Google has never failed to entertain users with its interactive doodles by roping in animation to honour some great people who have made a mark in history with their work. And today, Google Doodle seems quite hot with its interactive game of spicy chilli pepper as it pays tribute to the great American chemist and physicist, Wilbur Scoville, on his 151st birthday.
Nobody knew how to test the spiciness of hot peppers until Wilbur Lincoln Scoville devised the test and scale to measure the piquancy, or “spiciness”, of various chilli peppers in 1912. The Scoville Organoleptic Test and Scoville Scale could measure the pungency of chilli peppers like the Jalapeno, Ghost Peppers, and the Carolina Reaper which seems to be the world’s hottest pepper.
The doodle has Wilbur Scoville standing in the center holding a red-hot pepper in his hand with various kinds of pepper in the background. Red is the colour that is associated with the hotness of spices, therefore the whole doodle is dominated by that colour. And the burning play button at the bottom will lead you to an interactive game between an ice cream and chillies.
By clicking the mouse at the correct point on a sliding bar, you can fire ice cream at the offending chilli to neutralise it. And as you defeat the chillies, Professor Scoville gives a splendid expression as he grabs another hot chilli and gulps an ice cream. With the game getting more difficult as you pass each level, the pace of the game increases and you need to be quick while shooting the ice cream. Well, it is difficult to defeat the chillies after level 4 as the speed of the pointer and the intensity of the chillies increases. It all demotes how difficult it must have been for Scoville to experiment, analyse and derive the whole test accurately.
Doodler Olivia Huynh had the thought to create a fun filled doodle for Scoville test and brainstormed over it since last summer. As spiciness is associated with a fierce nature, she wanted to create some kind of a fighting game. When food is too spicy it makes you fight with yourself and you feel a burning sensation within yourself. Olivia used these practical references and began designing storyboards determining how the game would unfold while engineers worked on building prototypes.
Along with design assistance Brian Kaas, she started sketching and making draft art to display the whole scene in an interactive form. With an engineering team; the backgrounds, lead characters, meters, and the entire character animation was created.
The characters were brought to life as simple physical attributions were added to give the human feel. Scoville’s reactions on munching the chillies were animated with detailing as he perspires or even blows out a ball of fire from his mouth due to the spiciness of the chillies.
Professor Wilbur Scoville who was born on 22 January, 1865 contributed a great deal, for it was because of his efforts that one could accurately know how spicy a hot peeper actually was rather than treating every chilli as less spicy or too spicy. The measurement of the pungency of other spicy foods could be reported in Scoville heat units (SHU). His book, Art of Compounding too received a great acclaim as it discovered the use of milk as an antidote for pepper heat. Google has wisely tapped his research by using an ice-cream which is a milk preparation to kill the hot peppers in an interactive fun way.