However, the project went much further than simply adding a slot for the Higgs boson to the usual representations of the Standard Model. This project was inspired by the announcement of the discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson on 4 July. Other highlights from the weekend include an Android-based cosmic ray detector, which you can read about in detail here, and an attempt to create a standard infographic for the Standard Model (pictured right).

The Standard Model infographic developed at the webfest. “Each of the designs reflects the actual behaviour of the particle represented – it’s really amazing.” “These beautiful graphics were the real inspiration behind the project,” explains Alejandro Avilés, who goes by the pseudonym ‘OmeGak’ online. Each of the particles have had charming sprites created for them by graphic designer André-Pierre Olivier and when you encounter them in the game they’ll even tell you a little bit about themselves. In the current version of the game, which was modified after the event, players have to help find the Higgs boson among a croweded zoo of particles. ParticleQuest, which can be played online here, is a hack of Mozilla’s new open-source game BrowserQuest.

The ParticleQuest team members selected Alejandro Avilés to go to the Mozilla Festival in London in November. However, the highlight of the event was the ParticleQuest game, which was selected by a panel of judges as the weekend’s overall winning project. Projects dreamt up by the students included a browser-based dashboard for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new CERN open-data initiative, and a virtual world for the platform. It can also be played on iOS-based devices like the iPhone or iPad and the Firefox browser for Android can also run the game on Android-based smartphones and tablets.Particle quest sprites.

It can also be played on Opera when WebSockets is enabled. Mozilla says that BrowserQuest can be played on Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers (no mention of Internet Explorer). The WebSockets server code is also available for download. The source code for BrowserQuest is open source and can be downloaded at GitHub. The game can support thousands of players, according to a post on the page. Players can gather items, travel to other parts of the world, fight monsters, and gain achievements. In terms of gameplay, it's pretty basic for a MMO title with 2D top down graphics. BrowserQuest was co-developed by Mozilla along with Little Workshop and was created as a way to showcase how games could be created with HTML5-based code along with JavaScript. The browser-based fantasy MMO game is now live for anyone to play. Mozilla is not exactly known for its games but that changed today with the organization behind the Firefox web browser launched BrowserQuest.

Browserquest hack