Samsung and DeepMotion, a motion intelligence company, have partnered to bring more expression to AR Emoji on the Galaxy S10, S10+ and S10e.
Samsung leveraged a similar — but not identical — version of DeepMotion’s technology to allow its AR Emoji feature to capture a user’s natural body movement. User’s motion is translated to the digital screen, allowing the AR Emoji to move in tandem to the real person.
DeepMotion says the tech pushes past facial and canned body animations for real-time motion capture, thanks to AI technology.
While users can get their hands on the tech in Samsung’s AR Emoji when the S10 comes out later this week, DeepMotion says it’ll be available for other platforms as well.
Dubbed DeepMoji, the company’s digital avatar solution could work in a variety of applications, such as full body avatars in VR or AR.
DeepMotion says DeepMoji relies on ‘3D pose estimation,’ an aspect of computer vision that uses a 2D image or video to produce a 3D representation, along with physics-based character models to create the avatars.
Overall, the technology does a surprisingly good job mimicking real-world movements and translating them to digital avatars. While it should give Samsung’s AR Emoji a leg up on competitors like Apple’s Animoji — which feature stupendous facial animations but don’t have bodies — it remains to be seen if AR Emoji will be a hit with users.
Samsung’s first attempt with AR Emoji wasn’t popular, in part because users found the digital avatars creepy. The Galaxy S10 already looks to improve on that aspect so AR Emoji may have its time in the spotlight now.
To learn more about DeepMotion and its DeepMoji technology, check out this blog post for details.
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
