Google has a history of diversity and acknowledging all cultures and with the Chinese or Lunar New Year upon us they have showed off their newest AI experiment to celebrate the New Year.
The AI experiment is termed Shadow Art and uses AI in the “ancient storytelling art of shadow puppetry”. Shadow Art began in September when the team at Google built an interactive installation that allowed people to use shadow puppetry in a new way.
Shadow Art is a web-based browser game that uses TensorFlow.js, a TensorFlow library to bring fast animation to your screen. The data set which trained the AI was taken from thousand of hand gestures from volunteers across Google Asia.
To play the game you use your hands to create one of the 12 zodiac animals from the lunar cycle in front of your smartphone or laptop camera, copying the instructions on the display. The AI system then attempts to recognise the shadow puppet animal and if correct the display will then animate with the animal that you created.
The game allows you 20 seconds per animal with a goal to unlock all animals as fast as possible. The game is available in eleven languages including English, Chinese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese.
If you want to try it out check it out here and have a crack. Let us know your best time for unlocking all animals and Happy Lunar New Year to you.
