Google brings shadow art AI game to celebrate Lunar New Year

Chinese shadow puppetry is an ancient art form for storytelling that uses silhouette figures and music to pass down cultural history. Cut-out paper or hand figures are placed in front of a light source and projected on a translucent screen.

Shadow Art enables you to use your hands to form one of twelve zodiac animals from the lunar cycle in front of your laptop or phone camera, trying to match your hand to the diagram on the screen. The “shadow” of your hands on the screen then transform into a shadow puppet animal.

Google has ported that experience into a browser-based game that teaches users how to contort hands into shadow puppets where you have twenty seconds to form each animal. The main goal is to go through the full lunar cycle quickly.

This is available in eleven language varieties, including English, Chinese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese and in several countries around the world.