How much longer until you’re scanning your 3D Gemini Avatar?

Android XR is a present-day reality — even if for most of us, it doesn’t feel that way just yet. But as more and more of us get a chance to try out XR headsets, that’s quickly going to start changing. One of the new features introduced with Android XR was your Likeness, a photo-realistic digital representation of yourself. Today we’re checking out what could be a Gemini-based expansion for how Likenesses are used, as well as a possible rebranding.

Likenesses debuted with Android XR as a solution for video calls; rather than using an external camera and showing you wearing a goofy helmet, you could keep your Android XR headset on and have your virtual Likeness appear as the call’s participant. In order to get started, you’d use the Likeness app to perform a scan of your face.

Back in February, we identified work to bring something a lot like Likenesses to Gemini, in the form of “Characters.” But now as we check out the latest changes in version 17.11.54.sa.arm64 of the Google app for Android, it seems like Google may be moving towards some different branding.

In this build, we’re now finding multiple references to Gemini “Avatars.” Selecting one brings up an intro screen when you’re prompted to use your phone’s camera to capture some video to scan your head — just like how the Likeness app works. In fact, in its support documentation here, Google is still using “likeness” language all over the place.

We still haven’t been able to get this working in action yet, but the actual creation workflow is web-based, suggesting the option may also be available on desktop computer.

So, what will you do with a Likeness/Avatar in Gemini? Well, we get some direction from the text on that “Your avatar” screen, and see that same vibe continue with another text string present in this update:

That sure feels like people will be using Avatars to inset themselves into generative Gemini content — maybe your next Nano Banana creation. Of course, in this case there might be nothing stopping you from just actually snapping a quick selfie, but once you have an Avatar generated and saved in Gemini, we could see how going that route could prove a lot faster — especially if you’re making a whole lot of content.

At least, that seems to be a reasonable inference, but based on how much we’ve already seen Google make revisions around this work-in-progress tool, it’s entirely possible that it continues to change shape (maybe in unexpected ways) before it’s finally ready to go live. Rest assured that we’ll keep looking for any additional progress, and keep you informed of what Google’s preparing here.