The conflicting needs of emoji

[Adib Behjat]

I second Mark’s sentiment and really like the suggestion. I also do think it would be wiser if this process was handled and managed by OSs/Apps versus Unicode.

After reading Mark’s suggestion, I was reminded of a game where you combine basic/generic elements to create more complex elements (e.g. https://littlealchemy.com/ <https://littlealchemy.com/>).

For example, if someone wants to generate “Physics Teacher”, a user can type in their device:
🧑‍🏫⚛️

And based on this combination, the OS/App can give the user the option to generate a custom avatar to represent Physics Teacher. With regards to rendering, tools like DALL-E (or other similar diffusion models) can enable this capability. In addition, this process will help encourage the introduction of more generic emoji characters to help expand the foundational building blocks for these tools.


> On Oct 14, 2022, at 2:43 PM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
> 
> There are really two distinct animi(?) behind the push for ever-more-detailed emoji, or rather, two animi for using emoji, and they pull in different directions, almost opposite.
> 
> On one hand, people want an emoji that looks JUST like they want it to look.  Maybe not even only for people!  But of course we see it most with people.  People want an emoji that looks like _they_ look (do they really use it?  or do they just feel left out if it isn't available?  I'm not a heavy emoji-user, so I'm no judge, but I bet the second motivation is non-trivial as well.)  So the really do want "tall ectomorph female physics teacher with dark hair in Princess Leia buns, an eyebrow piercing (right), and a birthmark on the left side of the chin."  This motivates the various suggestions of somehow encoding a teeny image and pretending it's somehow "plain text", or encoding a link to it or something.  I had what I thought were helpful ideas about the recent notions being floated at the last Unicode meeting I attended, and maybe they're even being thought about...  But although I've thought that maybe sending images like this was the best of the suggested solutions, it's still awful.
> 
> The other problem is the other animus involved.  Because it isn't just a picture that people want when they use emoji.  It isn't enough that there's a little picture of a person wearing a mortarboard hat or something, there's actual semantic information embedded in the encoded text as well.  It isn't just a picture, it's a codepoint(-sequence) that means something, a bit-sequence that _means_ "TEACHER."  Just like U+0065 means something more than the ink used to draw it in whatever font.  People want some snippet of "text" that not only looks like them, but also *means* them.  Hence in my example above, expressing some of the various physical traits are one thing, and you can represent TEACHER with some cultural convention like a mortarboard hat (or THIEF with a mask), but how do you get across "PHYSICS teacher"?  Or a dozen other subjects, arbitrarily finely divided?
> 
> When I think about it, I don't know that people would really be satisfied with image-sticker emoji.  After all, not everyone has the skill to draw them (which is why we rely on emoji-font artists in the first place), or make them Just So, and I really do think that people would feel the lack of semantic meaning.  A lot of messaging services already let you include little graphics images, but I don't think the people using them feel this desire for new emoji any less.  How many homedrawn emoji do you really think will be made?  How many used more than twice?  How many used by more than one person?  How many will even be understood by the recipient?
> 
> Asmus' point about comparing it to swapping out lego bits is well-taken.  There have long been these kind of "avatar engines" that let you swap around features to get something kind of like you (I remember one on the Wii way back when.)  And maybe there is some reasonable limit to how much customization can be provided (though I'd bet anything we'd take forever agreeing on it.)  And even within specific limits like hair-style and hats, there'll always be one more that we're lacking, one more Mr Potato Head piece people will push for.
> 
> (Actually, thinking about Asmus' line about "faces drawn on," how's this for an idea, combining raster with standard?  Instead of drawing some random picture yourself for an emoji, you have an image of, say, facial features that's to be projected onto a blank emoji-face, which can be any "standard" emoji or whatever.  Could have other distinct ways of specifying headgear images, etc.  The renderer would be smart enough to scale or transform the image appropriately for different kinds of emoji with faces in different places and orientations etc.  Probably a beast to implement, but I'm just floating ideas.  This one actually has signs of MAYBE bridging the gap between the two drives for emoji.)
