Facebook is developing Avatars to let users personalize their expressions online

Developer Jane Manchun Wong spotted Avatars in Facebook for Android app package. Facebook Avatars is an unreleased feature, presently under ‘early development’ and no timeline for testing or release is set yet.

The feature will let users create personalized and illustrated stickers of themselves to use the Messenger app and the comments on the social media platform. It allows users to customize the avatars according to skin color, hairstyle, and facial features.

Wong shared screenshots that display the appearance of the avatars. These may actually replace the reaction-emojis of Facebook in comments and chats.

Facebook may be on course to use AI and machine vision to create the avatars based on the photos of the users. It should consider a lot of factors before putting these to use. For one, if the avatars misrepresent any emotion or appearance of a user, the ‘avatars’ will lose popularity. Adding to this are the recent privacy issues regarding the social media, which demand further perfection of its executions.

The social media giant is going over the development for three years now for virtual reality. At the F8 event last week, Facebook said that they are working on a process to use facial tracking sensors for mapping real-time expressions. While visual communication is increasingly growing all around, these initiatives with perfect executions can help Facebook be back on track, surpassing privacy issues and so on.