Google Gravity experiment

http://www.mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google-gravity/

84 41 13 years ago

Google Gravity Experiment , check it out.

blueblob2• 13 years ago

Maybe I am missing something, but why is this interesting? Is it because you copied the source from the google homepage and didn't change the links?

AndreasFrom• 13 years ago

Do you have JS enabled? The whole page falls down when interacting with it. The physics are quite nice actually and you can toss the elements around.

viraptor2• 13 years ago

I've got JS enabled and it doesn't work for me. Neither search itself, nor special effects. (FF 23.0)

blueblob2• 13 years ago

I have javascript enabled but I use a firefox plugin called ghostery and didn't realize that I needed to disable it.

quarterto2• 13 years ago

I imagine you are missing something, yes: http://imgur.com/JO4T1PN.

quarterto2• 13 years ago

Interesting to see this posted here. It's a Chrome experiment almost as old as Chrome itself.

dekhn2• 13 years ago

And in many ways, i think it demonstrates that the idea of using physics engines to manipulate the DOM is still pretty cool, and underutilized.

tinco• 13 years ago

Pretty cool? Yes. Under utilized? I know of one page on the web that does it, this one, and I think that's more than enough :)

patrickaljord• 13 years ago

This is a few years old. Still cool though.

franze• 13 years ago

same, same but different https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/box2d-jquery

(we are currently reviving the project, i.e.: added collision events, other stuff to follow)

ogig2• 13 years ago

This is old, still mrdoob's site is always worth checking out. http://www.mrdoob.com/

loopasam• 13 years ago

I did a similar thing a while ago (inspired from this experiment) on the website of the institute where I'm working at: http://loopasam.github.io/experiments/ebi-gravity/

brokentone• 13 years ago

Fun little project. However--I'm now slightly concerned that websites have access to accelerometer data without any kind of privacy prompt? There must be a browser setting here somewhere, but again, would love to have different settings by default.

lukedjn• 13 years ago

I'm curious, why would the accelerometer invade your privacy? Is there a significant difference between your mouse or keyboard and the accelerometer?

ngpio• 13 years ago

It's not unthinkable that accelerometer data might reveal more information about a user than cursor motion and keyboard input. Home layout, restroom/kitchen/etc. habits, body type, chair type, and even the squishiness of one's clothing could conceivably be determined.

Is this -currently- the case? Highly unlikely. But will someone seek to profit from these data in the future? Probably.

hippish• 13 years ago

Fingerprinting devices for one http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/10/10/stanford-researc...

pascal_cuoq• 13 years ago

Apart from fingerprinting that has already been mentioned, a relevant article: “ACCessory: Password Inference using Accelerometers on Smartphones” http://www.hotmobile.org/2012/papers/HotMobile12-final42.pdf

“We show that accelerometer readings are a powerful side channel that can be used to extract entire sequences of entered text on a smart- phone touchscreen keyboard.”

Pending research to the contrary, I would assume that what is typed on the keyboard of a laptop can be recovered through the accelerometer by an application running in the background.

jlgreco• 13 years ago

Using a privacy prompt for access to any sort of sensor seems like a reasonable policy to me, keyboard/mouse/touchscreen excluded.

ozh• 13 years ago

Old stuff, but cool because it uses Google's legacy UI that didn't use to suck ass as it does today

scott_s• 13 years ago

Funny, I hated that black bar. I think the current one is much more in spirit with what they were before its introduction.

peterjmag2• 13 years ago

I was showing this to a friend a couple of years ago when we accidentally discovered, to our delight, that it's orientation-aware. If you're using Chrome on a Mac laptop, try tilting your machine to see how it affects the elements on screen. (Theoretically, it should also work on most iOS devices and other laptops with motion sensors, but I haven't really tested it extensively.)

Prior to that discovery, I had no idea that a non-mobile browser could access motion sensor data. Turns out that on a MBP at least, the data comes from the Sudden Motion Sensor[1], which is also responsible for parking disk drive heads if you drop your laptop. Pretty cool stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor

A couple more links for the curious:

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/device/orientation/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAPI/Detecting_de...

EDIT: Almost forgot, but I actually created a little drawing experiment based on this: http://peterjmags.com/accelosketch/. Try clicking around and tilting your laptop to draw.

dekhn2• 13 years ago

iOS didn't always expose device orientation events in javascript browser. In particular, one of the first apps I wrote, for iPhone 3GS, specifically could not be a browser app for this reason.

Objective C is a hell of a programming language to learn just to access motion sensors.

zackmorris• 13 years ago

And for anything else devices do that could have been done in a browser..

Nothing like that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize you have yet another memory leak, zombie object or mysterious exception in the main run loop to debug!

peterjmag2• 13 years ago

Yep, looks like it wasn't introduced until iOS 4.2: http://www.sitepoint.com/websockets-and-deviceorientation-su...

ogig2• 13 years ago

It's also 'window speed aware', if you move/shake the browser window you will notice it.

denisnazarov• 13 years ago

I think seeing this is what originally got me into web development.

platz• 13 years ago

Reminds of this wonderful study in usability: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25059665/CustomerForm.htm...

DonGateley• 13 years ago

Many years ago when X-Window was in its youth there was a smart little program that made it possible to do that to the screen of anyone else that was connected by network. Try to imagine the first time your working screen simply falls to pieces and melts. :-)

Google Gravity experiment

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