The Arcade Fire’s new multi-paned video for “We Used to Wait” — a Google “Chrome Experience” — makes use of HTML5, animation, and map mashups. Google’s Aaron Koblin says, in an interview with Wired, “One of the biggest struggles for a director is to successfully create a sense of empathy with their characters and settings. Using Google Maps and Street View we’re able to tailor the experience to each person. This effect is a totally different kind of emotional engagement that is both narrative and personally driven.”
You need to use Chrome to experience it for yourself.
Via Greg J. Smith from Serial Consign and Eliot van Buskirk from Wired (whose brother, coincidentally, participated on a panel discussion I organized last fall).
One Comment
1 Stephen Taylor wrote:
I sort of saw this – it does work without using chrome, but is a little bit sticky. I need to update my OS in order to install Chrome. A pretty sweet idea all in all, and I think that my own experience with it is interesting because I grew up in the suburbs of Houston, which is apparently what the album is about, in part.
They are not all map-related, but there is a site for all of the Chrome experiments going on here: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
I also found this google-map derived site/experiement/playtime to be fun- like chatroulette but with places all over the world (though with less genuine surprise than chatroulette can provide). It basically sends you to a random street view somewhere in the world. My favorite place so far is santiago de Compostela, in Spain. It looks like the edge of the earth:
http://web.mit.edu/~jmcmicha/www/globegenie/