Emojis have become part of our daily communication when texting or posting updates on our favourite social media networks. We have access to hundreds of emojis on your virtual keyboards and the Unicode consortium is the organization that regulates the addition of these emojis into software. However, different companies usually come up with different forms of the same emoji and this is usually a problem.
From a report by Group Lens, they highlighted this fact by an example of the grinning face with smiling eyes emoji which is rendered differently on various platforms all the way on Apple devices to browsers like Mozilla.
As you can see, the same emoji looks radically different if you compare lets say the Apple one and the Samsung one where the former seems “negative” and the latter is very jovial. The organization found the same thing where this sort of different emoji styles of the same emoji can be a cause of miscommunication and they plotted a graph to show that.
The Apple form of the emoji is the most interesting of the lot as it actually drove different sentiments from the participants that were studied where some people thought it was positive while others thought it was negative.
This research has given light to a fragmentation problem emojis have and how we perceive innately of the various fonts of the same emoji. The Unicode Consortium should probably address this by making sure that all players use the exact same emojis but we have to see if they will do that in the future.
