How Indian Collaboration Gave Life to Samsung AR Emojis
Emojis are more expressive than words. We all believe it! Samsung Galaxy AR Emojis are in fact the effort of bringing the lovely Disney characters to life on Galaxy S9 and S9+. Samsung has already introduced AR Emoji Samsung a few months back. Although Emojis were introduced for first time in 1999 on Japanese mobile phones, it has taken over a large part of popular culture in the western countries.
AR Emojis empowers you to create and share digitized cartoon avatars using the front-facing camera. It captures facial expressions and converts it into a cartoon character. But taking a step further, this time through “Create My Emoji” feature, you can generate your own Emoji through your photo and can also customize your outfit.
With AR Emoji, Samsung tries to make Emojis more interactive. How did Samsung develop the AR Emojis? It is just all about 3D animation technique that can bring anything to life similar to any of Hollywood’s popular characters.
Collaboration with 3D Animation Specialist
To make this happen, Samsung collaborated with a startup team of 3D animation experts based in San Francisco – Loom.ai. Using the software of this company, users can develop a personalized 3D graphic from a single image. Samsung fused Loom.ai’s technology with its S9’s camera technology, i.e. facial recognition and AR to create personalized AR Emojis.
Having already worked at companies like Lucasfilm and DreamWorks the founders and CEOs of Loom.ai – Kiran Bhat and Mahesh Ramasubramanian collaborated with Samsung to improve its user experience. With the huge success of their 3D creations and positive reaction of audiences, Bhat and Ramasubramanian decided to introduce this technology on smartphones.
To make this dream true, Loom.ai simplified the process of capturing a person’s features using a single photograph relying upon the deep-learning mechanism where it analyzes the pixels and automatically creates a face which is the correct embodiment of muscle movement.
With the collaborative efforts of Samsung experts and Loom.ai geeks, this technology restructured the algorithms in order to run on mobile.
How the Galaxy S9 Develops a Digital Image
Although the secret sauce is still under the wrap, it gave digital experts a look under the hood. Leveraging this technology the phone’s camera captures and transforms a 2D image into 3D. To add to its nuances further, the S9 using facial tracking and Blend Shape mechanism creates an accurate facial expression for the AR Emoji.
You are then updated with a cartoon-like clone of yourself with 18 different expressions which Samsung plans to expand to 54. These may include joy, anger, pleasure sorrow etc. All these data does not block the storage as these are local to the device. This facial tracking mechanism captures over 100 facial expressions in real time including smiling and winking.
Nonetheless, many of the AR Emoji tests are such where the characters appeared quite inaccurate. Some said it lacks a skin-tone option and there is no option to select dark-skinned tones and many more. Although the AR Emoji may not look exactly like you, enjoying the cartoon characters of Disney itself is a big fun.
How to Create AR Emoji
To create a perfect AR Emoji of yourself you should take a selfie exactly the same way you’d take a passport photo. There should be ample light, uncovered face and a neutral expression so that the technology underneath can add the expressions to your face later. You can take numerous selfies until you’re happy with the photo. As there are multiple avatars you can generate, better to select the one you like best. You can also save these Emojis to your phone and can keep adding to it.
The latest addition to AR Emoji includes headwear like hijab and other hairstyles. Now, Samsung has empowered its users to express their feeling by adding 18 more animated stickers that are instantly generated on creation of AR Emoji.
It has enlarged AR Emoji’s library of expressions from 18 to 36. It also plans to integrate 18 more expressions in the coming days thus rounding the figure to 54. After downloading the update, you can access and share the new AR Emoji stickers through your keyboard, or copying and pasting them taking from the Gallery app thus adding new facets to your expressions.