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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
OMG leave the emojis alone! It's the classic example of a product that reached it's final form. Stop "innovating" the damn emojis
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?
We have Times New Roman! Stop designing new fonts!
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.
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'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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
>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.
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?
Overheated face emoji
If so, I hope they never go from 3D to 4D.
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).