http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

This online video has been gaining a lot of attention since it was released yesterday. It utilizes google maps along with html5 compositing to put trees into your childhood suburban neighborhood, and create an eerie user experience that really meshes the songs content to your hometown.

Aside from loving Arcade Fire and they’re new album “The Suburbs” I really enjoyed this Chrome Experiment. I’ve been keeping my eye on Mr.Doob for about a year now, and have been loving all the new HTML5 experiments he puts onto his blog. But I’m still not sold on HTML5.

http://mrdoob.com/projects/multiuserpad/

The concept of HTML5 is good, that an open source format without restrictions can work on any browser, any platform, and not require a lot of additional content to be downloaded, and for objects to be tagged and trigger videos, or photos through those tags. The problem I’m finding is that a lot of HTML5 doesn’t even work on an iPad or iPhone. Even though Mr. Jobs is putting his foot down, and trying to kill flash. It still seems to run better than HTML5, and work on more platforms, and browsers.

http://www.craftymind.com/factory/html5video/CanvasVideo.html

I’m not saying HTML5 won’t be the successor one day. But it’s going to be a while yet. That being said, when it does fully arrive and is supported by all browsers, and platforms. How are users going to prevent pop-ups if they have so much versatility now. Think of pop-up ads and banners with HTML5, as “The Wilderness Downtown” illustrates, pop up windows can move around. There was even an HTML5 example of pop-ups playing ping pong.

http://stewdio.org/pong

As cool as this is, I’ve been victim to pop-ups before, especially in Internet Explorer Days. Just wondering how the users of the future will be able to prevent this intelligent pop-ups? Is the catch that HTML5 can’t have commercial pop-ups? Or will it get even more aggressive, and the user experience of web browsing diminish? Or am I getting too paranoid? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/depth_of_field/

Other Links:

http://mrdoob.com/

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I have been working with grassy hills for a while for the SmakStudios.com website. After the package was redesigned I tried to merge the two scenes as a test. Video renders to come.

The ground texture is using an image of grass, and the same bump map to match that. This Render had too large of a bump, and not enough repetition of the texture on the plane surface.

Better render. I just had to make light sources for the hills in the back.

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I previously had a post about a concept expandable, and I found this example to illustrate what I meant by one that distracts navigation, and creates frustration toward a brand instead of actually making the user feel comfortable.

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I’ve been working on a side project using MOGRAPH 2 to have objects fly in from outside of the web browser screen and land into a banner at the head of the page. The thing I’m trying to do differently is have the motion fly behind the page content. I’ve found it really annoying and frustrating when there is an expandable or rich media that is being intrusive and hard to close, when all you want to see is the latest news or content of a page. I will be finishing off the renders in the next couple of weeks, and should have an online version for people to try out. Enjoy the boards for now.

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Utilizing the RED ONE with MX along with a 35mm Cooke iLens I was able to shoot and matchmove footage and then import it into Cinema 4d. In a few blog posts there will be some more renders, and beauty renders.

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