Having read the article, I still don't understand the point of 3D modeling emoji. Even the user interviews didn't mention it, and problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.
I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms. There are still significant differences between Android and iOS, for example. They recognize how subtle emoji interpretation is, so the only reasonable conclusion is that sender and receiver should see the same pixels.
> I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms.
You can't really do this. Or, rather, it's already been done, but people choose not to do this.
Emoji are just unicode characters. How they're displayed depends on the font used. Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.
The one announced here is open source, for instance, but there's no way Apple is going to adopt it as the system default.
"We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user. We understand users might prefer the current designs, and we are proud of the work our team has done, but we believe that consistent communication is more important, and individual users can always enable the override to get the old look back."
> Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.
Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.
> > Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.
> Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.
Well by "everyone" I meant platform companies, app makers, and website designers. There's literally no way you'll get them to agree on a font choice.
> "We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user".
First you'd have to get Apple to license their emoji font, presumably open source and freely available if you truly want it to be standardized across platforms. Have they ever open sourced a font? Or get Apple to agree to use someone else's font as the system default. Have they ever done that?
Second, if you forbid app developers from choosing an emoji font, the Facebooks of the world are just going to work around you by stripping out the emoji and manually inserting theirs in. Somewhat ironically, by ignoring the platform emoji font, which can lead to some jarring text rendering if you're used to the system font, apps like Facebook are fulfilling your dream of standardized unicode across platforms...but of course, only for users of their apps.
Third, I think you really underestimate the fundamental disagreements here. The Unicode Technical Committee has a working group to try to improve unicode interoperability, and victories are on the level of getting vendors to agree if the standard for the Lotus emoji should mention that it shouldn't include a lillypad (they decided no[1]). They're working on this, but it's never going to be what you want.
In any case, I understand what you're saying and I wasn't dismissing the fact that the precise emoji design can influence why you used that emoji at all, which gets lost in the translation to another emoji font.
How can you cut so many budget of so many products and decide "yeah, emoji in 3d, that's what we are going to do!". I don't understand... Maybe they have some AR/VR future usage of some kind?
They do have to keep drawing them as unicode assigns new codepoints. So they can't really be left alone, other than just leaving the old ones alone and only appending. But I would imagine this trend towards non-raster versions of emojis is more about making updates MUCH easier rather than "innovating emojis" (even if they claim that in their marketing slop)
So many of the newer code points are ZWJ patterns modifying existing emoji. If you already rigged the 3D shark emoji, when unicode decides that :shark: + ZWJ + :family of 3: has to resolve to :horrific shark attack involving a family of 3:, at least that's not too hard.
Emojis are more of a unicode standard, they can be re-implemented with various themes to suit modern design trends. There's nothing wrong with redesigning your emojis to fit with the rest of your OS like you would with a system typeface.
Except there's no way for the Unicode standard to be prescriptive enough for the different implementations to express identical intent. And that's before the politics get mixed in (e.g. Apple's water gun). That's why you see many chat services and social networks shipping their own whole and opinionated emoji font: at least on their platform every user sees the same glyph and although there is still room for interpretation and misunderstanding, that's not by having too many font designers.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Approximately nobody thought Google’s current emoji family needed a total overhaul, stop breaking our pattern recognition for no reason other than your designers are bored and don’t have enough real work to do.
Glaring ‘omissions’ are also breasts and penis emojis. Maybe even one representing sexual intercourse. You’ll find they are quite central to human culture.
Does anyone know _where_ these supposed 4,000 OBJ files are open-sourced? They don't seem to be in the Noto Emoji GitHub repo, nor linked anywhere in the article.
Seems like they're trying to tease excitement for new emoji in the next Android release (there was also an earlier linkless post in May[1]), so I'm assuming they don't want anyone scooping them and will push to the Noto repo on or after the day of release.
Seems like the post really should at least have used a future tense for "handing over raw .OBJ files to the community".
I also like that the article uses whatever system emoji you have, so everything is just showing apple emoji in text for me. All I see are a few 3D video renders of theirs.
This article seems fairly uninformative since, as others have pointed out, there's no visualization or comparison of the full emoji set and no link to see it. They just show a few example images and have some (AI-enhanced?) prose that doesn't actually say very much.
This article https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ has a larger (2d image) comparison grid with several dozen examples and an A/B slider vs the old versions. Overall the new design looks like a fairly tasteful compromise between Google's previous flat-shaded vector emoji and the hybrid 2d+3d Apple emoji, with the benefits (easier to rerender with higher-resolution, animations, tweaked lighting, etc.) that you'd get from a fully-3D pipeline. So I like the new set of emoji, just not this particular blog.google.com article.
