• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 14, 2017

Trying to stay one step ahead of Instagram and other copycats, Snapchat is officially adding 3D Bitmojis to its World Lens offerings. 

“Bitmojis have an emotional, highly personal appeal,” a Snap spokesperson said on Thursday. “Our community creates and often use them daily as a personal extension of themselves in the digital world.”

3D Bitmojis will now appear in Snapchat’s Lens carousel alongside face and World Lenses. To unlock the new Lenses, users can simply tap their rear-facing camera screen.

After pointing the camera at a surface to place their Bitmoji, users can then animate the world with short scenes. Snap is encouraging people to share their creations directly with friends, or post them to a Story.

As an asset of parent company Bitstrips, Snap bought Bitmoji, the emoji personalization app, last year for a reported $100 million.

Since then, Snap has been encouraging users to link up their Bitmoji accounts, which allows their emoji avatars to appear on Snapchat.

Among unique visitors over the age of 18, Bitmoji’s popularity skyrocketed by 5,210% from early 2015 through the end of 2016, comScore reported earlier this year.

By the end of 2016, that amounted to more than 10 million unique visitors on a monthly basis, according to the research firm.

“Bitmoji seems to have come out of a natural progression in messaging,” Adam Lella, senior analyst at comScore, recently told Digital News Daily. “As messaging behavior became more popular over the years, people started increasingly using emojis to communicate in a fast, fun and expressive way.”

Snap first launched 3D World Lenses back in April. Since then, the social giant gave birth to what CEO Evan Spiegel has called “the world’s first augmented-reality superstar.” The comment -- made recently during another during d isappointing earnings call -- was a reference to Snap’s dancing hot dog.

As of mid-August, the little 3D character had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times with the Snapchat app alone, Spiegel said.