Gestural shorthand and the new emoticons

NYT’s got an interesting article up on how video chat is changing how extended families keep in touch. Definitely worth a read for its own sake, but I call your attention to this quote:

But grandparents and grandchildren are already working on ways to nudge the medium a little closer to actual teleportation.

When Deborah Lafferty, 55, and her granddaughter Natalie, 2, want to hug, for instance, Natalie comes to the screen in Seattle and squeezes her own face, just as her grandmother does to her when she visits from England. Ms. Lafferty, in turn, squeezes her face. “Grammy loves you so much,” she says, echoing the phrase she uses in person.

We’ve heard a lot about the failures of text-only communications with regard to gauging emotional states. Thus the perhaps-inevitable rise of emoticons as a stand-in for the unstated cues available in meatspace.

Video chat ought to be a vast improvement in terms of showing and “getting” emotion. But my own experiences so far have tended to be a little grainy, a little slow, and far from perfect.

So my question is: What are the chances we develop a new language of gestural, emotional shorthand - the video chat equivalent of emoticons?