Google doodles for London 2012 hurdles

Add one more to your list of addictive Google doodles, for Google’s freshest doodle has you coming back to it, every now and again. With a doodle for every sport at the London Olympic, today’s doodle is an interactive for the hurdles event. 

Ok…go!

When you log in to Google.com today, you see a runner on a track, who takes his position at the starting point and gets going the minute you hit the button with the Play sign on it. You are required to alternate between the side arrow keys on the keyboard to boost the speed of the on-screen runner and press the Space bar to jump over the hurdles that appear at regular intervals. With the instructions going on side-by-side, even as the athlete runs, users can easily move on from hurdle to hurdle. At the end of the run, there is a quick flash of score and here users are given the option to either play the race again, Share it on Google+ or quickly get all the information on London 2012 Hurdles. 

Users are taken to a page depicting the results of the Women’s 100 m Hurdles Round 1, while also giving other relevant details on the other sporting events that are to follow. 

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Getting past the hurdles

Google has been actively doodling on each day of the London Olympics 2012 and this doodle is clearly one of our favourites. This, however, also isn’t the first time that Google has gone interactive with its doodles. On May 23, this year, Google had a doodle dedicated to the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, Robert Moog. The Doodle featured a synthsizer which you can either play by clicking on the keys or by typing on your computer keyboard. The sharps and flats (black notes) are played with the numbers on your keyboard and the regular notes with the letters. The sound that emanates is electronic and you can adjust the pitch by using the pitch wheel on the left. You can record your composition by hitting the record button on the right and play back your composition. You can also share your work on Google+.

On similar lines was the doodle that Google dedicated to Les Paul, inventor of the solid body electric guitar. The doodle could be strung like a guitar and if you placed your cursor over a string, you could hear the string being strummed. Users had the opportunity to have fun with this, by making chord combinations with the strings on the left and vary them up with the strings on the right. There was even a keyboard option which when you turn on, certain alphabets from your keyboard would strum certain strings. We played around with the melody that certain words would form. When we typed “Google” and “Android” the melody was only meh. “Apple” for some bizarre reason sounded like a workable melody.