Apple’s iPhone X includes animated emoji that lets device owners send messages animated as a variety of cartoon characters, including a pig, fox, puppy and poop.
This is very likely the result of the 2015 acquisition of Faceshift. Here’s a video I shot of that technology in March 2015:
It would be great to see this technology expanded to full video chats so you could have an entire FaceTime call as an animated character, but the addition of animoji to messages is a cool start.
It looks like the animoji can be received on a wide range of Apple devices through iMessage, but you’ll need the $1,000 iPhone X and its facial recognition technology to capture them and send to family and friends.
Apple also demonstrated the facial recognition for more detailed filters in the Snapchat app. I hope this is a hint of a more advanced roll-out of this animation technology to arrive in the coming years.
