Last week, two new players appeared on the scene of virtual reality – Animasher, via Stockholm, and Face Your Manga, which, as Mashable pointed out, quickly took sites like Twitter and Tumblr by storm.
For those not familiar (where have you been?!), Animasher is an easy animator, basically allowing you to animate images by moving them around on the screen and “recording” them. Face Your Manga, meanwhile, is more-or-less like the Wii player customization, but in the style of an anime character. You can then download the image and upload to any personal profile you like (Twitter, for example).
Avatars–long embraced by Asia–are becoming increasing popular in the U.S, and these are just the latest ones to go viral. (Many of us have elves and Simpsons in our likeness floating around the web.) Some have been quick to point to avatars as evidence of our desire to live online or, rather, live outside the real world. Maybe it’s not that deep. Maybe it’s just fun.
And really, they are nothing new. Face Your Manga like those silly cut outs at the zoo that your parents made you put your face in when you were little. Look, ma, I’m a zebra! Animasher may be more akin to doodling on a piece of paper. The general philosophy seems to be the same behind both of the aforementioned Web sites and their real world counterparts. The web has just made them better and upped the “hey, cool!” factor.
Little things like this (and many many other customization tools) are natural extensions of our desire to create, customize, and show off. But it’s not that we want to live online, we just accept it as a part of our social life. The most profound thing about these two sites may be their decided non-profoundness.
