Digital Doppelgangers are here - Avatar comes to Meta and Spices up Video Calls

Meta is adding Avatars to Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. In a bid to draw more people into a more advanced digital space and the metaverse, Meta brings digital characters that people can use to represent themselves (or Avatars) there. Meta is pressing forward to a metaverse future and this is one way to draw people there.

These video call Avatars that can be available to users with one tap from the camera, is built to respond to how their faces moves – which means that users can interact through the Meta Avatar.

Apart from this, Meta is also launching animated avatar stickers in Instagram and Facebook Stories and Reels, Facebook comments, and 1:1 message threads on Messenger and Instagram.

It will also be possible to tag friends through Avatar tagging – so friends can hang out and do things together on the Metaverse, just like they would do in real life. Advanced Avatar creation options are also there on Facebook and Whatsapp, which will help users create Avatars based on selfies. Meta also will standardize how an Avatar character would look across all apps and surfaces of Meta.

Meta has said that more than a billion Meta Avatars have been created so far.

Avatars are something that the young consumers are comfortable. From playing various games online, like Fortnite and others, youngsters are used to creating Avatars of themselves and adding various trophies and wearables to them. With the young demographic, Gen Z and Millennials spending a lot of time online and playing games using digitized versions of themselves, it is a great idea to bring in the idea of Avatars to various digital platforms. That is something they like to do and are most comfortable doing.

The Avatars are a way of bringing elements of the Metaverse to existing platforms. Since the idea is for Meta to slowly popularize the Metaverse and make it seem like a normal transition to make, these Avatars on existing digital apps and platforms will get the Gen Zs and the Millennials to use them on platforms that already exist. Then when the move to the Metaverse happens, it will seem like just a step forward. You bring elements from there to this dimension, so users get familiar with it, so when the actual move to a different dimension happens, it would seem like but a normal step forward.

This is also a way to increase engagement on the platforms that are already being used. A new feature! A new toy that the users can play with!

But it also makes one wonder if this is what users really want! Do users want a slightly strange and comical version of themselves to be their front while they talk to someone else? Isn’t the purpose of a video call to erm, see the other person? So why go to such great lengths to create a cartoon version of people to hide behind while making video calls?

Snap has already done this, years ago – so it doesn’t quite feel original or very creative as well.

One can only watch and see if this will catch on.