Instagram Adds Virtual Pets for Instagram and Horizon Worlds | Social Media Today

Instagram’s new virtual pet features are now being rolled out to some users, which enables you to capture photos with your digital companion in the app. As you can see in these examples, posted by app researcher Jonah Manzano, some users are now being prompted to “Adopt a new best friend” for your Meta avatar, which you can show off on both IG and in Meta’s VR Horizon experience. Through this process, you can create your own, custom virtual pet, with options to select the animal, color, fur patterns, etc. You can then engage with your virtual pet in VR, or take photos for your IG Stories. So it’s like Pokemon Go, but with virtual pets, or like Snapchat’s virtual pets, which are available to Snapchat+ subscribers. Instagram’s been working on variations of this for some time, with app researcher Alexandro Paluzzi noting various digital pet options over the past year. Those are slightly different, in that they seem to be more like Tamagotchi-inspired creatures that require maintenance and engagement. This version seems more ornamental, and given the popularity of pets on the internet more broadly, it makes some sense that IG would be interested in trying these out, and
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