Chrome Super Sync Sports

Branding, Mobile, Website

The brief

We were challenged to create a cool, arcade style game that demonstrated the power of the Chrome browser in being able to run web-socket powered applications, that allow mobile, tablet and desktop computers to communicate in real time.

What we created

‘Chrome Experiments’ are at the heart of what Google’s Chrome technology seeks to accomplish: the inspiration of technological creativity that can push the web forward. Our overarching task was to drive awareness of Chrome for mobile and show people how the Chrome browser connects across devices, while creating a showcase for HTML5 and the innovations it offers. We wanted to create a simple user interface that would allow for a warm and playful feeling, masking the complexities of technology that has the potential to seem alienating.

Super Sync Sports is a Chrome Experiment that allows you to sync your mobile phone to your computer and use it as a game controller. Run, Cycle or Swim your way to sporting stardom using the touchscreen on your mobile device. The project was created by Google Creative Lab in collaboration with ourselves, Rafael Rozendaal and Rami Niemi.

The cool stuff

Produced using HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and the WebSockets API. Taking one step back from the details of the technology, if you could look under the hood, you would see that Chrome Super Sync Sports is a distributed application that uses node.js relay servers to ferry packets of WebSocket data between a desktop computer and several mobile devices. All that information has to travel through the Internet in a short enough space of time so the people playing the game don’t notice a delay. But the Internet does not always play nice!

We created a automatically scaling multi-node server solution that sits beneath a beautifully rendered and fun to play arcade game. A beast of a back-end!

The results

Since launch millions of people have played Super Sync Sports either by themselves or against their friends. The project is routinely used in inspiration presentations that show the power and potential of websocket technology.