
New brand site for Sony uses rendered JPG frames for 3D parallax scrolling - danhon
http://discover.store.sony.com/be-moved/
======
TeeWEE
Very nice and breathtaking. Just a superb experience, this is the most awesome
site I have every visited. Seriously.

Ok, it is big, it is huge. But c'mon, they are stretching creativity, nobody
else would come up with something like this, i didnt even know it was possible
at all. It not all TECH API's and BITS and BYTES. Its sometimes creativity
what matters.

Abusing technology to create something cool often is the first step to making
the technology better support something cool like that. So somtimes there is
no proper way to do it with current API's. But there is a hack todo it. This
is how HTML5 video was created. Because you could hack it in with Flash. But
flash was not the best way todo it.

------
vinhboy
You guys are being way overly critical. I think the website is unique and
cool. Reminds me of the those nice story boards on NYTimes.

Also, works ok on Chrome Macbook Air.

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taspeotis
Care of Chrome's developer tools...

    
    
        Network tab: 1410 requests | 51.4 MB transferred | 2.0 min (load: 1.2 min, DOMContentLoaded: 4.29s)
        Console: 15 errors, 12 warnings

~~~
LandoCalrissian
I was wondering how big it was, that completely blows away what I expected.
That's really not usable for huge swaths of people.

~~~
daeken
How many people that can't handle 50MB of content are really in Sony's target
market?

~~~
talmand
People who buy their electronics that happen to have data caps? They could at
least load it all that image data on demand.

~~~
JohnTHaller
I don't think Sony is marketing the products depicted on that site to the
folks worried about downloading 50MB.

~~~
talmand
Well, yeah, that's probably true I suppose.

------
ChrisNorstrom
The Good: Really changed my perception of Sony as a brand. They're a lot more
experimental and ahead than I though. I feel like going out and buying a PS4
honestly. Great job on the marketing team. (I actually watched the videos and
was... "moved", wireless lens, underwater ear buds, 3d viewer)

The Bad: Over complicated and choppy (anyone else?). It's basically a TV
commercial that you have to keep scrolling to watch. I think there are better,
simpler, less choppier ways that this brand message could have been conveyed.

Alternative: Slides/pages with full screen video? Take each scene and separate
it into it's own full screen "slide" (not slide show but one slide after the
other on the page) and each mouse scroll moves you down to the next slide.

~~~
alan_cx
Changed perception? That has to be insane. Just a mere funky web page and you
go from not interested to wanting to buy? Good grief. I am stunned that a mere
web page can do that for any one in actual reality. You seem far too easily
bought. Here, have a shiney thing, there you go...... I had no idea people
were so easily manipulated, and equally happy to say so in public.

I really don't get on with these scroll down animated sites.

As usual with these things, I don't see anything useful or informative on the
landing part of the page, begin to scroll, see I'm expected to scroll for god
knows how long incase there is anything useful, all I usually see is show off
animation, I sigh, then close the page.

Why am I suddenly expected to constantly scroll these things? Is it just so
some web developer can show off their latest, now tired, seen it all before
now, trick?

I want to land on a page, see if its worth anything, then possibly click for
more info. If I want to see an animation, video, or what ever, just show the
darn thing in a normal video. But I want a choice there, not a silly site that
auto starts it, often hurting my ears, or waking up the house, with full
volume in the process. If the landing page gives me interest, I'll happily
watch a short advert, animation, or whatever to get more info.

Why all this scrolling? There are much simpler ways to show all this, without
me having to almost work to get to see it. Its not my message, its theirs. Why
are they making it harder for me to see their message? I just left the page.

Just me?

Oh, BTW, I have some magic beans for sale on a pretty website. Any takers?

~~~
jrs99
i think saying you "feel like" going out and buying something is not the same
as "i will absolutely buy it now without looking into reviews or anything else
whereas before i saw the ad i would never have bought it." The first suggests
that something moved you emotionally. The other might be more irrational.

Maybe if you make a pretty website he would "feel like" buying some magic
beans and eventually decide not to.

personally, i love the scrolling. you get to stop and look at things. in the
future, these are going to have much more interaction and exploration. That's
the next logical step.

------
kjhughes
_After all, it 's not about what we make; it's about what we make you feel._

What their site, their opening punchline, the responsive design problems, and
the slowness make me feel is that they're overly focussed on superficial form
at the expense of deeper functionality.

