🔵 Google Easter Eggs · Gravity & Underwater
Google Ball Pit
Trick
Before Google Gravity made the homepage collapse, Mr.doob made something simpler: a box full of balls. It's a good place to start if you like the idea behind our Google gravity and underwater tricks guide but want to see where it all began. This post is about the ball pit, its place in the timeline, and why a few coloured circles were enough to impress people in 2009.
Short version: The ball pit is Mr.doob's Ball Pool, a physics experiment dated February 2009 on Google's Experiments site. It came a month before Google Gravity.
Worth knowing
- Ball Pool dates from February 2009, per Google's own Experiments page.
- It was one of the early Chrome Experiments.
- Gravity and Sphere followed the same spring.
Why a pool of balls was a big deal
Chrome Experiments launched in 2009 as a showcase for what JavaScript could do in a browser. A web page that moved like a real object, with bouncing, colliding balls that reacted to your mouse, was a good demonstration. It didn't need a plugin, which is what made it stand out at the time.
The 2009 timeline
| Experiment | Month (2009) | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Ball Pool | February | Balls that bounce and collide. |
| Google Gravity | March | The Google page falling and piling up. |
| Google Sphere | May | Page elements arranged into a rotating 3D sphere. |
Dates come from Google's Experiments page for Ball Pool and from listings of Mr.doob's projects. Seen in order, you can watch the idea grow from toy to trick.
How to try it
- Open the Ball Pool page on Google's Experiments site.
- Press launch and let the balls settle.
- Move your mouse through the pile and watch the balls get pushed around.
- Resize the window and see how they respond.
It's a quiet entry in our complete list of Google Easter eggs, but an important one, because it shows where the other experiments came from.
What to look for
- Collisions. Notice how the balls push each other rather than passing through.
- Settling. Watch how long the pile takes to calm down.
- Window changes. Resizing the window changes the space the balls have to move in.
For more from the same period, see our retro Google tricks guide.
How we checked this: We used Google's own Experiments page for the Ball Pool date and creator, and compared several explainers for the surrounding timeline. If something here is out of date for you, email ownerflexora.ai@gmail.com and we will fix it.
Your turn: Try Ball Pool, then Gravity, then Sphere in order. Which one feels most like a toy, and which feels most like a trick?
More tricks to try
Curious how this kind of page physics actually works? The Google fall down trick explained breaks it down.
Frequently Asked Questions
To see the experiment itself, visit Ball Pool on Experiments with Google.