Generative Al-powered platform Kinetix has launched a Text2Emotes generative AI technology that announces a new era of user-generated content by enabling anyone to create 3D animations and emotes for games using text prompts.
Text2Emotes offers examples of Al which can create high-quality, playable 3D animations and emotes – animations which express emotion – from basic text input.
For instance, users could enter a well-known dance such as ‘griddy’ or a literal prompt such as ‘I’m angry’, and see their avatars come to life through Al-generated emotes.
The Al has been trained on the large proprietary dataset collated by Kinetix over the last three years with the consent of its user base. With hundreds of thousands of 3D animations, it produces an advanced approach which leverages limited academic datasets.
Yassine Tahi, CEO and co-founder of Kinetix said, “As we know, UGC is becoming the bedrock of modern gaming and enabling gamers to generate their own content on the fly using Al will be a critical part of this. So for two years, we’ve focused on perfecting our Al models and the animations generated by them; first using video inputs and now, incredibly excitingly, using just a simple text prompt.
“The clear early use case for this tech is in gaming. Emotes have become an essential part of users’ self-expression and a revenue driver for game-makers, and our Al-powered emotes tech is already being integrated by some of the best-known developers and virtual world builders,” said Tahi.
Enhancing the game development process
The Al-powered platform has also created a format that enables animations to be saved and published across multiple games and virtual worlds, meaning emotes generated with Kinetix can be used on any avatar, within any video game or metaverse world that integrates the Kinetix SDK.
Game developers and publishers can now open their games up to a whole new era of user-generated content, allowing players to import viral trends into their favourite games – or even fuel the next one by coming up with their own in-game emotes.
Jay Lee, global head of ecosystem Zepeto said, “Kinetix’s Text2Emotes feature represents an exciting use case for generative Al in virtual worlds, with the potential to enable a new dimension of expression for Zepeto users. When integrated, it will provide the Zepeto community with an even more immersive social experience.”
Text2Emotes will be added to the Kinetix Studio and existing Kinetix SDK, which already offers a ready-made, fully customisable emote wheel and a constantly growing library of more than 1,000 emotes across PC, console and mobile.
The Kinetix SDK is currently being integrated into more than 10 video games and virtual worlds including The Sandbox and PolyLand. Later this year, Text2Emotes will also be offered as an API.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
