If you’re looking for a nifty way to kill about 10 minutes, Google‘s new AI experiment is a fun way to do just that. The company has created Emoji Scavenger Hunt, a mobile game that uses AI to recognise objects using your phone’s camera.
Essentially, it will ask you to find the real-world equivalent of an emoji which appears at the top of the screen, like, say, a keyboard, notepad, or power cable. You have 20 seconds to point your camera at the requested object and every correct answer will add more time to the clock.
The tech isn’t amazing, so it might fail you even if you are holding the object right in front of the camera. The game will take a stab at identifying what it’s looking at towards the bottom of the screen so you can see what it thinks it’s looking at the whole time.
After asking for a hand, I held my own in front of my phone for the entire 20 seconds only to have the game say, “Might I see fries?”. No, my hand is definitely not fries. It did this with a few items like my backpack, but on the whole, it worked fine.
You can give the game a go for yourself over at emojiscavengerhunt.withgoogle.com, which works on mobile devices only, but won’t make you download anything, it just plays in the browser.