In the past few months we have seen some great examples of desktop websites synced with mobile devices. Many of them are games that use a smartphone or tablet as a game controller. Device syncing is not a new thing- a lot of companies have already been experimenting in this area for years, including Brass Monkey and Muzzley, who provide an SDK for developers who want to create games for their platforms.
For the moment, we have to recognize that this technology is still not stable. It throws up a lot of problems regarding performance and cross-browser compatibility. But the potential is there and it's promising. We know that many people hate this kind of complexity in web projects, but we are not talking about web standarization, we are talking about experimentation, and we need that in order to innovate. In an interview for our "Web Design and Mobile Trends for 2013" eBook Ian Hickson, editor of HTML at WHATWG, said to us:
"Innovation doesn’t happen in multi-vendor discussions. If you have a proprietary platform, it’s easy to add features to it.”
We have to fight for innovation in web design and games are the best laboratory to do this from.
So what's the technology behind all of this interaction? Basically, the key to synchronization is websockets, which create an interactive communication session between the user's browser and the server. The rest is HTML5, Javascript, CSS3, PHP, Python, Ruby, Flash: anything you want.