OT: Alexander Calder, today's Google homepage doodle

[RockdaMan]

Kinda neat. Not like the guitar, but neat enough.

Our homepage doodle today celebrates the birthday of Alexander Calder, an American artist best known for inventing the mobile.

Last year I wandered into a white room at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago full of Alexander Calder’s delicate “objects,” all beautifully balanced and proportioned, moving gently in the air currents like a whimsical metal forest.

This is Google’s first doodle made entirely using HTML5 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.

I like to think Calder would have appreciated today’s doodle, since we’re setting up shapes and abstractions and letting them act on their own. Hint: try it out on a laptop with an accelerometer!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/...oodle-for.html