There is an increasing amount of money and effort being invested in the development of photo-realistic ‘digital humans’, creating a contrast between ‘human avatars’ vs animated avatars, the more traditional means of representing users in digital space. On one side, Samsung’s STAR Labs and other companies racing to create the most authentic artificial humans. On the other side, companies like Genies and Snap’s Bitmoji, trying to design the most appealing and expressive cartoon avatars.
What Are Digital Avatars?
Digital avatars are a method of individualizing users of web services such as forums, games, and social media. It’s best illustrated by games such as World of Warcraft, in which you create a character, an alter ego, to represent yourself. You can create wise mages, mighty warriors, vicious hunters, who are humans, gnomes, elves, orcs, and more. Nobody playing the game actually imagines that the avatar is a perfectly accurate physical representation of the individual player. Similarly, your profile picture on your social media platforms is another type of digital avatar. One idea for the human avatars in development is to be representatives of brands, like mascots that consumers can interact with in real time, to build a relationship with the company through interaction with an artificial intelligence piloting its digital avatar. This is potentially a much more engaging and rapid means of responding to consumers than replying to comments via email. However, at present, there are not sufficiently sophisticated AIs able to hold flawless conversations with humans.
Advantages of Animated Avatars
Animated avatars have several features that put them ahead of their artificial human rivals.
- Lower production costs: Animated avatars are complex and generally well-designed, but they do not require the incredible amount of effort required to produce that photo-realistic human avatars do. Modeling human skin and hair types with perfect fidelity down to the last pore and follicle is time-consuming work, and perfecting facial rigging on expressions and microexpressions requires a lot of work, even with aids like motion capture. Most simpler animated images have far smaller image files, which also reduces time expended compiling memory-intensive, large file formats. Standard animated avatars can utilize a small file size, such as with animated gifs.
- No Uncanny Valley: When designers strive for photo-realism or near-realism in their work, they often fall prey to the concept known as the ‘Uncanny Valley’, the phenomenon where humans find something that is inexactly mimicking human appearance and behavior to be intensely unnerving. This principle is seen often in horror movies with animate dolls, ventriloquists’ dummies, and other similar real world examples. In virtual space, a hyper-realistic digital rig of a human often appears to be fine until it starts to move, and especially when it emotes. In contrast, standard animation does not require the amount of finesse and verisimilitude in conveying body language and facial expressions: we expect animated characters to overemote.
- Nimble updates: Animation is by no means an easy process. Manipulating a series of images to look fluid and appealing is time-consuming and intricate work, with anything more complex than the crude, jerky cutout style of South Park. With that said, animating new sequences, poses, and emotes for animated avatars is relatively speedy as opposed to the depth of effort necessary to modify models with the level of sophistication these ‘human avatar’ rigs have. In this way, animated avatars have a greater capacity for shifting to fit a moment in real time, or putting out content to tie into a campaign of some kind, as Genies has done with the COVID-19 pandemic and brands such as Gucci, Bird, and Cheetos.
- Visually engaging: People know what humans look like. They see them every day. Humans, even artificial humans, are not particularly interesting to look at, unless they are unusually attractive or remarkable in their style. Animations, however, are designed to draw the eye, to be interesting to look at in terms of their color schemes and emotional appeal. Animated avatars such as Bitmoji and Genies use maximum color and dynamism to make their characters appear more visually engaging.
While there is a lot of potential in the development of these models and the synthesis of artificial human avatars and artificial intelligence, animated avatars offer more at present. The companies developing human avatars will have to dig deep and produce a fairly simple yet deep system in order to prove more appealing as an alternative.
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