Google 'Mobile' Sculpture Doodle Is Pure HTML5, Sways Along with Your Laptop

If you're using Google today, which is actually very likely, you'll notice that it's running one of its regular doodles. If you're not using a very modern browser though, you may not realize that there's much more to the doodle than meets the eye.

You can drag any of the individual parts and see it sway from the momentum, with shadows below following the movement of each component.

And, if you have a laptop with an accelerometer, you'll be able to get the doodle to move, just by moving the laptop about.

The doodle was inspired by and is a tribute to Alexander Calder, an American sculptor and artist, best known as the inventor of the 'mobile,' sculptures made of individual components, perfectly balanced, but that can move about freely.

"Our homepage doodle today celebrates the birthday of Alexander Calder, an American artist best known for inventing the mobile," Jered Wierzbicki, software engineer at Google wrote.

"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," he explained the inspiration behind the doodle.

"Calder took ordinary materials at hand—wire, scraps of sheet metal—and made them into brilliant forms, letting space and motion do the rest. As an engineer, I work with abstractions, too, so this really struck me," he said.

The doodle may seem simple, but it's anything but. There's a lot of technology behind it and it's the first doodle completely created using HTML5.

A physics simulation handles the movement of the components and the doodle is drawn on the screen using 3D vector graphics. The result is a spectacular looking doodle, but you'll need a modern browser, think the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox, to get the most of it.