Why Would I Do That?
Since you’re reading this, I am guessing that you have experienced virtual reality, augmented reality, or mixed reality. Maybe you’re a med school student that spent three hours inside of a headset to better learn the human anatomy. Maybe you’re a technician that wired up a new Boeing engine with the help of AR glasses. Or maybe you’re like me and are tired of having to type out a whole page of text to describe a sweet virtual tour of Grecian ruins via Google Arts and Culture. Wouldn’t you like to use a short, pithy, millenial-moji to describe those experiences?
Well Unicode, the organization that manages emojis, doesn’t support one! And they won’t add one. I know because I submitted a proposal, and it was flat out rejected.
One of their reasons was that the technology is still in its early phases. So I need all my medical professionals, operators, military recruits, even Bank of America, yes you read that right, Bank of America home mortgage professionals to submit a proposal for a new VR emoji. That way we can prove to Unicode that it’s not too early, and we can all avoid the gross injustice of having to type out a 4 page text every time we don a headset.
Also, Fame
Now if that doesn’t convince you to submit one, what about fame?!
That’s right fame! Glory! Every day, users send roughly five billion emojis on Facebook Messenger alone. Unicode’s voting block actually extends beyond Facebook and is comprised of major software providers like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. A vote from these members for inclusion of a new emoji is also a commitment to support it in the next release. If your application is accepted, you get to claim credit for something people will use across every device and platform.
Lessons Learned
Now you should definitely submit an application, but you should also definitely avoid the mistakes I made. Here is Unicode’s full feedback:
“Thank you for your submission. The emoji subcommittee has reviewed this and declines to encode the HMD headset. The committee feels this technology is still in early stages. Additionally, the statistics and comparison are faulty, and the image is indistinct at emoji sizes. In gathering search statistics, the multi-word terms have to be quoted such as “extended reality” or “augmented reality”, otherwise the figures are invalid.” — Unicode Emoji Subcommittee
We’ll work through this line by line, and I’ve provided my full application and assets here in case you want to see where I went wrong.
Early Stages
Unicode cares a lot about frequency of usage. You either need to prove your proposal is the hottest thing since macarons or that a certain niche demographic will use the heck out of this new emoji. Think millions of users per day. My mistake was going for the former, but given the adoption curve, I recommend going for the latter. That is, even though it’s early, prove to Unicode that a small subset of the population would use the emoji with high intensity.
You could point to the dozens of designers that are already circulating concepts on Instagram or the increasing engagement in sports and medicine.
My mistake was not including engagement time (through the roof) for the subset of users who may utilize VR on a daily basis.
Indistinct at Emoji Sizes
Unicode also wants to make sure all emoji proposals are truly distinct in small viewports. For example a face with head-mounted display should look different from both:
😎 sunglasses
🤓 nerd
If you are a designer, go ahead and open up that Adobe XD and do your magic. If not, I would reach out to a few brilliant designers who are creating custom VR emojis.
Faulty Comparisons
Don’t do bad data science things like I did and compares apples to oranges. Unicode wants to know that your proposal is “trending” as a topic. So in Google I looked for extended reality (no quotes), whereas the correct comparison search would be “extended reality” (with quotes). This forces search engines to perform exact matches.
Interestingly enough, as of today, there are only 3.43 million hits for “virtual reality” on Google. Definitely more niche than SXSW would have you believe.
You Can Use My App
So, I hope you will join me in submitting applications for XR-based emojis. AR, VR, MR, whatever floats your boat. Unicode will hopefully get the hint, and we’ll all be able to talk about virtual experiences in the most universal of languages: the emoji.
Now the guidelines from UTC run 10 pages (5k+ words) and are basically like writing a college application. I’m going to save you the time and offer my proposal as a template. Feel free to use my emoji design as well, though you’ll likely want to edit it to be a little more distinct.
Can I Copy Your Stuff?
Yes, I give you all of the rights to the artifacts. To all of my one readers (thanks Mom), let it be known that content inside of the emoji proposal are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal.
“You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.”
I hope this convinced at least one of you to submit an application!