1. The Giant Ball

• What is the Giant Ball?

The Giant Ball is a gigantic "beach ball" which arrived on the earth by surprise. Its unique goal is to turn around the equator, but by that, it hopes to unite as much persons as possible, first to help pushing the ball, then realise this union strength and use it in their all-day life.

• What are its characteristics?

The Giant Ball is 1/10th of the earth, for an approximate diameter of 1275 km. An unknown gas fills it, and an extra-robust material composes the shell. It turns on the surface of the earth without crushing anything thanks to these extraordinary characteristics.

• What is the goal?

The goal is to give the highest speed possible to the ball. With one connection, you give 1 km/h to the ball. You can also push using the red button, just let it pressed to build some "hits", then release it to send them. It also looses some speed after a while. The application should also determine from which country you are connected, and count this hit to this country. All the countries together should be able to push the amazingly big ball at a fairly high speed. 

It is meant to be a short pause in your day, you connect to see what the ball is doing, and, by doing so, contribute to it!

• Can we win, loose?

We hope that everyone will win! By realising how much strength we will have if we all unite. Then you can push your country in the first positions of the contributors, and have this satisfaction. But being bellow is not so important, and the ball will be happy by any help it will get, even small!

• How does it find the country?

When you connect to our application, your computer gives its IP address, the address of you computer when you are connected, we use a table to convert this address to the country name: IP2Country. The other information are recovered from our own files.

• Does it always works?

It should, but there is not guarantee it will. The Giant Ball rely on the IP2Country base, and we guess that such a base is not easy to build, so it can miss some IP address or be obsolete (so we have to update from time to time). Also, the description of countries is built from different sources, and we cannot be sure the information are all exact, or up to date. But we hope so.

• What happen if I connect from one other country?

As you are already a guest of this country, you will contribute to this country score! The country found is the country of connection.

• What can I do if it does not recognize the right country?

• Why my country is Unknown (in the application) or Nowhere (in the score)?

• What are the rules?

  2. The Web Page

• How does it work?

The ball in itself is a Java applet embedded in the page, using its own network connection. The score and statistics pages are generated each 5 minutes by the server using the latest information. The page you are reading is simply static :)
The IP address is recovered from the connection details. No information are sent from the client to the server. The client requests the information from the server to get them (so send two command for that), the server cannot ask for any data from the client.

• It is secure?

It should. The server checks that the client is the right one and the connection should stop if anything is wrong. The client should also wait or quit cleanly if there is a problem. Then this is the ONLY web page with the giant ball (accessible by www.TheGiantBall.com ). If we use other web pages in the future, we will inform you here.

• Does it spy me?

No, the client does not send or recover any information from your computer.

• Are the data accurate?

The side of the earth, the side of the ball, the speed of the ball, the distance done, ..., are calculated accurately, though it is not guaranteed, and some problem might happen to change them. The motion of the ball is not physically realistic (as it is anyway difficult to conceive how such a gigantic ball really reacts), but the scales are, and the representation too.

3. Some technical aspects

• The client

The client is a Java/Java3D applet, using my own network support, derived from the network code we did for a prototype last year, available here. It sends no information to the server, which considers each connection to add one hit (1km/h), sends the ball speed and position, and the scores. The country is found using the IP2Country database, and the other information have been compiled from several sources.
After the connection, the information are updated regularly.

The last version is only 2D. The previous was able to switch between a 2D and a 3D version by detecting if you have or not Java3D installed. Java3D has proved to be a bad solution, so I have worked since nearly the beginning to give an alternative. Flash is commercial and I am not used to it, so it is not a solution now. The final solution was to give a complete 2D version. Finally, I have adapted the sphere raytracing code from Merlin Hughes, adding an alpha-channel and my own calculated texture to show the ball in 3D on the 2D earth.

• The server

The server is also fully written in Java, using a small part of our former network code, and a big part from scratch. The data are simply managed using different files (with redundancy for more security) and using common-csv from the Jakarta project.

4. Who are we? And other things...

• The author - Alain Becam

With a background in computer science, I started working on entertainment when I was a child. After my PhD studies, I came back to my first occupation, and worked again, with a friend, on innovative products for the whole family. I was then hired as a researcher on video-games, and to lead the technical realisation of a game prototype. This allowed me to strengthen my technical skills. I am still working in this university, where I do research on the use of knowledge on video game, and supervise several students to realise innovative games.

• Sponsors

If you are interested to sponsor the ball, you can contact me directly. This does not include the possibility to render your logo on the Giant Ball yet!

• Contributors

If you want to help me, or have some silly ideas like me, you can also contact me. For now the Giant Ball is not a lucrative activity, but it is fun!

• Sun Microsystems

If you are working at Sun Microsystems, I would be pleased if you push the company to enhance the deployment of the Java applets, and turn it into something user-friendly! JWS is NOT aimed at end-users, and Java3D is a hell to promote as it is (and also crashes sometimes). The plugin also crashed Internet Explorer.

I really, really like Java, and was happy to have a chance promoting its "applet" aspect and Java3D. I believe that Java should be more present on the client side too (where are the Java2D-based applet also???), but the actual solution is not ok for that.

If you are interested to discuss about it, do not hesitate to contact me!

Contact: contact@TheGiantBall.com