After bringing Where’s Waldo to Google Maps, Google has now brought another fun game to waste time on. The game is based on Artificial Intelligence and Emojis. It is a scavenger hunt which can be played on any phone. The game uses machine learning to identify the real-world objects and match them with an emoji.
To play the Emoji Scavenger Hunt game you need to go to your browser and access the link emojiscavengerhunt.withgoogle.com and start playing the game. The idea and interface are very simple, an emoji is displayed on the screen and the goal is to use the phone’s camera to find a matching object. There is an assigned time for each game, however, if you play successfully you get additional time for the next hunt.
The objects and the challenges which are offered in the game are easy to find, for example, the user will be asked to find a shoe or a pencil. However, it gets a little difficult to find an object like a strawberry or a pizza slice if there isn’t one present nearby. As it is a web free game so the object recognition is not perfect. The game sometimes rejects to accept the matching object irrespective of how close the camera is or how clear the image is. This is a nice experiment to find out how features of AI like object recognition are becoming a part of our daily life.
In the coming week, there is also Google’s I/O developer conference where the company will be sharing some of the new AI features with the audience. All the Google I/O conference talk has also suggested that an update is also planned for its AI camera app, Google Lens and the company’s cloud offerings which include the AutoML and the specialized AI chips known as TPUs.
