When Samsung first released its spooky AR Emoji, a lot of individuals assumed that it was just the company’s way of responding to Apple’s Animoji. But, Samsung was granted a patent in the past week and that has got people wondering that there could be a possibility of having a totally different reason for it rolling out the AR Emoji and to a large extent it may be to combat bandwidth issues with live video.
According to the reports reaching us from our sources, in the year 2013, Samsung predicted that there would continuously be bandwidth issues with live video in the future at hand and as a result it applied for a patent that would let users video chat with each other using 3D models of their faces.
According to the patent, “Existing video communication systems typically require high bandwidth and are inherently high latency as entire image sequences need to be generated and compressed before transmitting the signal to the another device.” It further states that people usually cannot make eye contact while video chatting because the camera is not mounted directly in a screen.
In addition, the patent also states that, “A need exists for a visual communication system capable of displaying the user’s actual likeness, facial expressions, and motion in real time, while reducing bandwidth.” At the moment, AR Emoji can help individuals create an avatar based on a photo of themselves which they can send as images and GIFs, on the other hand it can’t be used to video chat. If this patent is used and applied to AR Emoji, people could end up looking at avatars through video chat rather than looking at each other directly.
Now, it may only be a coincidence that Samsung’s patent was granted a few months before the launch of the Galaxy S10, but it certainly suggests that AR Emoji is only a starting point for what could be a fun and faster way of interacting with people through a smartphone.
