Viral App MyIdol is Good for a Laugh, Even if it Won't Earn a Permanent Place on Your Phone or Tablet

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

The modern experience of watching something go viral is pretty bizarre. Maybe it starts with a retweet that trickles down to you from friends of friends, then another, and another, until it feels like everyone is in on this conversation and naturally you want in too.

That's how I ended up downloading 小偶 - 我的3D萌偶 (a.k.a. MyIdol), a free Chinese app from a developer called Huanshi that sticks your photo on a bobbleheaded avatar so you can dress them up, take pictures and record video of them performing a variety of pre-made routines. It's exploded in popularity over the past few days, to the point that the developers are working on an English quick-start guide to help the influx of new users until they're able to release a full English version of the app itself. At the moment, the guide link just leads to a page that says "Guide for non-Chinese users is coming soon. Please wait for a few hours," which should give you an impression of just how sudden this has been.

After seeing video after video popping into my feed, I eventually cracked. I downloaded it to my iPhone, loaded it up, muscled my way through the interface and made this:

I did a MyIdol... pic.twitter.com/1M5mtH33JW

— Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart) April 22, 2015

Okay, so it may not look like I was taking this all that seriously, but I am actually pretty impressed. Instead of using a picture of my face, I used the image at the very top of my photo album: A drawing of a Persian cat from the comic A Bride's Story. The cat's face was at a bit of an angle, but even so I think the app did a pretty good job of shaping the head to match what I defined as the face and interpreting the skin tone (especially given the fact that ghost-white doesn't appear to be an option). Even the mouth moves appropriately. Considering that I'd basically handed it a pile of unsuitable garbage to work with, MyIdol did a decent enough job.

I also didn't find it terribly difficult to use, even though the two solitary Chinese characters that I know are the ones for 'man' and 'woman'. Like most interfaces these days, confirmation buttons are usually highlighted in some way, and there are a lot of icons used in the place of words. That alone will get you a lot further than you may think. If you're reasonably good at handling context clues you'll have no trouble poking around MyIdol.

So you make your character, you make some silly videos or screenshots, and... That's kind of it. There's not much more to MyIdol than that. It's free and it's entertaining, even if it's not terribly deep. If you want something to chuckle about with your friends for a couple days you could certainly do worse.

If you'd like some slightly more straight-faced examples of what MyIdol is capable of (or even a little help getting started) BuzzFeed's Lauren Yapalater summarizes her own entertaining experiences with it here, or you can download it for yourself here. 

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Appvn APK]

MyIdol app was so cool I was kind of addicted to that game earlier.