> 
> Perhaps the best "generalized emoji" implementation is something along the lines of the Emoji Kitchen, where you can combine arbitrary emoji in arbitrary numbers and orders and the system does its level best to figure out SOME way for the resulting image to make sense.  This gives you some genericness, and you can express all kinds of shades of meaning by combining enough emoji, but retains the semantic meaning of them as well.  Of course, it puts you at the mercy of how the system chooses to combine things, how good the designers are, etc etc.  You have no control over what really emerges at the end.  (I suppose if this ever became something widespread there would develop conventions for combining with a little more control (like Egyptian hieroglyph combiner marks??  Probably not, but with some semantic similarities.))
> 
> Anyway.  Wanted to rant a bit on this "two desires" notion that I was thinking about since the last meeting.  I think it's important to remember the second one, which gets missed out on when people focus on controlling the picture just so (though it is what's behind the idea of using Wikidata codes.)  And the "images of features" notion occurred to me while typing this, and I think it's interesting.
> 
> I'm not really trying to suggest answers here (though I did remark on some things favorably); this is more asking the questions.  There's always going to be these two conflicting needs, and there'll always be people who want ever-finer distinctions in emoji, and there may simply not be any really good answers.  Emoji probably never should have been part of Unicode (not "plain text"), but that ship sailed long ago, and even there it's not cut and dried (webdings? map symbols?)
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> ~mark
> 
> 
> On 10/14/22 00:54, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
>> People that grew up on games are used to character editors that allow any avatar to be assembled from building blocks. Short of a common "avatar engine" shared across all platforms, a limited set of emoji-legos isn't that unreasonable.
>> 
>> We have skin tones, male/female, some limited use of color (black + cat).
>> 
>> Because of their small size, emoji faces would support more customization; it's hard to create a full character emoji on the level of detail of a game character. So you'd be limited to less detail than you can implement with real lego blocks. (And yes, the ones for the heads of the little figure have removable hair (and head gear). Plus a variety of of faces (pirate) painted on.
>> 
>> If that can be done in the physical world, there's no reason a subset of that couldn't be supported in emoji rendering.
>> 
>> People will intuitively sense that that should be possible and thus the pressure to innovate in that direction won't stop.
>> 
>> Just my $1/50.
>> 
>> A./
>> 
>> On 10/13/2022 4:38 PM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
>>> Again, this way lieth madness.  People aren't satisfied with an emoji for "female teacher with dark hair"; they want "TALL, THIN, female PHYSICS teacher with dark hair IN PRINCESS-LEIA BUNS AND A PIERCED EYEBROW (GOLD RING)."  And if you give in on "welllllll, okay, we'll give in on the tall/short...," you're only encouraging them to beg for the rest.  ("How about only a _little_ tall?  How about broad-shouldered?  small-breasted?")
>>> 
>>> (Though my opinion isn't actually quite what that sounds like: even I admit that there probably *are* things that are appropriate to give in on, and I know we all can argue all the day long about them.)
>>> 
>>> ~mark
>>> 
>>> On 10/13/22 09:22, William_J_G Overington via Unicode wrote:
>>>> Thank you for posting about this.
>>>> 
>>>> Could one use variation selectors with this too, so as to have a default style of glasses and various styles of glasses available?
>>>> 
>>>> Or would one need to have separate styles of glasses each encoded separately?
>>>> 
>>>> If both approaches are possible, which one would be better?
>>>> 
>>>> If it is to be encoded, and I hope it will be, it would be good to go for the lot all at once. Lots of styles as glasses are in lots of styles.
>>>> 
>>>> In my opinion it is no use just doing one and leaving the rest for some future time as that is often a recipe for the rest never getting done.
>>>> 
>>>> If the lot is done as one grand forward leap then that is the way to keep Unicode thriving.
>>>> 
>>>> William Overington
>>>> 
>>>> Thursday 13 October 2022
>> 
>> 

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