How to Use AR Emoji (Video)

For this week’s tips and tricks Tuesday, I figured it was fitting to go through a feature on the newly launched Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. So in this episode, I’d like to show you one of the more controversial features that the S9 phones bring: AR Emoji.

If you aren’t familiar, AR Emoji are essentially Samsung’s version of the iPhone X’s Animoji except that they can also resemble you instead of a 3D version of an emoji. In addition to that, they have an agreement with Disney for Disney characters to appear in the app, as well (and I’m sure more and more will appear as time goes on).

So in this video, I’m going to quickly show you how to use AR emoji.

Now, the way they are setup is actually pretty impressive so let me show you that first.

How to Create Your AR Emoji

First, open the camera and switch it to the front camera by tapping the camera swap icon at the bottom right.

 

Then you can either swipe over to or tap AR Emoji at the top above the viewfinder and then ap on the face symbol at the bottom and tap Create Emoji.

 

 

It’ll ask you to remove glasses and clear away your hair and basically center your head inside the circle while smiling with your lips closed.

 

From there, it’ll scan and ask you if you’re a male or female and hit OK.

It’ll try and give you a starting point and then you can customize the face style (between two options at the moment), hairstyle and color, glasses or no glasses, outfits from a few different ones (I imagine that all of these will have more and more options).

How to Use the AR Emoji

After that, you’ll see your AR Emoji saved below the viewfinder. You can actually, tap Create Emoji to create more and they’ll appear here, as well (one fun idea might be to create some of your friends to then send them their own with ridiculous faces).

At this point, it’ll also automatically save 18 gifs of your AR Emoji into the sticker section of the Samsung messaging app that you can get to by tapping the sticker icon at the right end of the text field and send to people that way.

Otherwise, you can tap on the AR Emoji you want to use in the camera app and you can either make your face and then tap the shutter button to take a photo to send to someone or tap the record button to begin recording a video that you can then send. Unlike Animoji, the videos don’t have a time limit and you can even tap the pause button to pause and resume and it’ll stitch them together into a single video.

Besides your own AR Emoji, you can also tap the icon next to the face and get 3D characters to choose from as well as some hats and glasses.

Tapping on the cartoon face next to that will give you more filters that are 2D and react to you blinking, opening your mouth, etc.

After that, we have frames you can add to the selfie.

And finally, we have stickers that you can add and drag around on the image to where you want them.

Also, if you tap the gear icon you can reorder the different modes as you want.

And if you can tap the plus symbol to head to the Galaxy Store to get more free or paid stickers.

And there you go, that’s all there is to it. Let me know in the comments below what you guys think of AR Emoji, are they creepy, how did yours come out, etc. and don’t forget to follow me on Instagram for the coolest tech I run into and more.