Have you ever been watching a video on YouTube and thought, “Man, I really wish that progress bar was a Lightsaber.”
Or maybe you always dreamed of flying a TIE fighter on your daily commute. Google wants to help you out. Well sort of, by going to www.google.com/starwars you can choose between the Dark Side and Light Side of the force and re-skin you google apps with the appropriate iconography.
Google maps icons change from dots to TIEs or the Millennium Falcon. The Streetview dude changes to a Pilot of your appropriate faction. YouTube gets the aforementioned Lightsaber bars and sound effects. Even more mundane apps like Gmail get in on the fun with a re-skin that adds Star Wars themes are as a backdrop and Lightsaber loading bars.
In a post on the Google Company Blog Clay Bavor VP of Product Management talked about the genesis of the project,
“So when we first heard about Episode VII, we started thinking about what a Google tribute to these epic stories might look like: “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was some sort of Star Wars thingy in Search? The Millennium Falcon in Cardboard would be sweet! What if Google Translate could decipher galactic languages?”… and on, and on, and on. As this list of ideas grew, so too did the band of passionate engineers and product folks who wanted to build them.”
Google plans to make additions to the project in the run up to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on December 18 and plans to let the project expire on February 1, 2016