Yeah, looks like that article was from an I/O announcement of these new emoji (which I don't remember, but I also didn't watch much of the keynote), and they've decided to tease this until it finally lands in the next version of android.
What's the overlap of people excited about new emoji and also read blog.google? OTOH, I guess they didn't ask to be posted to HN. :shrug:
For what is worth, the fluent emojis from Microsoft, also named Segoe UI Emoji, have a 2D and 3D versions. They are beautiful! Although I'm not sure if the 3D ones are just complex vector images made to simulate depth with clever gradients and shadows, or were actually 3D rendered. I even saw some animations of them somewhere. Super cute
I realize many people are devoted to emoji. But my God, this type of infantilism is a proper blight.
Do people really have so little faith in their articulacy that they need to resort to crude cartoons? And what's the aim? Hope the recipient takes pity on the sender's insecurity? Distract from one form of mindless stupidity with a greater one? Who in their right mind ever thinks to themselves, "This message is ok, but I know what'll improve it: a nice little graphic-wank over the words." Or do users actually think there something charming about the things? (But that's unlikely. What sort of simpering plankton would ever mistake a smiley for charm?)
Whatever's behind the fad, I wish one of the tech giants would grow the balls and hairs to deprecate the things - or that a new generation would rebel against its parents childishness and find an amusing way to shit on it - roughly enough to wake them out of the practice. Or alternatively, that emoji users would spend a moment - just a moment - looking at the fatuous mess they're making of their comms and grow up. I can't be the only person who cringes when I see adults jump back in their playpens or reach for a dummy. And really, how can it not be immediately obvious to these people that not everyone wants them stuffing their soggy nappies through their letterboxes? Their general absence here is one of the most refreshing things about this site.
In today's AI times, I find it a little amusing to think about emojis as an automation of the craft of making ascii art. Is a little different since people don't get paid for that, but there was a creative component to it.
Can we please just make emoji bigger onscreen? They're not even em-height most of the time. Most interfaces don't scale the emojis when scaling the text.
There's so much artistry and time & effort put into these, and they end up feeling l ike a yellow smudge behind a crack on a dim screen in my life.
That's not what the article is saying from my reading of it. It thinks "rolling on the floor laughing" is a new exaggerated phenomenon despite ROFL being used the same way for decades.
Wasn’t google the one who made flat design popular after we had full 3D and glass aesthetics? Now they want to pretend they “invented” 3D shades emojis again..
You already know this, but to say the obvious out loud: Google is certainly big enough that they can pay both a 3D-rendered emoji team and a Drive search team. Drive search is bad because the Drive search team isn't working on it, not because they're short staffed due to investment in the 3D-emoji team, who wouldn't work on gdrive even if they had nothing else to do.
> The way we use emoji has changed. In the early days, we were literal: You sent a nail polish emoji () because you were, in fact, getting your nails polished.
The early days of emojis used unpaired parentheses, colons, and semicolons. It's like claiming int the early days of Apple the company released macOS 10.
I believe the point is that emoticons/emoji/kaomoji were never literal, and that it's surprising that anyone whose job is communications-related would say this.
Having read the article, I still don't understand the point of 3D modeling emoji. Even the user interviews didn't mention it, and problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.
I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms. There are still significant differences between Android and iOS, for example. They recognize how subtle emoji interpretation is, so the only reasonable conclusion is that sender and receiver should see the same pixels.
> I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms.
You can't really do this. Or, rather, it's already been done, but people choose not to do this.
Emoji are just unicode characters. How they're displayed depends on the font used. Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.
The one announced here is open source, for instance, but there's no way Apple is going to adopt it as the system default.
> You can't really do this.
"We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user. We understand users might prefer the current designs, and we are proud of the work our team has done, but we believe that consistent communication is more important, and individual users can always enable the override to get the old look back."
> Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.
Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.
> > Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.
> Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.
Well by "everyone" I meant platform companies, app makers, and website designers. There's literally no way you'll get them to agree on a font choice.
> "We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user".
First you'd have to get Apple to license their emoji font, presumably open source and freely available if you truly want it to be standardized across platforms. Have they ever open sourced a font? Or get Apple to agree to use someone else's font as the system default. Have they ever done that?
Second, if you forbid app developers from choosing an emoji font, the Facebooks of the world are just going to work around you by stripping out the emoji and manually inserting theirs in. Somewhat ironically, by ignoring the platform emoji font, which can lead to some jarring text rendering if you're used to the system font, apps like Facebook are fulfilling your dream of standardized unicode across platforms...but of course, only for users of their apps.
