Google sometimes gets a bad rap, and it’s easy to forget that the company that started out with the line “don’t be evil” can occasionally churn out something that’s actually pretty fun. Take Androidify, our latest Android App of the Week.

It’s not one of the firm’s most useful or innovative apps, but it’s one of the most addictive and funniest: a little tool that grants you free rein to create your own Android avatars.

It’s devilishly simply: scroll horizontally between hair style and colour, tops, trousers, shoes, accessories and more, and use the vertical bar to pick which garment to use on your avatar.

There’s a reasonable amount of choice, with dozens of clothing items alongside numerous hats and accessories – and your Android’s hair colour can be altered, too.  And by dragging your finger up and down your avatar, its height and proportions can be altered.

When that’s done, it’s possible to name and save your Android before sharing it with the world: it’s possible to post them to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or Twitter – with more options available depending on what apps you’ve got installed – as well as distributing your little friend via text message or email. It’s even possible to use the new avatar as a desktop wallpaper.

It’s a great little app that put a smile on our faces as soon as it downloaded – and, of course, our first instinct was to recreate members of the PC Pro team in Android form.

First up is deputy reviews editor David Bayon, who’s personified by his broad range of “two-shirts” – that’s one garment that’s designed to give the impression that he’s wearing two, fashion fans – as well as his follical minimalism.

My second creation is reviews editor Jon Bray – possibly the sportiest member of PC Pro crew and a keen fan of eye-wateringly tight lycra. He’s also the tallest member of the four portrayed here, which was a good excuse to show off Androidify’s body-stretching feature.

Third up is senior designer Sarah, who made her own avatar, and last is editorial overlord Tim Danton, a man whose love for Mars Bars is only outweighed by his adoration of tank tops – a choice that’s reflected in his Android’s clothing.

Our only real quibble is that there simply isn’t enough choice. We’d have loved the chance to change the colour of clothing, for instance, or loaded our avatars up with a more varied selection of accessories. That’s a minor complaint when this charming little app won’t cost you anything, though – so get downloading right away.

Want more great Android apps? Check out our previous Android Apps of the Week or read our 36 Best Android Apps feature

As senior producer of 3D Stereoscopic Feature Films for Sony Pictures Imageworks for more than five years, Buzz Hays has been there for the peaks and troughs involved in getting 3D cinema into the mainstream. Over the course of an afternoon he led us through many aspects of 3D, but for this blog I’ve collated his experiences of working on various films into one timeline. It begins a mere six years ago on a train, and ends with the revelation that Avatar was, in some respects, a disappointment…

2004 – The Polar Express

“The Polar Express was our very first project [at Imageworks] in 3D, with Robert Zemeckis directing. Only six years ago there were very few public venues that could show 3D – in this case I believe the number was about 84 theatres in the entire world. That’s a fairly limited release for a picture like that, but it proved to be quite successful for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Jeffrey Katzenburg credits Polar Express as the film where he really came to the conclusion that 3D was a logical extension of cinematography and wanted to take Dreamworks Animation into that.”

2006 – Monster House, Open Season

“The first digital cinema release in 3D was a Disney film called Chicken Little, and they had a whopping 86 screens, something like that. By the time we got to Monster House digital cinema had taken hold, and we had 172 theatres that could show 3D, still not a vast number but the studio felt it was enough to actually make the effort worthwhile.

“In the same year we actually released Open Season as a 3D film – interestingly, the film was actually in the can ready to be released, at which time they decided it should be a 3D movie. So we had to go back into the archives, get all the assets out and then recreate the entire film in 3D in a three-month schedule. It was built in a computer, it’s a totally CG movie, so it was a relatively straightforward exercise – it’s what we call a native version, it’s not a conversion. And it was overlapping Monster House, so we were actually working on two 3D films at the same time. Monster House proved to be quite successful. It was made for IMAX, which had about 90 screens worldwide.”

2007 – Beowulf

“Up to this point, it was mostly family films using 3D, and mostly 88 minutes or under. Beowulf was the first picture for an older audience that was nearly two hours long. We had concerns because conventional wisdom at the time was that children had an easier time looking at 3D that might perhaps be uncomfortable to look at, and adults had a harder time with it. That’s when we really started looking into the physiology side of it for the first time. How do we see 3D at all? Why does it work sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t?

