Currently I’m keeping myself busy with my bachelor thesis and web based multi-screen games. If you’ve never heard about it you should check out some of the games below. All of them are running in (modern) browsers and can be played with several devices simultaneously.
Racer
As a chrome experiment this game was released by google. It can connect several smartphones or tablets to one big racing track and has a nice soundtrack. Google released a tiny making of video.
Super Sync Sports
A slightly older chrome experiment is Super Sync Sports – a collection of minigames controlled by touch gestures on a connected smartphone. Its visual style is quite unique and reminds be a bit of Rhythm Paradise for the Nintendo DS.
Roll It
This WebGL chrome experiment can be controlled by tilting and shaking your smartphone. It has a very very Wii like feeling on it and a clean design. It’s amazing how javascript access to smartphone sensors like microphone, camera, accelerometer or compass can open up new possibilities for user interactions.
World Wide Maze
One last google game (I promise!) is World Wide Maze. It turns web pages into 3D mazes that can be solved by controlling a ball with a connected smartphone. For some reasons this game is the most demanding for my poor laptop cpu. The guys from HTML5Rocks published a nice making of tutorial covering WebSockets, physics, WebGL and some more technologies.
Spaceship Pilot
This is a small tech demo showing the concept of connecting a phone as game controller and reading accelerometer sensor data via javascript. Webdigi, the company behind the game, published a corresponding tutorial. A presentation by the developer Roshan Abraham shows (besides some technical stuff) how much fun even simple multi-screen games can be, especially when played by multiple people in the same room. It is this board game or Wii feeling emphasizing the group dynamics of competition and cooperation.
Conclusion
The rise of WebSockets and powerful smartphones created a new set of possibilities to interact with web based games. Some of these concepts are not entirely new. There were native apps connecting to each other or a browser game before. But it is not hard to imaging where the journey goes with javascript becoming more and more access to hardware features.
