Introduction to editable visual object and its description schema for mobile applications

•We analyze the drawbacks of current emoticon system.•We introduce an editable visual object which can substitute the emoticon.•We propose a schema based EVO description method.•We propose a differential coding to transmit the EVO.•We implement the prototype mobile application to verify the performance the proposed EVO.

With the spread of portable smart devices, social networking services are gaining popularity. At the same time, emoticons which can be used a primary tool to deliver the enriched personal feelings are also gaining popularity in the social networking services. Now, emoticon markets are much bigger than before since the territory of emoticons broadens the culture and social issues. However, provided emoticons from the service providers are difficult to express the exact personalized feeling. Thus, users cannot edit what they want to express. In this study, we propose a new concept of emoticons, an editable visual object, to resolve above problems. User can edit the components inside the proposed editable visual object and send it to express exact intention. Further, we propose an efficient editable visual object description schema to represent and transmit the editable visual object. To prove the performance and efficiency of proposed technique, we implement and test the prototype system for the mobile device. As shown in the test results, the proposed description method is at most 100 times superior to the compared screen capturing method in the view of transmission bandwidth. The proposed editable visual object can be exploited not only mobile applications, but also various fields such as education and medical field.