Microsoft’s new emoji at the moment are accessible in Windows 11

Microsoft is making its Fluent-style emoji accessible in Windows 11 this week. A brand new optionally available replace for the OS is rolling out that features a lot of essential bug fixes and the brand new emoji Microsoft previewed earlier this 12 months. While it’s a very new fashion, it’s not the 3D look that Microsoft beforehand promised — the corporate opted for 2D as a substitute.

The new emoji in Windows 11 consists of the return of Clippy, as Microsoft has changed the usual paperclip emoji with its Clippy character. The emoji have additionally been redesigned to incorporate vibrant and saturated colours, however lack the 3D facets that made them pop.

“The new emoji style is only available in Windows 11 and is 2D,” explains Microsoft in a quiet replace to its design blog from July. “We still offer an assortment of emojis [sic] for Windows 10 customers.” This identical weblog put up nonetheless factors out that Microsoft “opted for 3D designs over 2D and chose to animate the majority of our emoji.”

It’s not clear if we’ll ever see the spectacular 3D emoji inside Windows 11 that Microsoft demonstrated earlier this 12 months. The lack of 3D could possibly be associated to technical limitations of Microsoft’s color font format that the corporate makes use of to show emoji inside Windows. While Apple makes use of bitmaps to render its emoji, Microsoft makes use of a vector format which is way extra scalable and has file dimension advantages if emoji are flatter.

We’re nonetheless anticipating 3D and animated variations of those Fluent emoji to look in merchandise like Microsoft Teams, however if you need the brand new emoji in Windows you then’ll must improve to Windows 11. Microsoft has made it clear that it doesn’t plan on bringing this new emoji to Windows 10.