Human Avatars vs Animated AvatarsAs online communities and social networking expand in size and sophistication, there is a divergence among tech-based companies between those who favor ‘human avatars’ vs animated avatars such as the ones that Genies provides. Some companies, such as Samsung’s STAR Labs, are investing heavily in the development of photo-realistic ‘digital humans’. While we are certainly in an era of digital animation and graphical modeling that makes such feats technically possible, there are still limitations to the technology.
Why Do We Use Avatars?
In the tech world, avatars function as proxy ‘bodies’ for humans: representative visualizations of our real selves. In role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, players build fantastical full body avatars, and can be gnomes, orcs, elves, or a variety of other fictional beings. These digital avatars function more as alter egos: nobody playing the game really believes that the person they’re raiding a dungeon with on the other end of their internet connection is an elf or orc. Similarly, on social media users are encouraged to upload profile pictures. These pictures can be of ourselves, but can just as easily be characters from movies, shows, or games that we admire, or other images that we feel represent our interests and values. Why have anything other than your face as a profile picture? Self-expression, privacy concerns, there are plenty of motivations. For the same reasons, people like creating animated avatars such as Genies. Our visually appealing, expressive avatars give us a significant advantage over other providers.
The Rise of a New Generation of AI Avatars
Several companies are working on the synthesis of AI and computer animation, to create avatars that are artificially intelligent and can respond to consumer queries in real time, offering an experience analogous to a face-to-face interaction. A lofty goal, but even with motion capture, the technology is not currently sophisticated enough to drag their avatars out of the ‘uncanny valley’. What is the uncanny valley? It’s a term used to refer to robots, AI, and other simulacra of human intelligence and appearance that are close enough to human nature to mimic us imperfectly. It is also sometimes applied to dolls, mannequins, and ventriloquists’ dummies that are extremely lifelike but not quite. Instead of being appealing and engaging, entities occupying the uncanny valley provoke uneasy responses from people who encounter them. Creating a 3D animated likeness of a human is an relatively achievable task these days. However, the work of both creating an AI that can effectively mimic human responses in conversation, both in terms of tone and register, and in terms of facial expressions and body language, requires more effort before consumers will be happy to interact with one.
Advantages of Animated Avatars
There are many advantages to non-realistic, animated avatars like the kind that Genies provides.
- Lower production costs: Genies avatars are produced by some of the best young artists and animators in the industry. That said, our avatars do not require the incredible amount of work necessary to model human skin and hair types with perfect fidelity down to the last pore and follicle. When we want to introduce a new facial expression, the turnaround is much faster than the animation and fine-tuning that a human avatar must undergo. That makes us a nimbler service with lower costs.
- Representations, not replications: Part of the value of more cartoonish representations is that they are easier for users themselves to modify. As users experiment with changes to their presentation, an avatar can be a useful first step. This is less of an option with photo-realistic avatars, because of the requisite work to implement more than the simplest of modifications.
- Expressiveness: One of the advantages of animation is that exaggerated facial expressions and body language are par for the course. Especially in digital spaces, where so much of communication is lost due to lack of face-to-face interaction, emphasising body language and magnifying facial expressions can be very helpful in facilitating effective communication. Thus far, when this has been attempted by human-like digital avatars, the results tend to appear ludicrous or freakish, and undermine the fidelity of the medium.
Genies offers the most intelligent and expressive animated avatars on the market. Favored by talents such as Rihanna, Pink, Blink-182, and Carmelo Anthony, we have over 2 million users in love with our cartoon couture.
