On Apple devices, when we want to illustrate or animate a message or text, we can use an Emoji, a Memoji, an Animoji or a Memoji Sticker . The terms are very similar, but they refer to quite different elements. Let’s clarify the differences and what we can do with each of them.
Emoji
Emoji are the little icons that represent concepts . Starting with the smiley face to the avocado, going through the plane taking off or the palm tree. The term “emoji” comes from Japanese, it is the union between “e” which means drawing and “moji” which means character , that is to say a drawing character .
The arrival of new emoji to our devices is a two-step process. First is the Unicode Consortium responsible for the Unicode standard for encoding characters. This organization creates the emoji descriptions, for example “radiant face with smiling eyes”, and assigns them the code “U + 1F601”. Periodically this consortium publishes the updated list of emoji icons.
In second place we find the different companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Emojipedia, Twitter, Samsung, etc. These companies create, based on the Unicode description, a graphical representation of it , which, as we can see in the image, maintain the concept, but are quite far from each other.
We can use emoji in any text , in fact it is one more character that each system will interpret in its own way, of course, maintaining the idea that we want to convey.
Animoji
To properly understand the Animoji we have to go back to the launch of the iPhone X. This was the first iPhone to replace the Home button with Touch ID with a camera system and Face ID. To identify and unlock our iPhone, create a three-dimensional map of our face to later recognize us.
As Craig Federighi said during the presentation “What does humanity do when given the most advanced facial recognition system in history? Put on the faces of talking puppets. ” Technology has its fun part.
Animoji live inside the Messages app , we access them through the monkey-shaped button that appears above the keyboard. They are basically some characters, such as the bear, the shark, the cat, the dog, the panda, the dinosaur, etc. Thanks to the True Depth camera found on iPhone X and later, these Animoji mimic our facial expressions . We can send them as video, by touching the red button to start recording, or drag them into the conversation to send them as an image.
The Animoji images and videos are generated on our device and sent in a way that anyone we send them to will see them the same as we do .
Memoji
We can define the Memoji as an Animoji with our face. Instead of using one of the characters that come by default we can customize a human face with all its features (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, etc.) to be a representation of ourselves .
Once we have personalized this Memoji we can use it just like any other Animoji .
Memoji or Animoji Stickers
Stickers, which we translate as “stickers”, are small images that we can “stick” in conversations to express ideas. The Stickers are generated from the Animoji characters that come by default plus all the Memoji characters that we create, and show different emotions or actions such as surprise, approval, dream, greeting, etc.
We can use the Stickers from the Emoji keyboard, we will find them on the left side of the selector, next to the most used Emoji .
As with Memoji or Animoji, our device generates the image so that we can send it through any messaging application in addition to iMessage, such as Telegram or even email. It will always look exactly how we see it.
