What is a paramoji?

A paramoji is a parametric smiley face that represents facial expressions on continuous scales. Unlike widespread emojis the paramojis are not defined for discretely defined states. Instead, emotinal expressions are rendered from five parameters that can be freely selected. They can be used to visualize manually selected, automatically detected or computationally generated emotions with accuracy and with arbitrary nuances. The resulting emoji style icons are expressive, exaggerated and playful. Their emotional content can be easily recognized by humans.

How do paramojis work?

The paramoji is a visualization technique for emotions data. It supports a five dimensional model with independent aspects of human sentiment:

Valence is the axis from bad to good, misery to pleasure, disagreement to agrement.
Arousal is the axis from calm to aroused, inactive to active, sleepy to alarmed.
Dominance is the axis from weakness to strength, fear to anger, submission to dominance.
Contempt is the axis from neutral to smug, vain, disdainful and contempt.
Control is the axis from uncontrolled to controlled, expressed to suppressed.

With these dimensions the paramoji is able to express the emotional dimensions of the Circumplex model of affect and the PAD model of emotional states.

What emotions can be represented with the paramoji?

The paramoji parameterizes facial expressions with a wide variety of emotions. This includes the the seven universal emotions defined by Paul Ekman with reasonable accuracy. Here are the author's picks for those emotions. You can click the image to create your own variations of those expressions. Note that there is not one correct choice, but many ways to change the face along the dimensions of emotional nuances.

Why is linearity important?

The visualization technique maps the five parameters linearly onto drawing parameters such as angles, lengths and and positions. Linearity ensures that linear transitions in parameters space also lead to smooth transitions in the resulting images. Additionally, with little practice it is possible to recognize the parameters from the image, by looking at curvatures, angles and distances. Linearity also leads to smooth interpolations without jumps or unintended easing, making them perfect for animations.

How can I use paramojis on my website?

The easiest way to link the image directly as shown below. You can set the request parameters for five paramoji dimensions from 0 to 100. Optionally you can set the size parameter to get a fixed size image.

You can use the paramoji editor to find suitable parameters. To really leverage the power of paramojis these parameters must of course be dynamically derived or computed.

✎Try it out

I want to learn more about paramojis

Paramoji Speech Flow is an application of paramojis to advanced sentiment visualization in speech text.
Emotions at scale talks about various efforts to process emotions on computers featuring paramojis.
Visualizing emotions with linearly parameterized facial expressions, a research paper bind paramoji development.

Are there any similar solutions?

For a full parametric facial expression the best solution is still the good old Chernoff face from the 70's.
FACSGen - A facial expression generator tool based on the facial action coding system (FACS)
Parametric Face Drawings is visualization technique for facial landmarks.
A research paper on Parametric Facial Expression Synthesis.
The Facial expression generator based on FACS is a pay-walled paper on facial expression generation.

Paramoji - A parametric emoji