Akool combines GenAI models with 2D avatars to create lifelike characters
VentureBeat
FEBRUARY 26, 2025
Akool, a startup doing AI-driven avatars, announced enhancements toAkoolStreaming Avatars that connect avatars with AI models. Read More
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TechCrunch
OCTOBER 7, 2021
Avatar startups have come and gone over the past few years, but the future that many of the entrepreneurs behind them originally imagined has proven more or less accurate. Facemoji is building a plug-and-play tech platform to help game and app developers put avatar systems into their apps with the startup’s SDK.
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Nonprofit Tech for Good
FEBRUARY 18, 2022
At this time, most apps are gaming-related and inexpensive. Create your Oculus Avatar. Have fun with your avatar! That said, for someone like me ( Heather Mansfield ) who is very uncomfortable on camera in real life, it’s not uncomfortable being an avatar of myself in Oculus. You can be anyone you want in Oculus.
Digital Trends
JUNE 12, 2021
Ubisoft shocked E3 audiences by showing off Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
NetWits
SEPTEMBER 13, 2011
There’s a communications medium far too many nonprofits neglect: Gaming. “Games have clearly arrived as a mass medium,”. … pronounced Al Gore, the former Vice President and presenter of perhaps the most watched PowerPoint ever, at the Games for Change conference. Games are maturing fast. Gamification Evolution.
The Verge
MARCH 8, 2021
Facebook’s future virtual reality headsets should capture users’ facial expressions for more realistic digital avatars, says CEO Mark Zuckerberg. You want to make sure that the device has all the sensors to animate realistic avatars.”. Zuckerberg says hardware changes are a major focus for avatar-building.
TechCrunch
AUGUST 23, 2022
His quick response promising better avatars for the actual launch speaks to just how much appearances do matter in these situations. “Our bigger vision is to connect the metaverse through avatars,” said Timmu Toke, co-founder and CEO, Ready Player Me, in an interview.
VentureBeat
MARCH 3, 2025
The market is getting its test now as to whether VTubers — where humans give voice to 3D avatars in concert performances — can catch fire on the global stage. Cover Corp. has expanded outside of Japan, bringing virtual creators known as VTubers to U.S.
Nonprofit Tech for Good
DECEMBER 19, 2021
It is a digital reality – a cyberspace made up of multiple virtual worlds – that combines components of social media, gaming, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The gaming community pioneered VR, but the technology is now expanding worldwide into all aspects of society.
TechCrunch
APRIL 12, 2022
Only in the current market can one wonder how a celebrity avatar startup that sells NFT accessories took so long to hit a unicorn valuation. Genies, an LA-based digital avatar startup, announced Tuesday that it had raised $150 million in funding from Silver Lake, with participation from Bond, NEA and Tamarack Global.
The Verge
JUNE 12, 2021
Ubisoft capped off its E3 keynote with a big surprise: a first look at Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The game appears to be built with next-gen hardware in mind. The next-gen take on James Cameron’s world looks gorgeous, and Ubisoft says it’s being built with its own Snowdrop engine at internal studio Massive.
TechCrunch
AUGUST 30, 2022
Digital avatar startup Genies , known its for high-profile partnerships with celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Migos and Cardi B, has just released its long-anticipated NFT storefront, “The Warehouse.” Second, he added, avatars allow people to have ownership and individuality within the digital world.
TechCrunch
JULY 7, 2021
Instead of swiping through profiles, SwoonMe’s idea is to use a combination of avatars and audio to encourage users to connect based on someone’s personality, not their appearance. To use the app, you take a selfie which SwoonMe converts into an avatar. As they communicate, their avatar will slowly unveil their real photo.
TechCrunch
FEBRUARY 22, 2022
Last month, it added an AI-powered video (avatar) feature that looks like a real person. Most of its users are primarily creators and enterprise clients that use the tool for creating a video or audio content for their business or personal channels like vlogs and games, Kim told TechCrunch. Image Credits: Neosapience. raises $1.5M
TechSpot
MAY 29, 2023
Jensen unveiled Nvidia Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games during his Computex keynote speech, a custom AI service that Nvidia says brings intelligence to non-playable characters through AI-powered natural language interactions. Read Entire Article
The Verge
NOVEMBER 2, 2021
Microsoft just announced its Microsoft Teams metaverse for meetings and video calls, but the company also has plans for gaming and entertainment. Speaking to Bloomberg TV , Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the software maker is “absolutely” focused on gaming for the metaverse with Xbox. If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse.
TechCrunch
DECEMBER 2, 2020
Jio Platforms, the biggest telecom operator in India and which has raised over $20 billion from Facebook, Google and other high-profile investors this year, is leading a financing round of a San Francisco-based startup that develops augmented reality mobile games.
Digital Trends
JULY 2, 2020
Documentary explores if romantic relationships that began in the gaming world can endure in the real world.
The Verge
DECEMBER 14, 2020
Today, Snapchat is getting a new original game called Bitmoji Paint. As the name suggests, the game involves Bitmoji — those cutely grotesque customizable avatars — and painting. s second title from its internal games studio, which began putting out games last year. It’s Snap Inc.’s Zoom out, and you get pixel art.
TechCrunch
SEPTEMBER 8, 2023
At its annual developer’s conference, Roblox detailed its near-future plans to expand beyond its identity as a game platform for kids.
TechCrunch
OCTOBER 27, 2022
While Meta tries to convince users to attend virtual work meetings in its metaverse , ForeVR Games , a VR gaming startup with casual games like bowling, darts and cornhole, is a reminder that virtual reality is supposed to be fun. Much like Wii Sports, ForeVR games are designed to be easy to play.
