The search engine giant has accomplished yet another amusing chrome experiment by launching Cube Slam, which enables you play pong-inspired game with your friends face-to-face irrespective of where ever they are sitting around the world. Google developed this exciting game just to showcase the power of WebRTC, an open source project that permits you empower video conferencing in the web browser without making use of plug-ins.
Expectedly, Google has created a YouTube promo video for Cube Slam, which takes video chat to the world of games:
Graphics of cube slam are condensed in CSS 3D and WebGL whereas its custom soundtrack is provided dynamically via Web Audio. The objective of this game is to drive a cube three times in a row at your friend till the screen ends. Several power-ups like shields, lasers, fireballs, death balls, ghost balls, fog, bulletproof shields, mirrored controls resized paddles, extra lives, and time bombs can be unlocked along the way and each level offers a progressively hard set of hindrances and dares.
Since WebRTC has not been made available on mobile platform of Chrome browser yet (Google planning to launch later this year), you can compete against a computer character ‘Bob the Bear’. The bear will be your only challenger if you wish to play it on your tablet or phone. You can also play Cube Slam o ffine just by downloading the app from the Chrome store.
This is not the first time the company has used games to endorse its browser Chrome. Google has launched Super Racer, Sync Sports and Roll it earlier. Along with the promotion of Chrome, the company also wants to focus what exactly developers can perform with WebGL and Web Audio.
Google claims that Cube Slam is the “first large-scale application to use RTCDataChannel, which provides an API similar to WebSocket, but sends the data over the RTCPeerConnection peer-to-peer link.”
The structure for the game is hosted on Google’s Compute Engine and the code can be accessed here.
Cube Slam has been made available on Chrome for the desktop and Chrome OS. Google has planned to launch Cube Slam on Chrome for Android later this year, but you can try the game now by activating the “WebRTC Android” setting in the chrome://flags menu.
