Google is always showing off doodles on its search engine homepage, but this time it’s different. By using the HTML5 canvas element, which enables developers to render dynamic images and 2 dimensional shapes, Google was able to make the doodle come to life.
After seeing the creations of Alexander Calder in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Jered Wierzbicki, Google software engineer, thought of the concept. As Wierzbicki put it, “This is Google’s first doodle made entirely using HTML 5 canvas, so you need to use a modern browser to interact with it. It runs a physics simulation on the mobile’s geometry, and then does realtime 3D rendering with vector graphics. Only recently have browsers advanced to the point where this is possible.”
The doodle is shown on the Google home page as an interactive object–but only if you were viewing it in the Chrome or Firefox 5 web browsers–Internet Explorer still shows it as a standard, non-moving 2D image.
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