How good are the Samsung Galaxy S9’s AR emoji?

Alan Martin March 8, 2018

When Samsung announced the Galaxy S9, one of its selling points was the ability to create your own augmented reality emoji. This is basically Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Animoji, so if you ever wanted a cartoon version of yourself singing I want it that way, then now’s your chance.

Take a quick photo of your face, and an avatar is created in seconds. Gurn at the camera, and it will gurn right back at you – albeit with better teeth in my case.

This is the kind of feature that can go one of two ways: it’ll either be a novelty you only use once, or it will be something you return to time and time again. Me? While I enjoyed the novelty of alarming my girlfriend with disturbing animated GIFs, I imagine it’s something I’ll rarely use. screen_shot_2018-03-08_at_11

But it all depends on how good your likeness is. So just how good is the S9 camera at staring into your very soul and drawing out your innate physical qualities? We got members of the Alphr and Expert Reviews teams to get scanned to definitively answer that question. The results are included below.

Click each portrait to flip it and see the AR creation beneath.

What do you think? It’s definitely a mixed bag, but it does manage to pull out certain qualities of people, I find – but maybe that’s not visible from just the one photo. In any case, this is just a small part of the Samsung Galaxy S9 – and you’ll be able to read our full verdict when the review goes up later today.