Nonprofit Tech for Good
OCTOBER 26, 2009
Many of those Apps are already in development (@ Kiva4iPhone ), but at this early in the game hiring someone to develop an iPhone App for your nonprofit is expensive. As an iPhone user, I personally would love to download the Apps of my favorite nonprofits and have their avatars displayed on my iPhone. Very expensive.
The Verge
OCTOBER 4, 2021
Neal Stephenson famously coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash , where it referred to a 3D virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people. There are also broader metaverse-related taxonomies like one from game designer Raph Koster , who draws a distinction between “online worlds,” “multiverses,” and “metaverses.”
Digital Trends
JUNE 12, 2021
Ubisoft kicked off E3 with a stream that highlighted games like Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, Rainbow Six Extraction, and more.
The Verge
NOVEMBER 26, 2020
Luxury fashion company Balenciaga will debut its next clothing collection in a video game on December 6th, according to WWD. Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow is an “allegorical adventure” set in the year 2031, in which “a hero avatar advances throughout distinct zones, motivated by tasks and interactions.”
TechCrunch
AUGUST 17, 2023
Taking the form of an anime-style avatar, Moemate — powered by a combo of models including GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude — aims to supply and vocalize the best answer to any question a user asks of it. (“Moe” is a Japanese word relating to cuteness, often in anime.)
TechCrunch
DECEMBER 6, 2021
Less than a year ago, WildWorks, the makers of the kid’s virtual world game Animal Jam , launched its next big effort with a game aimed at Gen Z teens, called Feral. “Transactions on these blockchains can be more efficient than the credit card networks we use to take payments in most of our games now,” wrote Stacey.
TechSpot
NOVEMBER 10, 2021
It has worked on some of the biggest movies and TV shows over the last few decades, including Avatar, The Avengers, Game of Thrones, and the LotR franchise. Weta Digital, a separate company from Weta Workshop, was co-founded by Jackson in 1993. The deal will see Unity acquire Weta Digital's.
The Verge
APRIL 16, 2022
Microsoft is reportedly working on a program that will let brands showcase advertisements within free-to-play Xbox games, according to a report from Insider. Sources familiar with the situation told Insider that the ads wouldn’t disrupt gameplay and may appear on a billboard in a racing game, for example.
TechCrunch
DECEMBER 15, 2021
And while crypto investors are buying up avatars and digital swaths of land in hopes that a digital universe will spring up around these projects, it’s unclear which projects — if any — will stand the test of time. Over the weekend, the company sold 6,666 NFT hoverboards for $4.4 million worth of the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
The Verge
JANUARY 9, 2021
Oh hey, it’s all of my PC games available to play on the Quest 2, wire-free, from within a virtual room. One of the best features of the Oculus Quest 2 is it can be manually linked via USB to your gaming PC to play more demanding VR games you couldn’t otherwise run natively on the headset. This is getting weird.
The Verge
JULY 9, 2020
Image: Epic Games. A newly released iOS app from Epic Games lets developers record facial expressions that can be imported directly into the Unreal Engine, using little more than an iPhone’s front-facing camera. It’s the same technology that powers Apple’s Animoji and Memoji , which map your facial expressions onto cartoon avatars.
The Verge
MAY 16, 2021
The first project from Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata’s new studio JP Games will finally be released next month, the company has announced. The Pegasus Dream Tour is a mobile RPG themed around the Paralympic Games, the first game ever to carry the official Paralympics license.
Fast Company Tech
MARCH 18, 2025
Its easy to say that the name of the advertising game has always been attention. But the level of skill, belief, strategic rigor, creative confidence, and sheer will required to win this game has never been higher or more complex. If the game really was the closest thing to the real deal, why not make it that much closer?
The Verge
DECEMBER 10, 2021
The Matrix Awakens single-handedly proves next-gen graphics are within reach of Sony and Microsoft’s new game consoles. When we said the next generation of gaming didn’t actually arrive with Xbox Series X and PS5 , this is the kind of push that has the potential to turn that around. Image: Epic Games. The city surface is 15.79
Futurism
FEBRUARY 18, 2025
The 44-second clip Meta shared on Instagram over the weekend shows misshapen avatar characters sitting in a circle of chairs while discussing their breakups (because of Valentine's Day, apparently?) My ex broke up with me via text using emojis," one avatar says in the video while waving his arms around. "I
TechCrunch
SEPTEMBER 9, 2021
Houseparty, the social video chat app acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games for a reported $35 million back in 2019, is shutting down. Related to this move, Epic Games’ “ Fortnite Mode” feature , which leveraged Houseparty to bring video chat to Fortnite gamers, will also be discontinued.
The Verge
DECEMBER 13, 2021
The apparel giant just announced the acquisition of RTFKT Studios , which it calls “a leading brand that leverages cutting edge innovation to deliver next generation collectibles that merge culture and gaming.”. million at the time.
The Verge
AUGUST 19, 2020
While the world writhes in the clutches of a seemingly never-ending wave of chaos, one Twitch streamer’s heartwarming struggle to win a game of the new battle royale sensation Fall Guys is a story we can all happily rally around. But against all odds, Tim prevailed, winning a final round of the mini-game Hex-A-Gone to claim his first crown.
Nonprofit Tech for Good
NOVEMBER 21, 2010
Our official launch of text communication will be done at a Los Angeles Kings hockey game on November 27 th. At the beginning of the game, Lisa Niemi Swayze will be there to do a “puck-drop.” Our official launch of text-to-donate will be January 3, 2011 at another Los Angeles Kings hockey game.
TechCrunch
JANUARY 25, 2021
The line between social networking and gaming is increasingly blurring , and internet incumbents are taking notice. NetEase, the second-largest gaming company in China (behind Tencent), is among a group of investors who just backed IMVU, an avatar-focused social network operating out of California.
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