A look at how a team of animators at Snap create 3D Bitmoji animations for an AR Snapchat experience by overlaying them on the camera's field of view
every user's experience is different. Here's a storyboard from early on in the development of a 3D Bitmoji animation. (4/5) pic.twitter.com/63GNJuX4Ds Reggie Ugwu / @uugwuu : Companies like Apple, Google and Facebook are investing billions in a future in which AR will “change the way we use technology forever,” in the words of Tim Cook. Snapchat's scripted 3D Bitmoji series is designed to feel like a trifle. But it's the tip of a very big spear. (5/5) Reggie Ugwu / @uugwuu : The heads of that studio are four lanky Russian siblings who have backgrounds in cartoon and video game production. They all live on the same block in L.A. (3/5) pic.twitter.com/mAJqaRNmPc Reggie Ugwu / @uugwuu : More than half of ALL 13-34 year-olds in the U.S. use AR on Snapchat every week. The company is plying them with scripted, original content produced by a fully staffed in-house animation studio. (2/5)
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece sits early in an arc the related coverage completes: Snap first put 3D animated Bitmoji into the camera view with World Lenses in 2017, then built a fully staffed in-house animation studio — run by four Russian siblings with cartoon and game-production backgrounds — to script original AR content around those avatars.
What looked like a trifle became infrastructure: within two years Snap opened the same 3D avatars to outside developers via a Bitmoji For Games SDK and turned them into a scheduled, subscribable show with the Bitmoji TV launch. The through-line is Snap converting its avatar base into a content production system while Apple, Google, and Facebook pour billions into AR.
First-order effects
- Snap gains a differentiated AR content pipeline no rival can copy outright — more than half of U.S. users aged 13–34 already use AR on Snapchat weekly, giving each scripted Bitmoji release a large native audience.
- Users' avatars stop being static profile art and become recurring characters in Snap-produced entertainment, deepening daily engagement with the camera surface.
Second-order effects
- The Bitmoji For Games SDK pushes the avatars beyond Snapchat itself, letting select game developers swap in 3D Bitmoji as character skins and turning Snap into a supplier of identity assets to third-party titles.
- Apple, Google, and Facebook's multibillion-dollar AR bets face a competitor whose advantage is not hardware or SDK reach but owned characters and an in-house studio feeding them stories.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms compete on proprietary synthetic characters as much as on cameras or lenses — avatars functioning as reusable, licensable content supply across games, shows, and AR overlays.
- Personalized, avatar-driven programming points toward entertainment where the unit of production is the user's own likeness, raising questions about how far platforms can commercialize identities users supplied for free.
The trend: Platform avatars are evolving from profile pictures into programmable, cross-surface characters that companies like Snap use to fill their own screens with personalized content.