14 DAY TRIAL // The music video, interactive experience and tech demo all rolled into one that Google previewed at its I/O developer conference is now available for all to experience.
Just type "ro.me" into your browser and, providing you're running a recent version of Google Chrome, you'll be able to emerge yourself in the 'video' set to the song "Black" off of Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi's musical project ROME.
"'3 Dreams of Black' is our newest music experience for the web browser, written and directed by Chris Milk and developed with a few folks here at Google," Aaron Koblin, from the Google Data Arts Team who worked on the project, wrote.
"'3 Dreams of Black' is a visual voyage through three dream worlds, told through rich 2D drawings and animations that are interspersed with interactive 3D sequences. At various points in this web experience, you can take control with your computer’s mouse and guide your journey through the unfolding narrative," he explained.
The best way to understand what is 3 Dreams of Black, is to experience it, obviously. Among other things, the project tries to prove that the web, an open platform, can be great for interactive, visually rich experiences, accessible to all.
Unfortunately, in practice, it doesn't really work out that way. To get the most out of the experience, you need to have a recent version of Google Chrome, the Canary and dev channel builds, which are Chrome 13 at the moment, work best.
Even running the recently released Chrome 11 stable won't guarantee a smooth experience. Firefox 4 is also lacking.
This is because the video makes ample use of WebGL a relatively new technology which aims to enable developers to access the full power of the graphics hardware present on most modern computers via JavaScript code, the lingua franca of the web.
WebGL is a web standard and is supported by Chrome, Firefox, and, to a lesser extent, by Opera and Safari. However, as with any new technology, browsers still need have a lot of optimization work to do before performance is even close to what native APIs, aka DirectX or OpenGL, can achieve on the same hardware.
With that ample caveat out of the way, if you're running fairly decent hardware and a new enough version of Chrome, 3 Dreams of Black is truly an experience to behold.
It marries video, 2D animation and 3D animation, all in an interactive environment where the viewer gets to control some of what's happening on the screen, or rather, in the browser tab.
While the technology is still new, it clearly holds a lot of promise and it's projects like this that bring new technologies in front of the regular users and spur developers to start working with them.
