Several months ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S9 officially being revealed, there were rumors suggesting that Samsung could be “borrowing” some iPhone X features, such as the Animoji feature that debuted with the iPhone X. It turns out the rumors were true as when Samsung announced the Galaxy S9 and S9+, they also unveiled AR Emojis.
Right off the bat it might seem like Samsung might have copied Animojis, but this is something that Samsung Mobile’s head DJ Koh is vehemently denying. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal (paywall; via Cult of Mac), Koh stated that AR Emojis is something that they have been working on for years, and that he had personally explored 3D animations way back in 2001 on flip phones.
Koh was quoted as saying, “Their approach and my approach is totally different. I do work seriously based off my own roadmap.” Koh’s comments make sense because we’re sure that a lot of companies, especially huge ones like Apple and Samsung, have projects in the works that have yet to be announced that they might have been working on for years.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook recently said that they are working on products that won’t be seen until the 2020s, which means that there is a chance that someone could beat them to the market in certain products that might make them seem like a copycat. Let’s not forget that there have been variations of this kind of feature over the years, such as the Xbox 360 Avatars that leveraged the Kinect’s technology to pull off something similar.
Filed in . Read more about Augmented Reality (AR), Galaxy S9, iPhone X and Samsung.