~~~
vanderZwan
> they're overly focussed on superficial form at the expense of deeper
> functionality

Then again, isn't that what almost all advertising is trying to do these days:
draw your attention to the superficial form so you forget to criticise
fundamental flaws with the design?

~~~
headgasket
water resistant IP65 smartphone is a real enhancement, as in 100M deeper
functionality. I wish the iphone had that instead of lighter/ taller/ thiner
fonts.

Yeah I dont take calls underwater but I keep a bag of rice handy...

~~~
leephillips
Agree: cellphones should be waterproof. One of the _two_ iPhones that I
destroyed in 2013 drowned in a waterproof case that was not closed properly,
when I took an unexpected swim in the Atlantic. The silver lining was that I
discovered Android, which I prefer.

Also, I visited the site using a Thinkpad T60, which dates from around 2006
and would not be considered high-end. Using Chrome on Ubuntu, it was pretty
smooth - but I let it load before trying to scroll.

~~~
larrys
"cellphones should be waterproof."

It would be nice if they were. But all manufacturing involves design and price
tradeoffs.

I have a Sony Rx100ii (great camera) and it would be nice if that were
waterproof. But it's not and Sony (and others) offer a different camera that
is waterproof (but doesn't have the features of the Rx100ii). Any feature adds
to cost (or maybe makes something else not practical or not as good). Even a
slight increase in cost can change the demand curve. Or performance (take a
car with 4 wheel drive vs. 2 wheel drive). Etc.

By the way my own example of "should be" involves desktop or rack mounted
servers having at least a nominal surge protection or UPS. Obviously that has
been thought of and ruled out for various competitive reasons. (Weight, size,
cost, demand).

~~~
leephillips
Agree completely. In the case of cell phones, what I mean by "should" is that,
since we carry them around everywhere, it would be _extremely desirable_ for
them to be at least very water resistant, and is downright inconvenient to be
obligated to protect them from rain, etc. Worth paying a premium!

~~~
headgasket
I dont think the "Dell marketing" feature/price tradeoff logic applies to the
top of the market.

I just want the best tool, period. Since a price point for best device period
is well established since the original iphone, and the build cost keeps going
down, at one point it is this feature/that feature tradeoff for the next-gen
iteration.

I care more for indestructibility for a wearable or quasi-wearable device than
for a fingerprint reader that sort of works. And for a better camera that
opens at 1.8 or even 1.4 than for 9 grams less in my pocket and 1mm less
thickness.

But that's me. I guess the folks at Apple have a better algorithm. I'm really
tempted by the xperia tho, just not ready to ditch iOS, although the banning
of coinbase got me really close.

------
tambourine_man
Something is wrong when you are selling image quality and your site features
blurry artifacted images.

The animations are nice, but they are basically doing frame by frame 704 × 396
movie that look terrible when pushed to 1920 wide.

Just use a proper video format, which is much more efficient.

~~~
cyphunk
I'm curious why the images have artefacts (or pre-loading fuzz)? A year or so
ago Andreas Gysin did something very similar
[http://ertdfgcvb.ch/p2/sm/play/protog3](http://ertdfgcvb.ch/p2/sm/play/protog3)
and for some reason does not have the artefact issue. (code for that here
[http://ertdfgcvb.com/sequencer/](http://ertdfgcvb.com/sequencer/))

------
metabren
clickable: [http://discover.store.sony.com/be-
moved/](http://discover.store.sony.com/be-moved/)

~~~
sehr
Just realized how lazy I've become, thank you.

~~~
MichaelApproved
It's not just about being lazy, this is really helpful for mobile users.

------
Geee
What's the point of these scrolling sites? It's really hard to control the
scrolling speed and stop just in the right place. Just let me press a button
and then proceed to the next "slide" if you want fancy transitions.

~~~
jffry
I agree, and on this site, over on the far right side, are some little
rectangles you can click to jump between the sections (albeit still with the
animations, but sped up).

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smackfu
So I follow the URL, and it takes 30 seconds to show me three lines of text on
the screen, and I can't skip forward or anything.

How is this better than Flash landing pages, exactly?

~~~
hnha
It does not require proprietary nonfree software.

~~~
talmand
So crappy performance and bad customer experience is okay as long as the
software involved was not proprietary and free?

I don't understand what you're statement means in terms of what it is replying
to.

------
gbog
Very choppy and hard to go back.

On the plus side, I didn't know about these "Smartphone Attachable Lens-Style
Camera", is there someone here able to tell me if it is worth it? (I have a
Galaxy Note and no other camera).

