Arcade Fire & Google experimental video
Link: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire/
This new project from Google to promote Chrome and HTML5 as well as Arcade Fire's new album has been spreading around the tubes like wildfire today. And with good reason – this is a beautiful interactive piece of work. They've done an astounding job of bringing the self into the video along with some nice surprises along the way.
I'm torn about this whole thing though for a few reasons. On the plus side, I think Chrome is a great browser and pushing user adoption of it is worthwhile. On the down side, the heavy push that this is all because of HTML 5 is yet another case of ill-conceived tech reporting. I can't see anything in here that one couldn't figure out how to make work in Flash which would then work cross browser. Not that they should use Flash but to tout it as a brand new thing that no one could do before is highly misleading.
The second exception I take with this is the premise many are reporting that this is a brand new type of video or web experience or whatever. It's not new and if you think it's new, you don't know your web history well enough to be writing about new things on the web. Minus the modern elements like high quality video and real-time usage of Google Streetview imagery there isn't much here that wasn't done in the early days of web art projects where experimentation with javascript, multiple windows and creative use of html was often an essential part of the storytelling element.
Now that I'm done shitting all over this project, let me go back to my opening points. It's a beautiful piece of work and in and of itself it's amazing. I have no doubt that the development behind this is sophisticated and ingenious. I miss the days of the web when people explored the possibilities on the edge like this rather than push out the same dull crap for the lowest common denominator. It's this kind of work that pushes the web forward – something I think we've lost sight of in recent years.
Matthew Fabb wrote on 08/30/10 10:03 PM
Also the pop-up windows are REALLY, damn annoying. I see part of what they were trying to do, but could they not clean up the windows, instead of having a bunch of small windows in the corner. I went to close them up and everything stopped and had to be reloaded again. Also I can't help but think this is exactly the type of thing I DON'T want to see as an example possibly giving spammers ideas on how to keep ad windows active. I don't use Chrome much but it should have asked for my permission to launch pop-ups from that site before the project started. Something that powerful without permissions, makes me nervous about using Chrome, which is not exactly the idea that I imagine Google wanted to get across.
Also agree with you that it could have been done a number of years ago in Flash.
Despite all those complaints, it was quite cool.