To imagine conversations be more expressive, emojis can intensify dialogues, making them visually active, fun, and interactive. However, the young Australian twins, of 26 years, Colina and Hripsime Demirdijan intended to take it a step ahead by introducing customizable emojis to the world of social media.
The history of emojis dates back to 1999 when the Japanese ‘i-mode’ development team member Shigeteka Kurita set out to sketch 12-megapixel images integrated from the keyboard grid when sent over mobiles and pages formed their personal characters.
Later he modified them, which now is a part of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His creative art became well known worldwide, and Google ended up petitioning for introducing emojis that were further identified by the Unicode Consortium, with the help of their team members Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer.
By 2009 Apple had also introduced 625 new emoji characters into the Unicode Standard. Eventually, these emojis, integrated through multiple coding, started getting altered, remolded, and projected a rapid popularization among the young generation.
In 2016, these Australian based young twins experimented by advertising on a newly made Instagram page dedicated to emojis. By few days, it fetched 50,000 subscribers to the platform. The young girls could envision something new to contribute, and they ended up developing customizable emojis.
Unlike the other emojis, which were expressive and creative, the users made these customizable emojis as a close replica, not merely restricted to mobile phones but for other devices over different social media platforms. These avatars came with an automatic generation of multiple expressions. Users could apply them all without the hassle of personalizing the avatar for the 150 facial features, which the twins had already integrated into their Moji Edit app.
Describing the emojis as an unspoken language, Colin and Hripsime started learning programming to dive deep into the core features they were aiming to build. From developing the avatar designs to writing a business plan, the two siblings with no prior tech-education were further proceeding by implementing a tool that used 50 different blend-shapes.
Today it aims to explore 3d models and avatars and progress by adopting AR technology for producing avatars through a mere facial scan. Emojis might be an unspoken language, as Hripsime says, but it surely can make words woven into an art of storytelling.
