Last but not least: Emoticons
The classic emoticons consist of punctuation marks or are bright yellow. In future, however, the originally abstract characters will reflect human diversity even more and come in different skin colors.
Unicode is an international character code that is intended to standardize the digital characters of different countries and cultures. The Unicode Consortium (to which numerous software companies belong) has now published a draft for new emoticons guidelines written by Mark Davis from Google and Peter Edberg from Apple. The new guidelines are based on the six skin types of the so-called Fitzpatrick scale.
There are other human distinguishing features, such as hairstyles, hair colors or beards, according to the draft. But it would be impossible for Unicode to take all this into account. Nevertheless, this brings the emoticon one step closer to the human face.
If the Unicode Consortium accepts the proposal, it will probably be possible to personalize emoticons on smartphones from June 2015. Those who prefer to express their feelings in neutral crisp yellow can of course continue to do so. (sis)
