Manually tweak your Samsung AR Emoji and maybe they will actually look like you

Samsung’s AR Emoji were pretty heavily criticized right out of the gate for being a blatant knock-off of Apple’s Animoji. But hey, it’s not like it’s the first time the companies have ripped off each other.

But what really sunk the AR Emoji ship was when people realized that AR Emoji were also pretty inferior to Animoji, with many complaining that their rendered facsimile characters barely looked like them.

Later, we discovered that there are a few reasons why Animoji are better than AR Emoji when it comes to rendering your facial features and expressions.

Today – possibly in response to these criticisms – Samsung is rolling out an AR Emoji update that will let you manually tweak your characters. You still use the front-facing camera to create your AR Emoji, but you can now fine-tune the automatic creation to make it more personal and unique.

Using the new manual tweaks, you can adjust your AR Emoji’s hair, ears, eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, and more. This will obviously take longer to create than the automatic version, but at least it will be more distinguishable as you and not just a computer’s straightforward interpretation of you.

Additionally, the new update enhances the face-tracking function of the AR Emoji program, which Samsung claims will bring a 65 percent increase in “landmark detector points.” This essentially means that the camera will now be much better at figuring out what you look like and then creating the appropriate AR Emoji, although you still will likely have to do some manual tweaking.

The latest AR Emoji update is rolling out now to supported devices, which currently only includes the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus. However, it’s likely that the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 – launching on August 9 – will also support AR Emoji.

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