2024/12/17
At Genies, we’ve always envisioned a future where digital identity transcends traditional usernames and static profiles. With the rise of AI and immersive technologies, we’re bringing that vision to life with Smart Avatars—dynamic, AI-powered digital beings designed to revolutionize how users interact, create, and engage online.
Smart Avatars are more than just AI characters or 3D models; they are living, breathing extensions of identity in the digital world. These avatars can communicate, evolve, and seamlessly integrate into diverse digital experiences, whether through games, social spaces, or Parties (more on that here). With Smart Avatars, we are redefining the internet’s identity layer.
The Evolution of Digital Identity
From the early days of internet usernames to social media profiles, digital identity has continually evolved. In the next era of the internet, identity isn’t just about dormant static profiles—it’s about intelligent, interactive beings that can represent users, celebrity personas, IP owners (existing characters), or even fictional characters in deeply personalized ways. We believe these will serve as the new “usernames,” acting as a layer across digital experiences, and we’ve spent a long time investing in the tech stack to power this vision.
With the rise of AI agents, it’s inevitable that these personas aren’t going to exist as chat boxes forever. In order for users to build real relationships with them, they have to feel the intimacy in their interactions. That’s where Smart Avatars come into play:
What Are Smart Avatars?
Smart Avatars are AI-powered digital characters designed to drive meaningful interactions. Built on large language models (LLMs) and behavioral AI, they are far more than chatbots—they are intelligent, expressive, and adaptive beings that can act, react, and enhance digital experiences. Smart Avatars embody the convergence of AI, gaming, and digital identity.
Game-Ready Personas: Any Smart Avatar generated automatically becomes a game-ready asset that can transport across games, apps, and platforms. These avatars can autonomously act within games, influencing the gameplay itself, taking action, and providing immersive narratives.
Evolving AI Agents: Smart Avatars are conversational and can interact with users in real time, offering tailored experiences and suggestions based on user input and preferences. The key here though is that using a global memory, they can learn, grow, and respond in more personalized ways over time.
Limitless Character Creation: Developers and IP owners can craft any type of character - real or fictional - and evolve their personality, behavior, and intelligence over time.
The DNA of Smart Avatars: How They’re Built
We’ve spent years refining the technology that powers Smart Avatars, ensuring they’re scalable, versatile, and capable of transforming digital interactions.
First we generate your avatar (Avatar Auto-Generation)
Using Genies’ Avatar Auto-Generation, a 3D avatar can be instantly created from photos and our catalog of digital assets. This approach makes it possible to produce thousands of high-quality avatars in a fraction of the time traditional methods require.
Then we give it a personality (AI Personalities)
Smart Avatars come to life with AI personalities powered by LLMs. This allows these avatars to:
Engage in natural, meaningful conversations.
Adapt interactions based on context and user behavior.
Continuously evolve, ensuring relevance and intelligence over time.
Then we train it to act like you (Behavioral AI)
Humans express themselves through body language, and so do Smart Avatars. Our avatars can animate in real time, reacting with synchronized gestures, expressions, and movements based on gameplay or conversation. Smart Avatar users (whether IP, talent, or developer) can also create custom animations and emotes for their own use. This enhances their ability to interact dynamically and feel more human-like.
Then your Smart Avatar is ready for games integration (AutoRigging)
Every Smart Avatar is instantly transformed into a game-ready asset through our AutoRigging technology. This includes props, fashion items, and other digital goods, making avatars seamlessly compatible with games, Parties, and virtual environments.
Finally, your Smart Avatar can effortlessly travel from experience to experience (Ecosystem-Wide Interoperability)
Smart Avatars travel effortlessly across platforms, adapting to different styles and environments while retaining their unique identity. This interoperability ensures avatars can exist anywhere, from hyper-realistic XR worlds to stylized 2D games. They are also compatible with other types of assets (fashion, props, etc). Ultimately, everything works with everything.
What Can Smart Avatars Do?
Smart Avatars can unlock new opportunities for user engagement, interactivity, and monetization, and through our tools, we can empower people to shape the future of digital interaction:
IP Owners and Talent can launch their own Smart Avatar all around their IP: Smart Avatars bring characters and personas to life, allowing them to build relationships with audiences and fans in groundbreaking ways. IP owners are equipped with a dynamic, future-proof identity to take on the next era of opportunities across a wide range of mediums - whether that be integration into Parties, games, content, XR experiences, and more. IP partners and talent can also empower developers, creators, and fans to co-create an infinite supply of games and digital goods all around their Smart Avatar IP.
Developers can create UGC games with Smart Avatars: Our tools simplify Smart Avatar integration, enabling developers to access a catalog of Smart Avatar IP (or even develop their own Smart Avatars) to craft rich, AI-driven experiences without technical barriers. Developers can integrate Smart Avatars into their games, leveraging their personalities, behaviors, and storytelling to enhance gameplay. Developers no longer need to worry about crafting dialogue to suit their game setting, tone, and environment, all they need to do is select the Smart Avatar IP they want to bring into their game and build their experience around it.
Smart Avatars create dynamic and personalized gameplay for users: Smart Avatars redefine how people express themselves, offering persistent, interactive identities that evolve over time. Whether helping users solve a puzzle or adding depth to alternative storylines, these avatars create dynamic gameplay as users interact, communicate, and build relationships with them. Eventually, Smart Avatars will be able to autonomously live or play the game like a human player.
Users and creators can co-create UGC digital goods around Smart Avatar IP: Fans can create and acquire digital goods like fashion, props, and accessories for their avatars. These goods are interoperable across platforms, providing both utility and value. IP owners can even collaborate with fans to co-create items, building deeper connections and generating revenue. Digital goods also carry their own traits and properties that can also influence gameplay.
The Future of Digital Interaction
The one thing that will never change is a human’s need to represent and express themselves, whether that’s online or offline. This will constantly evolve for as long as we exist. The modern day internet is still very young, around 20 years old, and we have become too accustomed to “weak” ways of representing ourselves online. We started with a username that didn’t change for years, then a profile picture that also doesn’t change for years, and now our entire online presence is arguably one highly curated representation that rarely changes and isn’t truthful to who we actually are.
Our Smart Avatars are here to serve as the next chapter in how we express ourselves online. In the coming months, we’ll be announcing some of the first partners that will gain access to our Smart Avatar tech allowing them to clone a volume of IP, which will soon make their way into Party experiences for developers to build around and users to interact with.
We want an identity layer that is dynamic and ever changing, just like how we are as humans in the physical world. Our clothing changes, our preferences, our mindset, our beliefs and more. We want identity online to represent this. From the ease of creation, to their evolution over time based on user interactions, to their compatibility with all types of diverse settings, these avatars offer a glimpse into the future of digital identity and engagement.
If you're a brand IP owner or represent talent and are interested in Genies’ AI-powered Smart Avatars, we'd love to hear from you HERE.