~~~
anujkk
Like many other verticals there are many technological innovations happening
in photography too. This "smartphone attachable lens-style camera" is one of
these recent innovations. I can't comment on quality of the lens itself but
they must be far better than that of a standard camera installed on mobile
phones. These lenses can be used both attached/detached to the mobile phone.
They use NFC (if your phone is into that sort of thing) or create their very
own Wi-Fi signal to connect with the phone.

I first read about such lenses and other similar products on
[http://photojojo.com/store/](http://photojojo.com/store/) . They have such
products for both android and iphone.

Now, is it worth it? Depends on your requirements. If you don't want to get
into professional photography but still want to improve the quality of your
photographs you can use one of these. However, remember that these don't
replace DSLRs.

1\. Mobile Camera : average quality/almost zero creative control/very good
mobility

2\. Mobile Camera + Lens accessory : better quality/almost no creative
control/good mobility

3\. Point & Shoot Camera : decent quality/little creative control/good
mobility

4\. Hybrid/Zoom Camera : decent quality/very high optical zoom/decent creative
control/poor mobility

5\. Mirrorlesss/Interchangeable Lens Camera : Good quality/Good Creative
Control/average mobility

6\. DSLRs : Good quality/Good Creative Control/Poor Mobility

I personally prefer to keep [1] in my pocket & [5] in my bag(along with
lenses). I also have an old Zoom Camera that usually sits in my home. I
occasionally use it together with a teleconverter lens to take photographs of
sun, moon & objects/people that are far far away.

~~~
gbog
Thanks for these details. I'm interested because I usually don't carry a bag,
and care about mobility and availability. I also like the idea of taking
picture without disturbing too much the (human) environment, e.g. without
shooting too explicitely. However this lens seem to be too big to fit in a
pocket.

~~~
anujkk
There are smaller alternatives available on Photojojo :

1)[http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/cell-phone-
lenses/](http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/cell-phone-lenses/)

2)[http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/macro-lens-
band/](http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/macro-lens-band/)

3)[http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/iphone-telephoto-
lens...](http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/iphone-telephoto-lens/)

4)[http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/olloclip-iphone-
lens/](http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/olloclip-iphone-lens/)

------
coolnow
Does anyone else have an i7 4702Q with a HD4600 running Chrome (Windows 8.1)?
Is smooth scrolling, actually smooth for you? It doesn't for me, and even
Internet Explorer (which surprisingly runs most pages 60fps smooth) runs the
page really badly.

edit: firefox runs the page smoothly, but on other pages, still can't top IE's
smoothness. What a weird world it is now.

------
pwpwp
I don't see any parallax here. Seems like normal 3D triggered by scrolling.

~~~
talmand
Could you define parallax? Because I see it, as I know it, in several places
throughout the page.

~~~
pwpwp
"background images move by the camera slower than foreground images"
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling)

~~~
talmand
And you don't see that on this page?

~~~
pwpwp
Not really, no.

------
Oculus
Really cool website. I've noticed that really cool brand websites for large
Fortune 500 tech. companies tend to be done by a high end agency rather then
the companies' own teams.

------
benguild
Interesting experiment, but even chugs along on my latest generation rMBP in
Chrome. Meh

~~~
wanda
Weird. It's fast on my Thinkpad X201s from aeons ago (running chromium).

~~~
X4
I have a 3y old 1.3GHz cpu with integrated graphics only on Gentoo, but it's
so smooth, I can't believe it's not a video! How do they make it so smooth?

When I click the last page button on the right side, it runs smoothly through
all animations, same when happens when I scroll around. Can't wait to see
someone make a blog post on: "This is how Sony exploited HTML5 to run Smooth
Parallax Effects on their Page".

I ran it in Firefox with about ~100 tabs open having over a dozen addons, an
IDE opened and npm install running in the background.

~~~
wanda
Slack user here.

 _tips fedora_

~~~
krisdol
Yeah, fedora runs it, too.

------
linux_devil
>" A journalist once called us a guinea pig because the results of our
experiments were copied by others.It was meant as an insult, but we took it as
a compliment. Combining artistry and engineering IS an experiment—but when
artists work with engineers, every day is a chance to be moved." Found this at
bottom of page

------
Pxtl
... I really want to like Sony. They seem to have the best chance of bringing
Apple-style quality to more open software-platforms.

