Though they had AR Stickers, which you could access through Pixel phone camera and play around with Augmented Reality.
Their AR Stickers experience set a benchmark 3 years ago.
These AR Stickers set were of topnotch quality. Colours, materials, lighting, rendering, animation, sound everything was like animated movies.
In fact, you could place multiple AR characters in a scene and they will overlap properly and seem to react with each other all the credit goes to the guys who timed the animated attribute with these AR modules.
Their characters and colours represented a global inclusiveness in terms of size- shape race or skin tone.
Apple AR Memoji
Apple AR memoji are similar to Samsung AR Stickers in very refined form and pretty popular amongst the Apple users.
Back in 2017 when Apple launched them, they used to call them Animoji. Initially animoji were just a set of 3D AR Stickers which one could use with camera and play around much like Google Playground Stickers.
When Samsung in December 2017 launched customisable AR emoji similar to Snapchat's Bitmoji in it's Galaxy S9 phones. In it's later launches Apple also followed the customisable avatar route and it became Memoji.
In fact 2017 was the year when all 3 giants Apple, Google and Samsung introduced AR in their smartphones
Apple in September, Google in October and Samsung in December 2017 where Samsung had customisable AR emoji or Avatar others had AR Stickers.
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