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1000-key Emoji Keyboard Is As Crazy As It Sounds

Posted by timothy on from the quite-a-pitchman dept.

hypnosec writes: A YouTuber named Tom Scott has built a 1,000-key keyboard with each key representing an emoji! Scott made the emoji keyboard using 14 keyboards and over 1,000 individually placed stickers. While he himself admits that it is one of the craziest things he has built, the work he has put in does warrant appreciation. On the keyboard are individually placed emojis for food items, animals, plants, transport, national flags, and time among others.

3 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re: the work he has put in does warrant appreciati by TWX · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's what I was thinking.

    Western languages with alphabets around the common 26-letter model construct concepts by grouping letters into words and then words into sentences. Eastern languages with logograms like Hanzi or Kanji can have their logograms 'built' as they can be reduced to a combination of particular strokes that when put together create a specific meaning, so in effect, keyboards for Eastern logograms can be assembled through keystrokes in a fashion similarly to how they're drawn through brush strokes.

    This Emoji keyboard is silly, especially as a form of logogram, Emojis only contain so many varieties of each type of characteristic. That's why we used to type them on our keyboards using ASCII or extended ASCII, because we could represent the expression without having to have a specific icon for it.

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  2. Direct youtube link. by sims+2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Direct youtube link.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    Because that's what you were looking for anyway.

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  3. Re: the work he has put in does warrant appreciati by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

    A visual demonstration of the sillyness and pointlessness of emoji.

    I've never used one. Why would I? I have words and, on occasion, an old-fashioned ascii smiley :>

    Which is true, if you're limiting yourself to Western European languages. If you limit yourself to English, you can get rid of silly accented characters too.

    The reason for the Emoji entering our lives really stems from Apple trying to be universal. The history of Emoji is that it comes from Japan, as Japanese carriers sought to differentiate themselves by adding little pictograms. Of course, Apple had to bring their iPhone to Japan, which mean Apple needed to support Emoji as well (and for a little while, the Emoji keyboard was Japan-only)

    Emoji really entered our space when it was discovered that we can't represent Japanese text with Emoji in Unicode. It was not possible to convert because Unicode was lacking the Emoji codepoints to which you could convert to.

    Which is why Unicode added a pile of Emoji - because the goal of Unicode is to be able to universally represent text - and Emoji was text that couldn't be converted to or from Unicode.