Variation in Depiction of Same Emoji on Different Platforms Can Lead To Miscommunication

How your device depicts an emoji depends on the operating system it is running. The same "smiley face" emoticon, for instance, appears slightly different when viewed on an iPhone, an Android-powered handset, and a Windows Phone-powered handset. This variation can cause miscommunication between people (PDF), a study by GroupLens Research has found. The research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota said that sometimes this can cause people to misinterpret the emotion and the meaning of emoji-based communication "quite significantly." The conclusion reads: Emoji are used alongside text in digital communication, but their visual nature leaves them open to interpretation. In addition, emoji render differently on different platforms, so people may interpret one platform's rendering differently than they interpret another platform's. Psycholinguistic theory suggests that interpretation must be consistent between two people in order to avoid communication challenges. In this research, we explored whether emoji are consistently interpreted as well as whether interpretation remains consistent across renderings by different platforms. For 5 different platform renderings of 22 emoji Unicode characters, we find disagreement in terms of both sentiment and semantics, and these disagreements only increase when considering renderings across platforms.

Comments

Re:Do the Japanese have any data?

[AmiMoJo]

The early Japanese ones were proprietary, unique to each mobile operator. If you had an AU phone and your friend had a DoCoMo phone you couldn't trade emoji. In short order they got together and merged their sets.

Back then Unicode was totally inadequate for Japanese text as used by people day-to-day, and didn't have any emoji support anyway. Even now the bulk of Japanese text files and plain text email is Shift-JIS rather than Unicode. When Unicode is used in anything but trivial situations needs hacks to render properly. Westerners who run Japanese software need to use AppLocale because most apps aren't Unicode.

It's a total disaster and needs replacing with something better.