Introducing Samsung AR Emoji SDK for Unity
Bo Huang
As a recap from the previous section, the AR Emoji from Samsung is a new technology to create 3D avatars representing yourself on your Samsung S10 phones or above. A 3D avatar is created by a process similar to taking a selfie and stored on your device each time you run the app. At the same time, we are also working on a Unity SDK to access these avatars so you can use them in your game.
You may be wondering, what’s big deal? What can you as a developer do with this and what benefits does it bring you?
This is a new innovation from Samsung for consumers to express themselves digitally. While self-expression via selfies is ubiquitous, photography is a medium artistically and technologically entirely different from video games. Our technology is among the first of its kind that bridges and connects self-expression to video games, opening a virgin territory previously unexplored in game design.
Secondly, AR Emoji removes or reduces developers’ needs to author 3D character assets. Being 3D models like any other asset in game, developers can easily use them in place of characters designed by artists, which otherwise cost in the hundreds to thousands of dollars range each. And these 3D models are already rigged and skinned, which allows smooth animation and posing, and body parts swapping. The time your artist would have spent could instead be invested to beautiful and enhance other parts of your game.
Thirdly, AR Emojis’ facial expression animates and smiles just as you are smiling into the camera. This is a facial animation and generation system that normally costs hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars to license. With AR Emojis, such an animation system is now yours for free.
So as a game developer myself, I see significant value AR Emoji provides. Thus it’s my pleasure to share with you the technical slides we have presented at PAX Dev conference in Seattle recently. It presents a straight-forward API on accessing and using AR Emoji from your game, as well as authoring animations with our partner Adobe Mixamo.
And as always, please respond to this blog so we can answer your questions better.
Can’t wait to see your creations!
