2. Apple Memoji: Bringing mobile avatars to your parents
This is one of the mobile avatar GOATs: the Apple Memoji. Introduced in 2017 as Animojis, these weren’t the first virtual avatars to exist on a mobile device, but they did help repopularize the lost art of avatar making, thanks in part to their ultimate customizability. While they seemed bizarre at the time, Memoji took off precisely because they were easy to share.
If you have an iPhone, you can access your Memoji right from the Messages app. Your Memoji will even optionally follow your facial expressions and animate, so you can send a very targeted virtual emotional response. It works kind of like vtuber models, and while those are usually so custom that we can’t rightly put them on this list, the tracking is impressive.
