By
Delia
/ Last
update
February 16, 2022
3D emoji arrives for Teams in preview
Microsoft has started updating more than 1,800 emoji in its Teams app with new Fluent designs. The 3D emoji is available in preview now, and it’s the same as Microsoft announced last year.
Kaushal Mehta, a member of the Microsoft Teams engineering team, explained in a blog post that "Users will see a new take on most of the previous Teams emoji, along with some new picks”, "All skintone-enabled emoji will continue to have 6 skintone options."
The new 3D emoji will appear in chat and channels, as well as in reactions in chat, channels, or live sessions. There are even animations of some of the emoji. To access the new emoji, all you need to do is go to Microsoft Teams Settings, About, Public Preview. IT administrators may need to enable the preview feature, but once enabled, 3D emoji will appear in Microsoft Teams for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux and all supported web browsers.
Microsoft is still working on 3D emoji for Windows 11
You may recall that Microsoft actually promised 3D emoji for Windows 11 in 2021 and quite a few people were excited about it and wanted to upgrade to Windows 11. However, the 3D-style Fluent Design emoji were not available as expected. Microsoft said its social media team posted the "wrong graphics" and apologized for the mistake.
Windows 11 users are still using the 2D version of the emoji, but that doesn't mean that the 3D emoji that was skipped last year won't be available in Windows 11. According to a tweet from Nando Costa, Microsoft is still working on bringing 3D emoji to Windows 11, but the work is not quite done yet. Microsoft plans to create new designs each year based on new Unicode versions.
At this point, Microsoft still has a long way to go in building a consistent UI experience between Windows and Microsoft products. The good news is that if you've ever been excited by the news of 3D emoji, they should be available in Teams soon.