“We had a director in this case, Bob Zemeckis, who wanted a really deep film, but he wanted a story told in three dimensions. Yet the two-hour movie was a big concern for us. We had a ten-month schedule to fine-tune things, and it was only after Beowulf that we realised that over the course of those last three years, we’d worked with hundreds of visual effects artists who’d worked with 3D all day every day for a year or two at a time, and we didn’t have a single health problem.

“A mere year after Open Season, when Beowulf released we had 1,100 screens, so suddenly it was a realistic number to get a lot of people to see the picture. That’s when the floodgates really started to open in terms of 3D production. We had a condundrum, though: in 2007 there were very few 3D releases, so we had no opportunity to show a 3D trailer for the film; all we could do was tell people it was 3D.”

2009 – Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, G-Force

“Jonas Brothers was our first live-action experience, and proved to be a very interesting one – not least because my ears were ringing for about six weeks afterwards because the shoot was just girls screaming for ten hours. It was unbelievable. Working with the live footage – and this might surprise you – we thought, wouldn’t it be great if the cameras and images actually lined up? Turns out they didn’t very well at all.

“Technology’s getting better, but these are hard situations to shoot. Basically when we’re shooting with the left and right-eye camera the differences between the two were so vast in some cases it looked like the two eyes were shot on two different days, so the amount of work we had to do in post was frightening. There’s a current filming philosophy to just get it close and fix it in post – which they don’t have to do, we do. We realised then how important it is to start working with camera rig manufacturers to make the camera systems better, so that the post-production process is easier.

“With G-Force, they’d experimented with the idea of doing a 3D movie, then decided not to for a variety of reasons, and mid-way through the shoot – on 35mm film in 2D – they decided, yes indeed, we are making it a 3D movie. So this was our first foray into this notion of converting 2D into 3D. Basically no one had done it – there had been The Nightmare Before Christmas which was stylised with no people in it, and a few IMAX movies – but this was the first time we’d really been confronted with how to convert material.

“We had the luxury of only having to worry about the background photographic plates they’d shot of people and buildings because the main characters in the movie are generated by computer. So, we came up with the tools and techniques to derive depth out of the photographic elements and put them into a 3D environment, in this case Maya, then added the CG characters and rendered the whole thing in 3D. So it was really a hybrid approach.”

2010 – Alice in Wonderland, Avatar

“Alice in Wonderland was similar, although a 180-degree opposite approach: the actors had been photographed against a green screen, and the environments were created in 3D. Despite the various press you’ve been reading about the pictures that have recently been converted, it actually can be done very well, it’s just time-consuming and very expensive.

“As for theatres, things today are both better and worse. Think back to 2007, around Beowulf we had the luxury of a release window for as long as the film needed – six or eight weeks was a reasonable amount of time for a 3D picture to stay in cinemas. Flash forward to now and Alice in Wonderland, the release window had collapsed to just shy of two weeks because of the number of 3D releases and the fact that the theatres hadn’t kept up with the number of installations they had committed to. Avatar was supposed to be the big pivotal film where 3D would explode and we’d have a zillion theatres, but as it turned out it barely had 4,500 or so, maybe 5,000. We were expecting more than 6,000.

“We’re getting past the point where mass audiences are seeing this as a novelty, and it’s hopefully just becoming another way people watch films. So we’re starting to move into a territory that’s not just the blockbusters, not just the animated films, but getting back to traditional storytelling. Over the next year or two we’re going to see some very interesting motion pictures and television programmes in 3D.”

Indeed, the cutting edge argument falters even more when you learn that Edd is not even free to roam the massive Second Life landscape, interacting with other avatars in a truly free way. Instead, he is restricted to going where the boffins send him, and that’s that.

Which rather dampens the comments by Edd’s creators that this could be the forerunner of avatars which will be able to interact within 3D virtual world simulations of city streets or underground railway stations and be used to train emergency service workers. Get a grip on reality here, the truth is that this kind of avatar AI is in the earliest possible of moments in time. Once a synthetic avatar, if that is not too much of an oxymoron, can be let loose to roam at will and interact as just another resident of the virtual world. Then, and only then, will I start to get excited about all this. I cannot see Edd, or any other Second Life avatar for that matter, cracking the Turing Test any time soon…