Memoji

[William_J_G Overington via Unicode]

Thank you for your reply.

John H. Jenkins wrote:

> Memoji are not merely animated emoji; they are personalized avatars.

Some more information about that would be appreciated please. In particular I am wondering how they are transmitted from one end user to another end user.

For example, is each frame sent as a sequence of Private Use Area code points with one as a base character and the rest as modifiers, for example, for hair style, hair colour, style of glasses and so on? If that is so then both sender device and receiver device would need to have the same font installed.

Would it be possible please for someone to post an email with a memoji in it to this mailing list so that readers who so choose can analyse the coding in both a circulated email and in the web page archive of the email?

If I remember correctly the rationale for encoding any emoji at all into Unicode was, at the time, that emoji encoded using Private Use Area code points were getting into mailing lists and the mailing lists were becoming archived in web page archives and thus the archives included Private Use Area characters and there was a desire to remove the potential for ambiguity in the archives.

So, if memoji with all of those base characters and modifiers get into databases then maybe the same rationale will be needed and that they will all become encoded into Unicode.

However, maybe they are encoded in a different way, maybe using a base character in the Private Use Area followed by a sequence of tag characters. Or some other way.

> As for animated emoji, I expect that the UTC would consider them out-of-scope for plain text.

Well, my experience is that if a proposal is regarded as being out-of-scope for Unicode then it is screened out and not included in the document register and UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) does not consider the matter and no reason is supplied as to why the proposal is regarded as out-of-scope. So, as far as I am aware, UTC does not consider whether the scope of Unicode should be extended.

Yesterday I suggested that there could be a

ANIMATION FRAME SEPARATOR 

character.

Thinking about this in relation to memoji I have since thought that there could also be a 

ANIMATION FRAME SEPARATOR YET KEEP THE LETTERING

character, then the expression of the memoji could change from frame to frame yet the lettering containing a message could persist over many frames, without needing to be repeated in every frame, until an ANIMATION FRAME SEPARATOR  character is received with the lettering for the next part of the message. 

> Note that web pages can already contain animated or moving elements which cannot be represented in plain text.

Well, the implication of the name seems to be that memoji are used in text. Whether that is plain text is of interest.

The moji in emoji means letter, character.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/emoji

William Overington

Tuesday 10 July 2018