

Arcade Fire meets HTML5 - larrykubin
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/arcade-fire-meets-html5.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/MKuf+(Official+Google+Blog)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

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ryanricard
The first time the map pops up I was dismissive. "Eh, so they mashed up a
google maps thing with the video. Big deal. You can even see the google (r)
watermarks. lame."

Once it started in with the street-level images, swirling around, it started
to hit me though. That was my friend's house! I remember when they put in that
stone landscaping in front. A whole lot of memories came rushing back, of
feeling the dry desert heat, of playing basketball in my driveway with my
friends, of rollerblading down that hill, of being a kid.

Along with the excitement though, a sense of longing. I can't help but notice
that someone else's car is parked in front of "my" house now. I remember my
dad packing up his stuff and leaving. I remember all those fights and tears as
we moved out of that house and across the country. I keep up with friends from
that time a little, but it's a little message here and there, I hardly see
them anymore.

When the window popped up to write a message to my younger self, it felt like
there was far too much to say. I settled on "It will be OK. Really."

This was unexpectedly beautiful and touching. Bravo.

~~~
alabut
" _A whole lot of memories came rushing back_ "

Me too, and it was made even more powerful because coincidentally, the running
character reminded me of when I used to be on my high school cross country
team and would go for runs around the neighborhood at odd hours.

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boredguy8
This is very trippy and will take some time to process. Part of me is in
revolt: "You shouldn't be able to make a film about me and my house!" And yet,
I know that it's not about me or my house per se.

Yet this is clearly a portent of things to come: when everything I see is
'about' me.

For instance, when people cull Street View data (or something similar) to
identify houses with wood siding, and send direct-marketed advertising with a
"before" and "after" photos of the house with aluminum siding or fresh paint.
I could potentially identify east/west facing houses and market shade trees or
awnings.

My movies could be similarly contextualized: living in LA I get to see a lot
of architecture I recognize since so many films are made here. So I see Fox
Plaza in Die Hard or Fight Club. Why shouldn't Des Moines residents see 801
grand topple, instead?

And the ending, as trees 'reclaim' the space? I've often wondered what people
might think if they were to return to this place following a catastrophic
collapse of civilization. Now I have a visual inkling of what they might see.

There's something interesting going on here that more insightful minds will
hopefully digest.

~~~
tlrobinson
_"I've often wondered what people might think if they were to return to this
place following a catastrophic collapse of civilization. Now I have a visual
inkling of what they might see."_

Check out the book "The World Without Us":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us>

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bd
Very cool, though it would be about 114% better if they used just normal divs
inside a single window.

If you manage to navigate away from the browser, good luck restoring the
state.

Also why to spoil beautiful content by putting chrome (lowercase) around it?

~~~
dimarco
I'm not sure about the mechanics of Chrome, but aren't new Chrome windows
different processes? thus having their own share of CPU?

Trying to cram everything in a single thread of execution seems like it would
have been a mistake.

~~~
bd
Now that would be clever.

Though playing the demo with one eye on Task Manager shows only two processes
(for the whole duration) - one hovering mostly around 50-60% CPU load, another
at 0-5%.

Checking this with my CPU intensive demos, this looks like normal Chrome
behavior (two processes, one with high load). New process seems to spawn only
for new tabs.

So it doesn't seem like such optimization was used.

~~~
tlrobinson
I think it's something like one process per "connected" set of windows/frames
(those which can talk to each other and thus are expected to be single
threaded), plus one per Web Worker (V8 is not threadsafe)

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mcobrien
Summary if it doesn't work or loads too slow:

* You wait for a couple of minutes, wondering if the progress indicator will ever move

* The song starts and a couple of windows open.

* Video plays of a guy in a hoody running down a street

* More windows open, showing your address panning and spinning around, using street view and google maps

* Flocks of birds and trees appear in the video and then street view images. If you look closely you can see the running guy in there too.

Pretty good, although the window tiling didn't work great for me. Worth a
look.

~~~
nailer
Thanks - I couldn't get it to work in either Chrome 6 beta or FF 4 beta on OS
X :^(.

~~~
X-Istence
Works fine in the latest Chrome release or Safari 5

------
maukdaddy
The best part by far was the canvas where you could draw/write messages [to
your younger self].

I especially liked how the birds flew in and rested on the drawn lines.

Also, this is a fantastic album.

~~~
driax
I also really like how the birds flew in and I thought that it's one of the
things people always said couldn't be done without Java or Flash plugins. By
that metric html5 really is a success.

Although I wouldn't say there's a best part. The experience were running
smoothly on my system, so it all the pieces added up to something more. Tough
the draw/write were a bit out of place, but I can imagine that they wouldn't
want to leave it out because of the way stuff you made (the drawing)
interacted with the automated stuff (the birds).

I always run my browser un-maximised at only about 1/3 of my monitor's size,
so I like how the web-experience came out of the browser, but like others,
fearing a bit that this might become more normal. I already hate how youtube
videos are auto-starting; imagine some tab in the background spawning multiple
windows simply because they are trying to make an experience.

So if nothing else this shows that we don't need Flash even for flashy
experience-oriented art sites :)

PS: Totally agree about the album

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leot
Works best if you put in an actual familiar address, rather than just, say,
your hometown.

~~~
mcobrien
Yeah, mine actually centred on my old house. A little less glamourous than the
rest of the video, but effective :)

Btw, it seemed to stall for me but eventually loaded after a couple of minutes
(Chrome dev on MBP). Stick with it.

------
jarin
Hey wait a minute, I thought Chrome was supposed to have a popup blocker

~~~
phoboslab
The popup blocker in Chrome (and other browsers) only blocks those popups that
would open automatically. Popups that are created as a result of a button
click are treated as intentional (from a users perspective) and thus not
blocked.

