The Unicode Consortium has announced version 7.0 of the Unicode character-encoding standard, bringing an additional 2,834 new characters and 250 new emojis to its already extensive character set.
The Unicode system was put in place to provide a consistent way to regulate the presentation of text on different software platforms around the globe, in order to handle and transmit characters. The Consortium is the industry body devoted to the development and promotion of these character based software standards.
"Most of the new emoji characters derive from characters in long-standing and widespread use in Wingdings and Webdings fonts," explained the Unicode Consortium.
Currency symbols for the Russian rouble and Azerbaijani manat are amongst the new symbols added, whist emoji including 'Thermometer' and 'Tornado' for weather, and gems such as a 'Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended', 'Man In Business Suit Levitating' and 'Raised Hand With Part Between Middle And Ring Fingers' (AKA the Vulcan salute) are also new.
Whilst the descriptions and reference designs of the new emojis have been set by Unicode, it is revealed that companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft will work on their own Emoji renditions. We can expect to see some varied designs when it is actually implemented between the tech giants.
Apple emojis fail to represent ethnic diversity
Apple has however, fallen into the spotlight for the lack of diversity in its own emoji designs. For instance a petition was set up against the Cupertino based company for only having included two non-white faces in its implementation of the characters.
"Of the more than 800 emojis, the only two resembling people of colour are a guy who looks vaguely Asian and another in a turban," the petition claims, according to the Guardian. "There's a white boy, girl, man, woman, elderly man, elderly woman, blond boy, blonde girl, and, we're pretty sure, Princess Peach. But when it comes to faces outside of yellow smileys, there's a staggering lack of minority representation."
Apple has since announced that it has been working with the Unicode Consortium to update the Standard with more diversity in the range of characters. However, it looks like due to the lack of new emojis of people and most of the v7.0 additions being objects, that Apple will have to re-work some of its existing pictographs.
