This is so exciting. I still remember the days when online movie promotional tie-ins were relatively innocuous websites featuring hidden content areas or spoof videos. Google has kicked things up a notch with the release of “Lightsaber Escape”.
Billed as a “Chrome experiment”, Lightsaber Escape is a free online game that transforms your phone into a lightsaber handle (or hilt). To play the game, you need to be using the Chrome browser on your PC and have Chrome installed on your phone. Getting started is then as simple as following these steps:
- On your laptop or desktop, visit https://lightsaber.withgoogle.com
- Once this loads, a personal URL will appear on your monitor.
- Crank open Chrome on your phone and visit your personal URL.
- You’ll then be invited to calibrate your phone by holding it vertically in front of your monitor. This only takes a couple of seconds.
- That’s it! The next thing you see is a stormtrooper in a hallway and you’ll have the opportunity to test your sweet deflection moves in a quick instructional test, before moving into more challenging stages.
Google has put the phone’s vibrate function to good use in providing tactile feedback, and the audio coming from both the desktop and phone provides a fairly immersive experience.
This is a simple game, but it’s nevertheless an impressive promotional cross-over, and a clever use of multiple devices, associated through a web browser. I hope you have as much fun with the game as I did.