Memoji 🤪
Me, myself & I. Meet the virtual me.
Recognized this? 🔝
For the older people reading us (you are 11.5% but still, thanks), this is a M-E-M-O-J-I. Memoji for my emoji, personalised Animoji. Yes, it’s a thing now. For the very old (0.5%), what is an emoji? Well, an emoji is the little ideogram or smiley you send to everyone to tell anything these days (FYI, 🍆 is dick, not the food!)
Psychology behind memojis 💆🏼♀️
The micro trend was born at this specific moment.
Apple’s CEO think that digi-caricatures will be a permanent feature of our future. “Memoji can be considered a form of self-presentational behaviour, in a similar way to using photos, emoji, etc.,” she wrote to Salon. “This allows us to put across our ‘best self’ to others.”
Self-presentational behavior is a social psychological term used to describe how people want to control or shape how an audience views them. The idea behind self-presentational behavior is that it enables humans to better hide their flaws.
🧻 A 2015 report found that 92 percent of online consumers use emojis. While some experts speculated that the rise in popularity of emojis suggests humans are becoming less intelligent, or lazy (to use their words), Kaye has debunked this. In a separate interview with Vice, Kaye suggested that our enthusiasm for emojis could be seen as a creative outlet.
If you are interested in reading more about this, here is the link.
Competitor analysis🏅
Memoji is basically Apple's version of Snapchat's Bitmoji or Samsung's AR Emoji or even Facebook’s avatar. They are all cool enough to play with but… that’s it, it’s fun.
The graphics are different.
The customisation. With AR version, you emoji can look EXACTLY like you. With others, it’s an avatar. Think like you are smiley face 🤪
Snapchat’s version is 100X times more powerful with AR endless possibilities (ex. you can replace your face with your memoji)
This is what you can do with memojis 🎭
Create an animated cartoon of yourself — a caricatured, personalised avatar that smiles, blinks, and talks in sync with your own movement: These Animoji can look exactly like you, or a version of you with, say, yellow skin, blue hair, a mohawk, a 'fro, man bun.
Send it as if you were someone else: with a panoramic background, with a weird face or a cowboy hat 🎩
Adapt to the situation: for Covid19, you can add a mask over your face. Perhaps that could help reduce contact 😷
Memoji, like Animoji, can respond to facial expressions via the camera
If you have an iWatch, switch your Siri to memoji!
This is what you could do with memojis 🚀
Apple have not said their last word on this cool tool. A lot of things are still possible. Let’s hit it, once and for all:
🍆 Sexting, closer to sexing like never before.
👽 Customise endlessly. Think like you could be sending a message as if you were a horse or an alien.
🔈 Voice over. Apple’s Memojis and Animojis may team up with Siri and Messages to “speak” in tones that match the facial expression of the avatar characters.
🤳🏾 Upload and post. Future Memoji could be created automatically from user's photos.
😊 Moody. Share your mood with your memoji.
📹 Assist to a video conference. Forget video conferencing through Zoom, Apple has been looking at a way of using virtual and augmented reality to stage meetings in 3D space.
🔒 Privacy. Surfing the web as your memoji could save $100M to Facebook’s law suit. Think talking to your memoji doctor or a memoji terrorist 👳🏻♂️
🎮 Think Second life, GTA or Sims. Play Mario Kart with your friends’ memoji.
🎯 Think Wii, 100x better. Interact with other memojis in a secure decentralised space. Interactions will include team building, virtual board game,… Cool yeah?
🤖 Design a robot. Customer service is obsolete unless we team up with leaders to launch AI + real-life robots that could answer all your questions.
🕶 A little bit farfetched, think Ready Player One. Live inside your memoji’s fictional life. Go to a strip club without your girlfriend knowing. THIS IS SOME BLACK MIRROR s***
Genies
Imagine if you could clone yourself into the digital world looking a million different ways. Genies’ upgraded 3D Avatar & Digital Goods SDK can make that a reality. No longer an exclusive perk reserved for celebrities, everyday users (for the first time ever) will soon be able to create their own personalised 3D Genies, starting with these two apps:
👜 GUCCI users will be able to shop directly with GUCCI for digital goods while their avatars rock the latest apparel designs.
😜 GIPHY will help users turn their avatars into GIFs across their site, mobile app, and other supported networks.
Genies hopes to grow these SDK partnerships to create a new type of digital goods economy and marketplace. In the future, you can cop the latest sneakers, swag, or accessories from their impressive roster of thousands of celebrities (Shawn Mendes and Cardi B to name a few) from their Genies’ Avatar Agency. After creating your unique 3D Genie, you can teleport from platform to platform, interacting with other users to socialize or show off.
So, what will your Genie look like?
La 🍒 sur le 🎂
Well, that’s it for this micro trend. It’s not a macro trend yet but it could be, once some big corporates forget about releasing their iOS version 120.14 but focus on the virtual experience they can deliver to their users. For now, we’ll stick with sending messages.