Third, I think you really underestimate the fundamental disagreements here. The Unicode Technical Committee has a working group to try to improve unicode interoperability, and victories are on the level of getting vendors to agree if the standard for the Lotus emoji should mention that it shouldn't include a lillypad (they decided no[1]). They're working on this, but it's never going to be what you want.
In any case, I understand what you're saying and I wasn't dismissing the fact that the precise emoji design can influence why you used that emoji at all, which gets lost in the translation to another emoji font.
[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25230-esr-report-utc185.pdf
OMG leave the emojis alone! It's the classic example of a product that reached it's final form. Stop "innovating" the damn emojis
We have Times New Roman! Stop designing new fonts!
How can you cut so many budget of so many products and decide "yeah, emoji in 3d, that's what we are going to do!". I don't understand... Maybe they have some AR/VR future usage of some kind?
They do have to keep drawing them as unicode assigns new codepoints. So they can't really be left alone, other than just leaving the old ones alone and only appending. But I would imagine this trend towards non-raster versions of emojis is more about making updates MUCH easier rather than "innovating emojis" (even if they claim that in their marketing slop)
So many of the newer code points are ZWJ patterns modifying existing emoji. If you already rigged the 3D shark emoji, when unicode decides that :shark: + ZWJ + :family of 3: has to resolve to :horrific shark attack involving a family of 3:, at least that's not too hard.
Emojis are more of a unicode standard, they can be re-implemented with various themes to suit modern design trends. There's nothing wrong with redesigning your emojis to fit with the rest of your OS like you would with a system typeface.
Except there's no way for the Unicode standard to be prescriptive enough for the different implementations to express identical intent. And that's before the politics get mixed in (e.g. Apple's water gun). That's why you see many chat services and social networks shipping their own whole and opinionated emoji font: at least on their platform every user sees the same glyph and although there is still room for interpretation and misunderstanding, that's not by having too many font designers.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Approximately nobody thought Google’s current emoji family needed a total overhaul, stop breaking our pattern recognition for no reason other than your designers are bored and don’t have enough real work to do.
The best emoji for the way we communicate today would be to revert the water pistol back to a real gun.
Glaring ‘omissions’ are also breasts and penis emojis. Maybe even one representing sexual intercourse. You’ll find they are quite central to human culture.
True, then again, I’d prefer we revert the way we communicate today, thank you very much.
Does anyone know _where_ these supposed 4,000 OBJ files are open-sourced? They don't seem to be in the Noto Emoji GitHub repo, nor linked anywhere in the article.
I couldn't find anything easier.
Seems like they're trying to tease excitement for new emoji in the next Android release (there was also an earlier linkless post in May[1]), so I'm assuming they don't want anyone scooping them and will push to the Noto repo on or after the day of release.
Seems like the post really should at least have used a future tense for "handing over raw .OBJ files to the community".
[1] https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
I'm wondering the same! How that article has no links is beyond me.
I also like that the article uses whatever system emoji you have, so everything is just showing apple emoji in text for me. All I see are a few 3D video renders of theirs.
This article seems fairly uninformative since, as others have pointed out, there's no visualization or comparison of the full emoji set and no link to see it. They just show a few example images and have some (AI-enhanced?) prose that doesn't actually say very much.
This article https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ has a larger (2d image) comparison grid with several dozen examples and an A/B slider vs the old versions. Overall the new design looks like a fairly tasteful compromise between Google's previous flat-shaded vector emoji and the hybrid 2d+3d Apple emoji, with the benefits (easier to rerender with higher-resolution, animations, tweaked lighting, etc.) that you'd get from a fully-3D pipeline. So I like the new set of emoji, just not this particular blog.google.com article.
Yeah, looks like that article was from an I/O announcement of these new emoji (which I don't remember, but I also didn't watch much of the keynote), and they've decided to tease this until it finally lands in the next version of android.
What's the overlap of people excited about new emoji and also read blog.google? OTOH, I guess they didn't ask to be posted to HN. :shrug:
The Google "blob" emoji was the peak of emoji design.
Getting rid of the blobs and putting a smiley face on 'pile of poo' were sad days.
For what is worth, the fluent emojis from Microsoft, also named Segoe UI Emoji, have a 2D and 3D versions. They are beautiful! Although I'm not sure if the 3D ones are just complex vector images made to simulate depth with clever gradients and shadows, or were actually 3D rendered. I even saw some animations of them somewhere. Super cute
I really wish they'd go back to the blobs and stick to them.
tip: on Gboard type the sparkle emoji and then any other emoji and it will suggest the blob version (tho, only as an image)
You can also use Emoji Kitchen to generate the images if you use a non-Gboard keyboard! https://emojikitchen.dev/
I realize many people are devoted to emoji. But my God, this type of infantilism is a proper blight.
