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.

> Emoji with the darkest skin tones can be difficult to see in dark mode — a problem for anyone who sends or receives them. That’s why we built an AI-powered contrast tool that analyzes each emoji at the pixel level, flags when the contrast ratio is too low and suggests high-contrast solutions that are implemented by designers

What part of this is AI? What part of that couldn’t have been done without it? Do they just mean they vibecoded it?

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.

OMG leave the emojis alone! It's the classic example of a product that reached it's final form. Stop "innovating" the damn emojis

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.

The best emoji for the way we communicate today would be to revert the water pistol back to a real gun.

The Google "blob" emoji was the peak of emoji design.

I really wish they'd go back to the blobs and stick to them.

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.

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

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.

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.

Possibly related: https://gifcities.org/search?q=dollar&offset=0&page_size=200

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 to correct for it? 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 - nastily enough to wake them out of the practice. Or alternatively, that emoji users would spend a moment - just one 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.

The pendulum between iconographic and photorealistic will swing back and forth for eternity.

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?

>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?

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..

Emoji are such a terrible idea. What it means depends entirely on what the emoji designer wants.

There was an article shared here by emojipedia that showed, besides the obvious gun emoji turning into a toy gun and then back into a gun, subtle differences between designs changing the MEANING of a message on the internet.

Can you imagine if you write a word like "imagine" that changes meaning depending on what font the user has installed? It's probably a nightmare for preservation as well. You can't record the text, you have to record a screenshot of the emoji because in 50 years who knows what it's going to look like!

> Modern internet culture has steadily moved from mild expressions to drama, hyperbole and overwhelm.

rofl

Can we get the 3D-rendered emoji team to switch gears and work on making Drive's search function work >5% of queries?

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.

Yeah, an AI generated blogpost telling me about human emotion...

ahh can't wait for 3D "pregnant" black disabled """men""" on my android