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Google – Playing Ping Pong With WebVR

Information
Client
Google
Focus
Concept, Creative Direction, Design, Technical Strategy, Development, Sound Design
Awards
1 x Awwwards Site of the Day
1 x FWA of the day
2 x CCA Gold
1 x CCA - Silver
1 x ADC*E
1 x German Design Award

Playing Ping Pong With Google’s WebVR

Once upon a time, virtual reality was incredibly complicated and hard to work with. Until Google launched WebVR for Chrome that is. It empowers everyone with the ability to create virtual reality content for the web.

We were chosen by Google’s Creative Lab in NY to develop a thrilling experience to showcase this new technology. This led us to the creation of our very own game: Konterball.

Based on the rules of Ping-Pong, users can play the game online against their friends in real time, or in a single-player mode. It was developed to showcase Google’s WebVR, sitting natively inside the latest version of Chrome. So it works directly within the web browser of pretty much any device, meaning you can play with your laptop mouse, with your thumbs on your smartphone – or even by simply tilting your VR headset to control the paddle.

Go to website

Join the game with any device you like

Feel free to enter the world of Konterball via the Google Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Desktop or via Mobile.

In-keeping with the spirit of VR, we wanted to make Konterball an immersive game, existing in its own uniquely colourful corner of cyberspace. Realising this meant fleshing out the gameplay with specially commissioned music and sounds. You can even check out the music over on Spotify

Addictive, handsome, and intuitive, Konterball even got featured as the number 1 example of WebVR at the Google I/O.

Spending the week in VR isn't that much fun, but necessary for solid QA.

It was one of the most technically sophisticated projects we’ve done. The hardest thing was making the multiplayer mode feel instant. We had to come up with solutions to disguise latency from players, such as slowing down the gameplay between player hits to give the signal a couple of milliseconds to travel.

Moriz Büsing emoji Moriz Büsing Tech Director
Every single player record happened in QA.
  • 00
    World's first WebVR Game
  • 01
    Featured at Google I/O
  • 02
    Possible to connect via every device
  • 03
    Single player record: 113 points
A secret rainbow mode had to be part of the game!

EP available on Spotify

The EP "Ping Pong" from "Das Ping Pong" was carefullly composed by Fifth Music and is available in two versions on Spotify.

Design Leads
Thomas Lichtblau, Matthias Mentasti
Tech Leads
Moriz Büsing, Thomas Ragger