#82: Holographic Animojis

Have you ever wanted to control a hologram's movement using only your face?

Nolan, one of our Unity developers & the mind behind 4D Hologram, is also responsible for more than a few silly faces pointed at our front-facing cameras as we make live 3D animations of ourselves in the Looking Glass.

As you can see, it's possible to turn an emojified version of your mug into a hologram whose facial expressions you can control and view in real time.  

Leveraging Apple's ARKit, Nolan was able capture our head poses and face geometry. That information was then sent to Unity and paired with a 3D model of a familiar & adorable 3D animal character using our HoloPlay SDK for Unity. The end result was a dynamic experience wherein every one of our exaggerated facial expressions was holographically mimicked, and because the Looking Glass can be viewed by groups of people without headsets, we were able to enjoy this experience together as an office.

Live 3D animations like these are not only a fun way to represent yourself as a hologram, but it also shows that we're able to link an existing person to a digital presence in a cool and compelling way. This opens up a new way to interact with holograms and quite may even change how we think about representing ourselves digitally.

We've covered instances of users creating digital representations of themselves before in a previous post, and while this is a different case, it shows that when it comes to digital spaces, Looking Glass users are free not only to be any human character, but if you want, you can even be an adorable doge.

**this is part of our “100 Days of Holograms” series, where a few of us in the team at Looking Glass Factory post one new wonderful or weird (or both!) use for the Looking Glass holographic display being conjured around the world each day.