Google is celebrating Jules Verne's birthday with a logo that pays homage to the author's famous 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The doodle, which marks Verne's 183rd birthday, transforms the usual Google letters into submarine portals looking out at the sea.
The effect was created using the powerful transform tools in CSS 3 to layer together an animated diving sequence using nothing more than standard HTML and a few transparent images. If you've got a device with an accelerometer built-in (any iOS device, recent Macbook or Android device), you can even control the doodle just by tilting down to dive or side to side to move forward and back.
If you're on a desktop or don't have an accelerometer in your laptop, you can steer the Nautilus with a control stick. While the doodle worked in most browsers, it's smoothest and fastest in Google Chrome and Firefox 4 beta.
Other Google doodles have used HTML5's canvas element, along with some CSS 3, to create the bouncing balls experiment and the awesome, playable version of Pac-Man.
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