What is "moai"

n. One of the large stone statues on Easter Island (Rapa Nui).

Moai , or Mo‘ai, are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500 CE. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island's perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads three-eighths the size of the whole statue. The moai are chiefly the living faces (aringa ora) of deified ancestors (aringa ora ata tepuna). The statues still gazed inland across their clan lands when Europeans first visited the island, but most were cast down during later conflicts between clans.

The production and transportation of the 887 statues are considered remarkable creative and physical feats. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost high and weighed 82 tons; the heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons; and one unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately tall with a weight of about 270 tons. The islanders themselves tore down the standing moai after their civilization broke down.

The Moai Seamount is a submarine volcano, the second most westerly in the Easter Seamount Chain or Sala y Gómez ridge. It is east of Pukao seamount and west of Easter Island. It rises over 2,500 metres from the ocean floor to within a few hundred metres of the sea surface. The Moai seamount is fairly young, having developed in the last few hundred thousand years as the Nazca Plate floats over the Easter hotspot.

The Moai seamount was named after the moai statues of neighbouring Easter Island.

Moai is a development and deployment platform designed for the creation of mobile games on iOS and Android smartphones. The Moai platform consists of Moai SDK, an open source game engine, and Moai Cloud, a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) for the hosting and deployment of game services. Moai developers use Lua, C++ and OpenGL, to build mobile games that span smartphones and cloud. Several commercial games have been built with Moai, including Crimson: Steam Pirates, and Broken Age. Moai integrates third-party game analytics and monetization services such as Apsalar and Tapjoy.

Moai are large statues of Easter Island.

Moai also may refer to:

• Moai (seamount), submarine volcano type
• Moai kavakava, small wooden statues
• Moai (game development platform)
• Moai (social support groups), Japanese institution

A Moai (Japanese for "Meeting for a common purpose") are social support groups that form in order to provide varying support from social, financial, health, or spiritual interests. Moai means "meeting for a common purpose" in Japanese and originated from the social support groups in Okinawa, Japan. The concept of Moais have gained contemporary attention due to the Blue Zone research popularized by Dan Buettner. According to research, Moais are considered one of the leading factors of the longevity of lifespan of the Okinawan people, making the region among the highest concentration of centenarians in the world.