There'll be more diversity than ever in the emoji world, very soon, after a proposed change to Unicode that could change the graphical language for ever.
If agreed and implemented by manufacturers, the change will allow full emoji customisation -- meaning you could change the gender, or even hair colour of an emoji.
The update -- entitled UTS 52 -- would be the first to allow major emoji customisation. Previous changes have allowed users to adapt the skin colour of various emoji, but this would be a more sweeping change that could affect many emoji in different ways.
In a proposal, a number of customisations are outlined, including the ability to modify "flags for subdivisions of countries such as Scotland or California, gender variants such as female runners or males raising a hand, hair colour variants such as a red haired dancer, and directional variants like pointing a hand or bicyclist to the right".
The customisation would apparently work in the same way as the skin tone modifiers introduced last year.
. "Internally that emoji consists of a base emoji followed by a skin-tone modifier that indicates that the base emoji should be olive-skinned. The olive-skinned emoji looks like a single character to the user, and behaves as a single emoji character in display, line break, and other processing."
By similarly adjusting other emoji, the system could allow for more natural and complex conversations, without changing the essential simplicity of the pictures. A separate proposal would allow emoji to be displayed in black and white.
The change isn't going through just yet: it is likely to be discussed before Unicode's Q2 committee meeting, along with feedback requests from emoji implementers like Google, Microsoft and Apple, but it'll be a while -- at least the end of 2016 -- before the proposals are approved and implemented.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
