Aesthetically and technologically spellbinding, The Wilderness Downtown is an interactive visualisation of Arcade Fire’s new single, We Used to Wait.
Personally, I couldn’t be more delighted the wait is over. This bleeding edge mash-up of HTML5, Google Maps and music gives wider audiences a glimpse of just what is possible using the latest web technologies.
Now let’s not split hairs here, yes it does take a little while to load and it only fully works in Google Chrome and Safari. But as this is one of the first attempts at mainstream promotion using advanced technologies specific to HTML5, I think we can forgive them.
For those of us who have been keeping a close eye on the advancements and inclusions of HTML5, The Wilderness Downtown is a welcome demonstration of the possibilities opened up by this emerging web standard. The audio, video and canvas tags are synchronised brilliantly. The HTML5 Canvas 3D engine renders flocks of birds that react to the music, and the new HTML5 audio tag manages the track and keeps record of key points to synchronise both canvas effects and HTML5 video windows. This, combined with the Google Maps API used for generating different street view perspectives, creates a truly immersive and memorable user experience.
Arcade Fire are not exactly new to using the latest web technologies for self-promotion, on August 3rd 2010, the band teamed up with YouTube to put on a live-streamed show at Madison Square Garden, the stream was watch by 3.7 million users and included loads of cutting-edge interactive features including ‘Choose your Cam’ and fan-provided photos. In support of this, Amazon advertised the band’s album The Suburbs at the discounted price of $3.99 during the week of release. A week later, it held the number one spot on Billboard’s album chart.
From a marketing perspective, are these bleeding-edge technologies a good way to draw attention? Clearly, it’s an effective tactic to attract word-of-mouth promotion. And even though HTML5 is not yet universally supported by all browsers, the chatter around The Wilderness Downtown is largely pro-HTML5 rather than “Why isn’t this working in IE???”
Rob Lowe’s love for HTML5 goes all the way to 11
We’re seeing some seriously impressive stuff being done these days with HTML5 (check out http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/21-ridiculously-impressive-html5-canvas-experiments/ for some amazing canvas experiments) but what concerns me is:
“This site was designed with Google Chrome in mind and is unable to render properly in your browser. For the best viewing experience, we recommend downloading Google Chrome and trying this site again.”
Not surprising when it’s featured on chromeexperiments.com, but my worry is that HTML5 will be the new “beta tag” to hide behind. Worse still, we could end up just like the bad old days when every site had a variation on “Best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4+”.
The W3C’s glacial progress on finalising HTML5/CSS3 recommendations means browser manufacturers are all implementing their own take on HTML5. Experiments are great, but if we’re going to move the web to open standards, we need to make sure we’re not just replacing proprietary plug-ins with proprietary Javascript and markup.
Also for all your HTML5 needs: http://thelab.mzl.com/2010/07/html5-and-why-we-should-all-care/