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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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?

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?

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

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