The good folks at Google have published a very cool multimedia showcase for what’s possible in HTML5. Using music by Arcade Fire (the 21st century hipster equivalent of ELO), filmmaker Chris Milk has made an interactive video of sorts that spans multiple browser windows.
Eliot Van Buskirk has a full write-up, including an interview with Milk, over on Wired’s Epicenter blog.
“The Wilderness Downtown,” features HTML5 native video and audio, canvas-animated birds that fly away from your mouse clicks, interactive SVG fonts, and photo panoramas from Google Maps Street View. You enter in the address of where you grew up and it pulls the images for that neighborhood. The neighborhood of my childhood home wasn’t available, so I opted for the section of Burlington, Vermont I lived in throughout college. It was creepy to see my old house in an Arcade Fire video.
Being Google-produced, the experiment works best in Google Chrome, of course. It had problems playing back properly in Firefox 4 beta.
If you have Chrome and can watch it, it really strikes a chord. It goes beyond all the HTML5 vs Flash dogma and presents what’s possible with these new technologies in a way which resonates on a level that’s more emotional and immediate than nerdy and intellectual.
So who do I talk to at Google about getting them to do one of these things for my band?
This post was updated at 2:45 PDT. The original incorrectly said it was a YouTube experiment. The site was created by the Google Chrome team, not YouTube.
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