Animoji
Apple emoji using facial motion capture
Animoji are a collection of digital avatars created by Apple Inc., based upon symbols of animals and mythical creatures from their Apple Color Emoji typeface. Unlike standard emoji, Animoji are 3D models which can be custom-animated using facial motion capture to reflect the user's own facial expressions and utilize lip sync to seemingly speak audio messages recorded by the sender. The name is a portmanteau of "animated emoji", referring to this capability. Certain Animoji also use audio modulation features to alter the way the voice of the character sounds when recorded.
Animoji can be accessed from the iMessage app on compatible devices and can be embedded on top of users in FaceTime calls or on video recordings in Clips. A set of static expressions for each character, themselves based on other popular "smiley" emojis, are also available as a collection of iMessage stickers and are available on devices without Face ID support. Despite their similar appearance to standard emoji, Animoji have no correlation to the Unicode standard and are simply transmitted to other devices as image or video files.
Memoji
With iOS 12, Apple expanded upon Animoji by implementing customizable Memoji, which can be designed by the user using different facial features and clothing options to create avatars of themselves or others. Subsequent updates have included further customization options, including the introduction of visual representations of disabilities through devices such as cochlear implants and oxygen tubes, which can be added to an avatar.
A standalone Memoji app was implemented on Apple Watch devices with watchOS 7, allowing users to create and adjust their avatars from their wrists.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Animoji” as apple emoji using facial motion capture. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q48937918. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Animoji” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.