Snapchat’s World Lens feature applies filters intelligently to the world around you using greater reality and your smartphone’s camera, and now the application is adding support for Bitmoji to the feature.
This means you can take those animated avatars of yourself and put them into your surroundings.
It’s a smart use of both Bitmoji and World Lens tech – you can do things like having your avatar do some yoga on the boardwalk, watch it land some skateboard tricks, or just show it hanging out in your favorite position.
The Bitmoji animations will anchor where you place them, letting you walk around the animated scene to get a different position, and they can be scaled up or down in size.
They really do look like they’re interacting with the real world, which is itself an awesome technical achievement.
The 3D Bitmoji are created based on the Bitmoji you’ve already made using the application and your linked Snapchat account, and they’ll will show as a new option in the back camera Lens options inside Snapchat in both iOS and Android automatically.
Some of the animations can run longer than 10 seconds, the maximum length of a single Snap, but you can use the new multi-Snap feature (on iOS currently, and coming soon to Android) to bond them together to get the whole thing.
I was initially resistant to Bitmoji’s pull, especially when they were all over Facebook as Bitstrips nearly ten years ago or so.
But under Snapchat, they have become a pretty fun way to communicate, either within Snap or using the Bitmoji keyboard in Messages on iOS or G Board on Android.
Snap has done a lot to expand their appeal with things like Friendmoji and Bitmoji Geofilters, and these World Lenses seem like another smart extension.
With the incoming quality of Apple’s ARkit, experiences like these are about to become a lot more common, but Snap’s secret sauce might be Bitmoji, which it alone can offer its users.
The personalized cartoonish avatars have actually done a great job of endearing themselves to people – it’s quietly becoming a situation where Snap owns a character with the affectionate value of a personalized Mickey Mouse or Hello Kitty for every one of its users.