Nokia Puck is the result of an experiment designed with the most innovative aspects of web development: an application created with HTML5 to play air hockey on Twitter as part of Social Media Week, a world event sponsored by the Finnish company Nokia. The purpose of this entertainment was to promote the new Nokia Lumia devices, displaying a fun tweet with the hashtag #NokiaLumia at the end of each game.
The advantage of this new web development is the ability to play in real time on any kind of device: smartphones, tablets, PCs, etc. Thanks to this it was possible to install big screens for this world event to show users’ matches live.
The social networks, in this case Twitter, make it possible to publicise and promote any new technological feature. Nokia took the chance to promote the launch of the Nokia Lumia, holding a draw every day for a Nokia Lumia 910 among users playing Nokia Puck on Twitter, wherever they were.
The Nokia Puck game experience was exceptional: real-time web technologies (such as SPDY, Web Sockets, etc.) which have been used to create the application made latency during the game almost nil.
Just like many of the most innovative current projects, the technology behind the application is based on node.js and MongoDB, providing optimum performance and high speed. This aspect has been crucial, as the events of Social Media Week took place in 25 cities around the world, producing very high peaks in the numbers of users connected. In addition, thanks to the cloud, it was possible to distribute the application immediately to all servers, which had to be strategically distributed.
Thanks to the development of a physics engine implemented entirely in JavaScript, the Nokia Puck application is 100% compatible with all platforms, allowing users from all over the world to play on any kind of device, with any screen size.
It didn’t matter how you played Nokia Puck – with the keyboard or computer mouse or touching a smartphone or tablet screen – it all counted when it came to beating your opponents.
Available during the Social Media Week 2013 through http://nokiapuck.com
September / 2013
Game projected with Microsoft Surface tablets in the events.
GUI designed by Max Spencer with Protein project management.
Node.js
Websockets
HTML5
Cloud auto-scaling servers