In honor of #WorldEmojiDay, Apple as Memoji-fied its leadership page. On the surface, it looks like a lighthearted, self-effacing way for Tim Cook, Angla Ahrendts, Jony Ive, Craig Federighi, et. al to have a little fun and be perceived as a little more human and in touch. That's nice PR.
Beyond that, we're about to go through the biggest transition in human interface in human history. Command Lines and GUI will have nothing on the AR- and voice-driven future. We won't just see interfaces, we'll be in them. And we won't just interface with them, they'll interface with us right back.
Throwing people into that directly will be disastrous. Like throwing someone from a cave into a disco.
So, Apple and others are introducing enhanced reality slowly and carefully, in ways the mainstream are best equipped to understand it: Games and avatars.
It's a candy coating around a paradigm shift, but that's why we have candy coatings. Games are fun, we'll engage with them. Avatars are, by their very nature, humanizing, and we'll bond with them.
You can look at things like Animoji and Memoji as gimmicks that people will try once or twice and then move on from. And that's fine. But you'll be missing out on the bigger picture — the people having tried them even once or twice and, in so doing, tried out face tracking and expression matching, and creating an AR representation of themselves.
That's one step closer to what comes next.
You can look at it as a simple implementation of the classic boil-the-frog strategy but that's what makes it so effective. Especially when you're getting the frog to help boil itself.
If Apple's leadership signing off on this bit not only brings a smile to some of its customer base, but helps thaw out and encourage even a few of the stiffer collars out there to give it a try as well, it's an easy win.
A couple notes:
- Wow but Jony Ive doesn't let himself smile, even in Memoji form.
- Craig Federighi greatly downplayed his hair.
- Great to see JG on the leadership page, his ML team is as critical to the future as Johny Srouji's team has been to the present.