But seriously, this is crap (at least on Firefox). It's slow and choppy and it
has a (however brief) unskippable intro. Pretty, but broken.

------
neals
At some point, wouldn't you just rather play a movie than have me scroll all
the time?

------
waltercfilho
All that, and they couldn't get the damn Twitter icon right.

~~~
mineo
The text and images also cut off on the left and right if your browser window
is "only" 1200px wide.

------
robin_reala
Any reason why they didn’t just use a paused video and step through it frame
by frame on scroll? Seems like it’d be a much more efficient experience for
the user.

~~~
prr
Reverse scrolling a video is really slow, unless you set the key frames close
together (in which case, you don't really gain much file size wise).

~~~
robin_reala
Ah, I figured there was a reason I was missing. Thanks!

------
yourad_io
It is interesting to note that even if I _ever_ manage to create a splash page
as awesome as this, HN will still (partly) respond: Meh - choppy.

~~~
talmand
I think it has more to do with the choices in technology than art direction.
It is cool, but if it sucks performance-wise for enough people then it sucks
no matter how cool it looks.

I haven't been a big fan of these types of pages, especially the type that
take over the scrolling functionality. I was recently tasked with building
one. The creatives love it, I dislike these pages even more now.

------
leephillips
One implied claim that stuck out was that their recent full-frame digital
camera produces images comparable with "medium format film". This is extremely
unlikely, and casts all their claims in doubt. Also, I couldn't find anything
about their creative research into incorporating rootkits and other exploits
into their products: I know what _that_ makes me feel.

------
scarredwaits
Apparently the RX1R PREMIUM COMPACT CAMERA (third from the end) includes a
slice of cheese in the middle of the sensor. Easter cheese? :-)

------
TomGullen
I got a pretty good desktop computer and it's choppy. These things really have
to be silky smooth for me or I leave pretty quickly.

------
aplusplus
Was it done in-house at Sony USA or who produced it, does anyone know?

Quite funny how the use meta keywords like its 2002 … "download movies online,
online movies, internet movies, video on demand, movies on demand, tv shows,
watch movies online, watch online movies, support, technical, service, repair,
fix, USA"

------
pdknsk
I was distracted by blurriness and compression artifacts. Homework for Sony
web designers: try the site on a rotated 1920 x 1200 screen. Then you'll also
notice that it's cut off left and right. Apple has the same problem on their
Mac Pro site, which uses a very similar mechanic.

------
ihatetomatoes
Curious how it was build? Here is the Be Moved site deconstruction -
[http://ihatetomatoes.net/sonys-be-moved-website-
deconstructe...](http://ihatetomatoes.net/sonys-be-moved-website-
deconstructed/)

Nicely done Sony.

------
bigd
there's a Venus de Milo inside the ps4 controller! can't wait to open mine!

------
Raphmedia
I really like it! Imagine how easy it must be to create something like that!
Simply export a video into jpegs, add some JS and BAM! A nice scrolling
effect. I like it!

------
tsunamifury
Design should not force the user to relinquish tactile control. I spent more
time aware of the broken scrolling physics choppy animations than reading
anything.

------
nebulous1
[http://flashvhtml.com/](http://flashvhtml.com/)

Feels better in my opinion. The jpg method seems too jerky.

------
jwcacces
"Scroll Down to Explore"

So, where's the scroll bar?

~~~
dfxm12
And I generally use the space bar to scroll. That's not working here :(

~~~
calciphus
Scroll wheel on my mouse isn't working either.

Nor are arrow keys.

Someone tried a little too hard to optimize for Safari and OSX and forgot
that's like 8% of the market.

Chrome on Win 8.1. Site is nearly un-usable (I can click in their custom
scrollbar to make it move).

~~~
talmand
That all works for me but everyone's mileage may vary because of the way it
appears to have been built. It doesn't use the browsing scrolling and likely
attempts to take over all the normal scrolling duties to do what it wants. So
if you browser of choice is not on the list for whatever reason, then their
will be problems.

------
chrislgrigg
This trend of sites that break gesture forward/back, space bar scroll, and
other standard browser features needs to stop.

------
_pmf_
Ah, that explains why it works without crashing Chrome (as HTML5 WebGL
monkeying does).

------
thrillgore
Ow my CPU load

------
Kiro
How does this work exactly?

~~~
talmand
Series of images are loaded into a canvas element that steps through them as
you scroll. The text is layered on top and parallax-ified as needed.

------
mrdude42
wow...