Do people really have so little faith in their articulacy that they need to resort to crude cartoons? And what's the aim? Hope the recipient takes pity on the sender's insecurity? Distract from one form of mindless stupidity with a greater one? Who in their right mind ever thinks to themselves, "This message is ok, but I know what'll improve it: a nice little graphic-wank over the words." Or do users actually think there something charming about the things? (But that's unlikely. What sort of simpering plankton would ever mistake a smiley for charm?)
Whatever's behind the fad, I wish one of the tech giants would grow the balls and hairs to deprecate the things - or that a new generation would rebel against its parents childishness and find an amusing way to shit on it - roughly enough to wake them out of the practice. Or alternatively, that emoji users would spend a moment - just a moment - looking at the fatuous mess they're making of their comms and grow up. I can't be the only person who cringes when I see adults jump back in their playpens or reach for a dummy. And really, how can it not be immediately obvious to these people that not everyone wants them stuffing their soggy nappies through their letterboxes? Their general absence here is one of the most refreshing things about this site.
In today's AI times, I find it a little amusing to think about emojis as an automation of the craft of making ascii art. Is a little different since people don't get paid for that, but there was a creative component to it.
The pendulum between iconographic and photorealistic will swing back and forth for eternity.
Would love to see a Google Trends-type dashboard based on Google's "Gboard Federated Analytics" data.
I don't think the data at https://www.emojitracker.com/ is as valid or as frequently updated.
Possibly related: https://gifcities.org/search?q=dollar&offset=0&page_size=200
Can we please just make emoji bigger onscreen? They're not even em-height most of the time. Most interfaces don't scale the emojis when scaling the text.
There's so much artistry and time & effort put into these, and they end up feeling l ike a yellow smudge behind a crack on a dim screen in my life.
What a slopfest. The floating plague in full swing: https://imgur.com/a/IIRIrMI
I just love the "efety Updates" and Android 1.
oh, are they going to adjust the eggplant emoji to match modern usage? And perhaps the peach emoji as well?
If so, I hope they never go from 3D to 4D.
Overheated face emoji
>In the early days, we were literal
People using smiling and laughing emoji were not literally smiling and laughing no more than the people writing LOL.
>We’re handing over raw .OBJ files to the community so they can use them to build immersive VR worlds, indie apps or weird memes.
Where?
No, the point was that we were literal when choosing which emoji to use.
That's not what the article is saying from my reading of it. It thinks "rolling on the floor laughing" is a new exaggerated phenomenon despite ROFL being used the same way for decades.
IMHO it’s still just that: early emoji use was literal and later use got more [nail polish emoji].
Not sure why ROFL is relevant, a typical emoji user is likely unfamiliar with internet slang.
cool, meanwhile people will use pixelated pepes instead
Wasn’t google the one who made flat design popular after we had full 3D and glass aesthetics? Now they want to pretend they “invented” 3D shades emojis again..
> Modern internet culture has steadily moved from mild expressions to drama, hyperbole and overwhelm.
rofl
ROFLCOPTER!
Can we get the 3D-rendered emoji team to switch gears and work on making Drive's search function work >5% of queries?
You already know this, but to say the obvious out loud: Google is certainly big enough that they can pay both a 3D-rendered emoji team and a Drive search team. Drive search is bad because the Drive search team isn't working on it, not because they're short staffed due to investment in the 3D-emoji team, who wouldn't work on gdrive even if they had nothing else to do.
It's also crap...
> The way we use emoji has changed. In the early days, we were literal: You sent a nail polish emoji () because you were, in fact, getting your nails polished.
The early days of emojis used unpaired parentheses, colons, and semicolons. It's like claiming int the early days of Apple the company released macOS 10.
I believe you're referring to emotions, which are a separate and distinct concept/term
I believe the point is that emoticons/emoji/kaomoji were never literal, and that it's surprising that anyone whose job is communications-related would say this.
Yeah, an AI generated blogpost telling me about human emotion...
I didn't find it to be AI-generated.
It smells like Gemini to high heavens, how familiar are you with its writing? If nothing else because of the complete lack of relevant links.
(crying emoji) is a masterclass in modern vocabulary... seemed a bit suspect to me. Maybe people are just sadder
ahh can't wait for 3D "pregnant" black disabled """men""" on my android
Their priorities are all messed up. There are 12 emojis for pregnant non-women: 6 shades of pregnant men and 6 shades of pregnant non-binaries.
But there's no emoji for things you do need, like pouting face (you're forced to use enraged face which is too strong).