The Google Chrome Dinosaur Game, In Real Life

[Ryan] wanted to hack the Google Chrome Dinosaur Game so he could control the dinosaur with his own movements. The game only requires two keyboard presses (up and down arrow keys), so controlling the game with the Arduino Keyboard library only requires a few simple function calls.

He uses the Arduino MKR board in his build, but notes any number of other boards would work as well. A force sensor detects his jumps and a stretch sensor detects him ducking. Both the stretch and force sensors are resistive transducers, so two simple voltage divider circuits (one for each sensor) are needed to convert changes in force to a voltage. You may need to adjust the sensor threshold to ensure the code responds to your movements, but [Ryan] makes that pretty easy to do in software as both thresholds are stored as global variables.

It’s a pretty simple hack, but could make for some good socially-distanced fun. What other hackable Google Chrome extensions do you like?

6 thoughts on “The Google Chrome Dinosaur Game, In Real Life

  1. Very Cool!
    I wonder if a DDR keymat and some firmware to map no button press to a space key wouldn’t do the job as well.
    But hey, the real fun is on the build not on the game.

    1. It’s a small game that’s been built into the chrome browser for over a decade. It would appear when you lost internet connection as a way to give you something to do until your connection was restored. It wasn’t a game that was for sale or anything like that, but people have still managed to do fun things with it, like this or trying to set the world scoring record.

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