To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the classic Rubik’s Cube puzzle, Google’s homepage doodle today is an interactive version of it. So, prepare to gloat once you’ve beaten it, or utter “screw it” after giving up (which is the route I took).
After visiting the site and clicking on the animated cube, it will grow larger and allow you to grab any end and turn it. At first, it appears that this is one doodle that doesn’t have some Google flavor, but you must look close. Before clicking on the cube, the animated cube features a lot of white and each of the four main colors in the company logo. It’s not until you click it that you see orange added back in and the white reduced.
As Wired reports, this doodle is one of the most advanced Google’s ever done. It uses highly sophisticated CSS techniques, such as 3D Transforms. In effect, it’s a simple game done in CSS, which is quite impressive to say the least (though it’s hardly the first).
Perhaps the coolest aspect of this interactive cube is that Google’s supplying the source code for it, along with providing a number of different experiments that have already been built with it. Those are definitely worth checking out, but expect to spend a little too much time on them.