With Windows 8.1, Microsoft’s operating system now also supports color emoji. But they did it in a very different way than Apple and Google. Instead of using PNG images, they introduced a support for layered vector glyphs!
Reminds of that neat trick where one would layer webfonts/icofonts on top of eachother, all in a different color (e.g. Forecast Font).
Best thing above all about the technology: it’s backwards compatible.
The way Microsoft has done this is brilliant, much, MUCH more intelligent than the way Apple has, although they like their cutesy skeumorphism too much to implement something so clean as this. The brilliance is the backwards compatibility, and that any font designer can now create coloured fonts that work in any application using DirectWrite. Hopefully Apple will add this to ATSUI.