Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
A classic boardwalk game rolls from your phone to your computer—using only your browser
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Last week we
launched
Roll It
, a
Chrome Experiment
that links phones to computers and gets people out of their chairs and swinging. We wanted to share how we built a physical game experience with no dedicated hardware. It requires just the web, your computer and a phone.
Here’s a look at the APIs and browser-based features we used to create it.
Roll It is a three-dimensional (3D) experience, from the swing of your phone’s
accelerometer
right up to the virtual models rendered on your computer’s
HTML5 Canvas
. On the phone side, we hooked into browser events like
DeviceOrientation
and
DeviceMotion
to detect the speed and direction of a swing. On the computer side we rendered our scene using
Three.js
and plugged in
Physijs
to add physics to the ball and environment.
To sync the phone to the computer we employed
WebSockets
which enable rapid two-way communication between devices via a central server.
For extra stability we built our backend on
Google Cloud Platform
:
Our
Google App Engine
application, built in
Go
, dynamically balances users across our relay servers.
A
Google Compute Engine
server maintains game state across synced devices.
Google Cloud Storage
speedily serves up the static assets.
We couldn’t have brought this experiment to life without a great team. The theme for Roll It was composed by
Mr. Tim Healey
.
Legwork Studio
developed the interfaces and game environment, and teamed up with
Mode Set
for the development.
To dig deeper into the technology behind Roll It, check out the
HTML5 Rocks Case Study
, or join the team for a
Google Developers Live
event this Friday, June 7, 2013 at 5pm GMT for an in-depth discussion.
Posted by Pete LePage, Developer Advocate and Boardwalk King
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