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kreek
Takes minutes to load, CPU at 100%, form over function; aren't these all the
same critics Flash receives?

~~~
natrius
Uh... it's art. It's _supposed_ to be form over function.

~~~
kreek
Yes obviously it's art. The way the art is delivered, in this case HTML 5, is
affecting its function. Take out the location stuff and there were similar
projects being done by the Remedi Project circa 1999 in Flash.

------
WesleyJohnson
I didn't have any issues running it in Chrome. Loading rather quickly and
stayed responsive the entire time even though I have quite a bit running on my
dev box right now (Eclipse, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Skype, etc).

Anyway, I thought it was cool. The effect was somewhat lost on me, howerver,
as the community I spent most of my childhood years in is what many people
think of when you ask them to imagine a stereotypical redneck trailer park:
dirt roads, "mobile" homes that should be condemed, broken down cars on cinder
blocks, couches in the front yard, etc. I was still impressed though.

------
chaosmachine
Couldn't get this to load past about 66%. Using Chrome. Too much traffic,
perhaps.

~~~
tibbon
This happened to me when I didn't put in an exact address. Try another (or a
more exact) address. At first I just tried a city name, which it found, but
that doesn't work. Street and number needed.

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die_sekte
Bah. No Street View in Germany yet.

Tried London. Interesting, though the trees did apparently grow through cars.
I certainly would be happy if there was more content like this.

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dingle_thunk
Oh, man, this was horrible. The music was good (love Arcade Fire), but the
video was neither artistically entertaining nor technologically impressive.
More to the point, I absolutely despise the fact that an application asking
for personal information and attempting to use it in an intimate fashion
(based on a global privacy invasion) was produced by the world's largest,
least personal advertising company. I was just cringing the entire time...

~~~
uuilly
I love Arcade Fire but this was over the top gimmicky and it puked new windows
everywhere.

------
ryan
After watching this, I spent an hour browsing around google maps in the area I
grew up. Brings back lots of memories :)

It's amazing how far technology has come in 20 years. Gives a very different
perspective seeing an area from up above. Trying to decide if I would have
wanted this as a kid - I probably had more fun exploring in person.

------
Timmy_C
The birds in the background are fun to play with but, like others who have
commented, I too couldn't get it to load with only one tab open in the latest
version of Chrome. Too bad.

I really like the idea of technology as art.

. . . and I really dig the latest Arcade Fire album.

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intranation
I had a lot of trouble seeing past the Hi-Res (studio behind Requiem for a
Dream, among others) style pop up-driven website with cheap interactive plays
at emotion. Surely this is just an old-school DHTML site built using new
tricks? I thought we were past this kind of website.

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ordinathorreur
I didn't feel engaged by this at all and would be quite interested to see how
other HN users feel about this previous interactive offering by the same band:
<http://www.beonlineb.com/>

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SebMortelmans
I really liked the idea, although a bit rough executed in the beginning, from
the letter onwards upto the finale it really all fell into place.

I loved how the birds that flew off the letters were kinda synced with the
other 2 popups.

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aidenn0
Unfortunately it really donsn't fit on the screen for my macbook. I guess the
popups are supposed to tile rather than obscure each other? I can't be the
only one in the world with a 1280x800 screen!

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whackedspinach
Note to Google: I know the users of tiling window managers and multiple
screens are a small subset of your users, but I happen to be in both. Please
don't use pop-ups. I like Arcade Fire too!

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shortformblog
Good God... I think the most entertaining part of this is watching how much
processor it takes up. It's regularly hit over 100% on my Mac Pro tower using
a recent build of Chromium.

~~~
jonknee
Worked fine on my Macbook Pro, the fan didn't even come on.

~~~
shortformblog
Reloaded it and it started quickly.

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winternett
Elaborate attempt by Google to gather your whereabouts...

They should have shot the video in daylight, Google street view is shot in the
day.

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harshpotatoes
All I get is a stuttering animation and choppy noise in chrome... 100% cpu
usage and 500mb of memory used... The idea sounds cool though...

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wlievens
My country doesn't have Street View yet :(

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shortformblog
It hung on me too, and crashed Safari... too bad because this seemed like a
really interesting project.

~~~
X-Istence
Worked fine in both Safari and Chrome for me on Mac OS X.

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c4urself
this could almost be one of those turning points in html5 acceptance where you
would say: and then i saw the arcade fire video and everyone has been using
canvas ever since...

is there any more detail on how they made it besides chromeexperiments.com?

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mitjak
Finally all my hipster and music loving friends have a reason to switch to
Chrome.

~~~
alabut
Worked just fine in Safari.

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zentechen
What's the fuzz? It worked great on XP with Pentium 4 onboard video card while
a load of other apps running in the background.

Perhaps the author could add localized billboard ads in street view and makes
some money that way.

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Jeema3000
Slideshow on my Intel Core 2 E5400 with the latest version of Firefox.

If this is the best HTML 5 has to offer over Flash, color me not impressed.

EDIT: There seems to be something wrong with Firefox on my computer. It
doesn't seem to want to update HTML canvas properly unless I'm actually moving
the mouse around in the canvas. Might have something to do with it. Weird...

~~~
xutopia
I would hold off judgment till when HTML5 gets properly hardware accelerated.

~~~
jarin
You can hardware accelerate CSS animations with translate3d()
<http://mir.aculo.us/2010/08/05/html5-buzzwords-in-action/>

