This may be the most bizarre chatroom ever created.
It's called Rumpetroll. In Norwegian, the word means "tadpole," but the literal translation is "ass troll." It's a very clever name, as Rumpetroll is a chat room.
Enter, and you're dropped into a color-shifting primordial soup with a bunch of other tadpoles (that also happen to look like sperm). Click around with your mouse to swim around and join up with other groups. Type to chat, and enter "name: Mike" to give your tadpole/sperm a display name.
The visual environment is powered by Canvas, JavaScript and CSS 3. It also uses WebSockets, a technology which allows persistent client-server connections. It exemplifies how web standards can be used to write a front-end that turns the most banal and simple web app into something unique and interesting.
Because of these leading-edge technologies, you'll need a modern browser like Chrome, Firefox 4 or Safari 5.
I've been hanging out in Rumpetroll all morning. I've gone on some fruitless adventures into the abyss. I also met some Russians. I've even encountered a few users who have learned how to hack the site's JavaScript to increase the size of their tadpole, or speed it up so they can fly around at amazing speeds.
The creators are four hackers from Oslo, Norway: Daniel Mahal, Hans Petter Eikemo, Hugo Ahlberg and Simen Brekken. Kudos!
See also:
