Over the past 15 years, Google has been showcasing thousands of fun, clever, informative, and inspiring experiments coders have made with Chrome, Android, AR, AI, and more. If you weren’t aware, all of those experiments can be found online on the Experiments with Google website. As of February 2024, there are over 1,600 experiments available to try, and while it’s worth scrolling through to see them all, we’ve picked out our five favorites below.
Instrument Playground
I am still not entirely convinced that AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini are “the future,” but it’s clear that artificial intelligence is going to power many of the products and services we use in the coming months. As frightening as that might be, there are plenty of instances where AI is used to create something delightful and entertaining. That’s certainly the case for Instrument Playground, which is a recent Experiment with Google powered by AI.
When you launch the experiment, you’ll tell it which instrument you want to play. Once you pick an instrument, the MusicLM text-to-music language model will generate a 20-second sound clip inspired by the instrument. You can alter that sound by adding an adjective (loud, moody, shrill), switch between three different modes, or play the instrument with your keyboard to create your own short song. You could spend hours messing around with this one.
Puzzle Party
Assembling a jigsaw puzzle can be fun and therapeutic, but keeping up with all of the physical puzzle pieces is a bit of a pain. That’s why I recommend trying out the experiment Puzzle Party, which tasks you with assembling puzzles of famous artwork available on Google Arts & Culture. The best part is that you can invite as many people as you want to play with you in Google and collaborate to finish the puzzles together.
If you want to try the experiment for yourself, click the button below:
Return of the Cat Mummy
I’m always on the hunt for fun browser games to play on my lunch breaks, and Return of the Cat Mummy definitely fits the bill. You play a mummified cat who is trying to gather all the ceremonial items necessary for the pharaoh’s afterlife journey. Along the way, you might learn a thing or two about ancient Egyptian history. Fun and educational!
Say What You See
As intrigued as I am by AI image generators, I never know exactly how to phrase what I want them to generate. Say What You See is a game that teaches you the art of image prompting by showing you an image and asking you to type in a caption that might generate that image. The closer you get to nailing the caption, the higher you score.
Tab Maker
Do you want to design a custom new tab page in Chrome but don’t have the coding skills to make it happen? If so, you need to check out Tab Maker. This brilliant tool allows you to building an extension for Chrome that changes the new tab page into whatever your heart desires. Follow the instructions to build the new tab page of your dreams with text, images, GIFs, and links, and then share it with the world (or keep it to yourself).
If you want to try it for yourself, visit tabmaker.withgoogle.com.
