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My Idol is the weird new Chinese app you’ll want but won’t know why

Have you ever wished your selfies had a little more personality? That’s exactly what bizarre Chinese app ‘My Idol’ achieves in weird and wonderful ways…

If you’ve spent any time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Vine in the last week, you may well have spotted strange 3D avatars of your friends, lifting weights, singing or perhaps even pole dancing. The app responsible, ‘My Idol’ is the debut creation of Chinese developer Huanshi Limited and right now it’s still entirely in Chinese.

It’s fair to say that the team behind the app probably didn’t expect such instant popularity with English-speaking users and they’ve promised to release a translated version as soon as possible, but that isn’t stopping a barrage of new creations appearing on the social-verse of Western audiences.

We tested the app with the help of former Recombu member Basil who lent his likeness to the cause.

The app itself starts innocently enough, after a tutorial video showing the basic process of capturing your mug you then have the option to snap a fresh selfie or choose from one already in your iPhone’s photo gallery.

Once you’ve chosen your favourite mugshot, the app analyses your photo and offers up a set of grab handles that you can manipulate to fine tune where the borders of your face sit. It’s at this stage that the creation process may go wrong, very, very wrong. On more than one occasion our resultant avatar was blessed with a creepy moustache, left beardless and had a second fringe growing out of his forehead.

If all goes well though, the app will render out an uncanny recreation of your selfie, complete with a fully 3D animated torso, arms and legs. Then it’s just a case of deciding how weird you want to get; with the aforementioned options to select behaviours such as weight lifting and pole dancing or the ability to freeze-frame specific exaggerated facial poses – props like fans a lollipops also feature as well.

Provided you can navigate the interface, which it’s worth remembering is written entirely in Chinese (they have created a guide for English-speaking users as a stopgap), there are options to save out stills and videos of your avatar performing whichever acts you chose and even tools to share directly to certain social networks.

We’re unsure if the developers of My Idol plan on bringing their debut hit to Android or any other platform for that matter, but first thing’s first an English version will likely appear on your local App Store very soon.

Why not tweet us your terrifying/amazing My Idol creations @Recombu.

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