WhatsApp is slowly yet steadily expanding the frontier of what its users can do with emoji. It has certainly had to make up ground against other messaging apps with emoji stickers and animated emoji, but it's all progress nonetheless. We're now learning about another feature in the pipeline that's playing catch-up to something Apple and Samsung were all over years ago.
WABetaInfo has picked up on plans to let users switch to a custom avatar — perhaps in the style of Memoji or Bitmoji — during video calls. This means that people will be able to utilize alternative avatars instead of using their straight camera vision or their profile picture during a call. The feature has been in development since March.
Unfortunately, we don't see much about the avatars themselves here — this screenshot simply shows the button the user will need to press to switch to their avatar. The button simply doesn't work at the moment.
Animated emoji-based avatars are definitely an improvement to WhatsApp's video call experience whether it's for privacy's sake or just another way to express one's self. The biggest question here is whether designers will go for a 2D or 3D look. However that goes, we suspect the first batch of avatars will be fairly barebones with a limited set of options and limited customization to start.
There's no firm timeline on when users can expect to use these avatars much less be able to use the interface that enables them, but the sooner, the better. Add this to the pile of new features WhatsApp already has in store, including the ability to create orders within a chat thread on WhatsApp Desktop. Additionally, its Desktop beta may soon introduce a blur tool in the internal image editor that was seen this year on the Android and iOS beta versions.