As a society, we seem to be moving backwards toward communicating by pictures only. Emojis and GIFs are today’s cave paintings, and I, for one, am totally okay with that. To make this transition even more amazing, photo-editing app Facetune created a tool that lets us change our very own faces into moving emojis.
Jumping into the personalized emoji craze popularized by Kim Kardashian (which is essentially just an upgraded version of Bitmoji), Facetune’s new tool, called Memoji, transforms a selfie into one of 11 different animated emojis using 3D facial modeling. According to a press release for Memoji, this technology can “naturally reshape and animate any image of the face to reflect a specific feeling or emotion.” This includes the crying-laughing, snorting, and most importantly, the unicorn emojis:
I can’t wait until they introduce the superior moon emoji into the mix.
To make your own memoji, just open up the app and grant permissions to access your camera roll and camera app. Then, either select a selfie from your camera roll using the top-left button, or take a new selfie with the top-middle button. Once it’s ready, just use the top-right button to share it with friends—you can choose to send either a GIF, video, or image file—which will bring up your share sheet to select compatible apps and services.
When asked about the inspiration behind the app, Zeev Farbman, the CEO of Lightricks, parent company of Facetune and Memoji, gave this, quite frankly, incredible response:
I don’t smile in pictures. So when my girlfriend showed me a picture of me smiling in a photo we took on a hike, I was dumbfounded and scared. I’d spent years cultivating an image of Spartan focus and strength and this one photo threatened to ruin decades of consistency. Thankfully, we had already developed Memoji by Facetune and I was able to instantly click on the frowny face emoji to bring order and decency back into my life
Unlike Facetune, which has moved to a subscription model, Memoji is free right now for iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches running iOS 9 or higher. It’s currently unavailable for Android, which I can only assume means that the Apple crowd tested as a tad bit more narcissistic. As someone who owns an iPhone and has a folder of reaction photos of myself, I can both attest to this fact and say I had too much fun testing this app out.
Just updated your iPhone? You’ll find new emoji, enhanced security, podcast transcripts, Apple Cash virtual numbers, and other useful features. There are even new additions hidden within Safari. Find out what’s new and changed on your iPhone with the iOS 17.4 update.
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