Arcade Fire, HTML5 and Chrome
Cross Post from the Google Chrome Blog by Thomas Gayno, Google Creative Lab
Earlier this week, we launched a musical experience made specifically for the Google Chrome browser, called “The Wilderness Downtown.” The project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google.
“The Wilderness Downtown” is set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait”, and showcases many of the latest developments on the web. It features a mash-up of Google Maps and Google Street View with HTML5 canvas, HTML5 audio and video, an interactive drawing tool, and choreographed windows that dance around the screen. These modern web technologies have helped us craft an experience that is personalised and unique for each viewer, as you virtually run through the streets where you grew up.
Browsers and the modern web have indeed come a long way since Chrome was introduced, and we hope this project provides a glimpse at some of what the future holds. The project was built with Chrome in mind, so it’s best experienced in Chrome’s beta or stable builds. To launch the project and learn more about how it was made, please visit our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.