December 16, 2015 - 10:46 AMT
Google, Disney team up for Star Wars lightsaber experiment

Google on Friday, December 15, launched a new Chrome experiment called “Lightsaber Escape” in partnership with Disney, LucasFilm, and Industrial Light & Magic. The Star Wars “interactive web experience” starts off in a Star Destroyer, where Google says “you’ll need to use your phone as a lightsaber to escape the First Order,” VentureBeat reports.

In March 2009, Google launched Chrome Experiments to show off what its browser can do. More specifically, the company asked programmers to push the limits of HTML5 and JavaScript to demonstrate what can be built on the Web. Earlier this year, Google announced it now had over 1,000 Chrome experiments, meaning about 200 new experiments are added every year.

The Lightsaber Escape game is quite simple. You swing your phone around to control the lightsaber on your desktop or laptop with the goal of fighting storm troopers and other villains.

The game is considered a Chrome experiment because it was developed to work only in the browser. The 3D graphics were built with WebGL, the communication between your phone and computer occur over WebRTC and WebSockets (Google says this reduces latency and improves interactivity), and the rest use web standards that ensure the experiment works across browsers without plugins (though of course Google makes sure that experiments it builds work best in Chrome).