What’s all the fuss about Google’s new game: Emoji Scavenger Hunt

Google has a new game to play with you! Hell yeah! I mean it. After bringing Where’s Waldo to Google Maps last month, Google is back with another fun time waster, this time based on artificial intelligence and emoji. It’s a scavenger hunt (a person who searches for and collects discarded items) that can be played on any phone, and it uses machine learning to identify real-world objects and match them with an emoji.

To play this Emoji Scavenger Hunt game, just head over to emojiscavengerhunt.withgoogle.com using a phone’s browser to play. The idea is simple: Google will display an emoji on-screen, and the goal is to use the phone’s camera to find a matching object. There’s a time limit at play, but each successful match gives you additional time to roll.

The objects or challenges that game offers you are often easy to find, like a shoe or a pencil, but it gets more difficult if there isn’t a strawberry or slice of pizza nearby. It must be noted that this is just a free web game, as the object recognition is far from perfect. Sometimes it refuses to accept the matching object, regardless of how close to the camera it is or how clear the image.

Such experiments are a good example of how AI features like object recognition are finding their way into more and more parts of our everyday life. It’s also a good reminder that this coming week is Google’s I/O developer conference, where the company will surely have some new AI features to share with the world.

All the Google I/O conference rumors suggest that an update is planned for its AI camera app, Google Lens, as well the company’s cloud offerings, like AutoML and it’s specialized AI chips known as TPUs. As always, TechJuice will be covering all the news from May 8th onward.

Did you try out the “Emoji Scavenger Hunt” game? Let us know in the comments below.