Living Jiagu

For Google Developer Days in Shanghai, we showed visitors the origins of Chinese characters while showcasing the future of Google technologies. We asked people to write in the ancient oracle bone script, the earliest known form of Chinese writing, colloquially known as JiǎGǔWén. After visitors copied a character on a tablet, we used TensorFlow’s image-recognition capabilities to check if the input matched the original OBS character. If the attempt was recognised, we used Google’s AutoDraw API to then bring the character to life in an animation springing from the tablet to a 23m² LED wall.