“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is opening today in some regions while others are just some hours before the movie makes its debut. The newest installment in the Star Wars saga is set to be a major success at the box office, potentially breaking the record for the biggest worldwide opening. Marketing for that movie has been everywhere ever since the trailer was first shown and in the mobile world, Motorola has released some special editions of their handsets, an official app for the movie was released, Disney has created an immersive experience to be used with Google’s cardboard and some apps, like Waze, included some customizations making reference to elements of Star Wars.
Google has also participated in the celebrations for these movies in the past and for the new movie, they have offered to customize the looks of Gmail and other apps with themes of Star Wars. Yesterday, they surprised everyone with a game based on the Chrome Experiments platform called Lightsaber Escape, the game provides an immersive experience as it integrates good graphics with sounds and the lightsaber on the screen could be controlled using a smartphone. Since Google is also known for including some Easter eggs in the search engine, and even some interactive ones, Google has created a special one to reference Star Wars.
If you make a search for the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away” on your smartphone, the screen will turn into full-screen mode in a dark background with stars. Suddenly, some yellow letters will start appearing in the screen just like the classic Star Wars opening crawl. You’ll soon realize that the whole search page for that particular term has been transformed. What’s surprising is that you can actually click on the links and they will send you to the requested site. You can also control the speed and the direction of the scrolling text by swiping your finger. There are buttons for pausing the scrolling text and another one to exit this interface. This doesn’t seem to work on tablets and it only displays the first page of the search results. It would have been better if the results were displayed continuously and maybe Google should give the option to search for additional terms in this interface, I’m sure some users would really like that.