Many social media and messaging apps are focusing on Bitmoji, avatars of us personalized with augmented reality, here’s how they work
Now that even WhatsApp has succumbed to the temptation of stickers, we can say that the circle has closed: our chats and conversations are increasingly visual and less and less textual. Ideal for communicating any mood, images (whether they are simple smilies, emoji, GIFs or, indeed, stickers) are supplanting the written text.
A fundamental contribution to this “cause” has come from Bitmoji, funny faces / stickers that users can make “in their own image and likeness”. The first to introduce them were the developers of Snapchat, followed closely by other social and instant messaging platforms. Today, creating bitmoji is much easier than it was a few years ago: all you need is a simple program or an app on your smartphone and you’re done. An example is given by Genies, an app for Android and iOS that creates bitmoji and, thanks to augmented reality and artificial intelligence, customizes them and “animates” them. The smilies thus created can then be used within various messaging apps.
What are Bitmoji
Genies is not the first company to invest heavily in Bitmoji. Among the first to believe in Bitmoji was Snapchat, and it is precisely the social media company that is pushing hard for the implementation and large-scale deployment of Bitmoji. For Snapchat, the use of these user-customized emoji represents the novelty to regain ground against Instagram and Facebook. At the moment, however, the best developed app for creating personal avatars is Genies, which offers a million options for editing and customizing your own Bitmoji. At the moment they are also among the few Bitmoji apps that allow you to use these AR avatars in other apps as well, including major messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, iMessage and WhatsApp. According to the developers, in addition to all the actions and movements that a Bitmoji can perform, the app is also capable of recognizing about 180 moods just by framing our face.
How to create a Bitmoji with Genies
Once the camera is pointed at us we can customize our Bitmoji by changing skin color, haircut or eye coloring. As already mentioned, the options for editing Bitmoji exceed a million. Once we have created a Bitmoji we can still edit it at any time. Keeping the camera open we can make our avatar imitate our mood or what we are doing. Alternatively, as already pointed out, we can write something like do a pirouette or make a pout and the avatar will perform. There are also a whole series of accessories, paid or not, for our Bitmoji. Suffice it to say that Gucci, the first advertiser to invest in Genies AR avatars, offers the possibility of purchasing over 200 extra-luxurious items for our digital clone.