14 DAY TRIAL // Google is always keen to show off whatever new technology makes its way into Chrome. The best way to do this, of course, is to build an interesting and interactive demo to showcase it. With Movi.Kanti.Revo, Google's done just that.
The experiment, which uses your webcam, is designed to show off WebRTC, specifically the getUserMedia API. WebRTC is designed to be a standard for peer-to-peer internet communications, video and audio.
There's still some way to go before WebRTC is fully supported by browsers, a few months at least, but most modern browsers support one portion of WebRTC, the getUserMedia API which is designed to handle access to the webcam and the mic, the two important peripherals for voice and video calls.
While getUserMedia is perfectly suited for WebRTC, that's hardly the only thing it's good for, as plenty of demos were quick to illustrate when Opera and then Chrome introduced the feature.
Things like webcam photo editors, or apps that relied on gestures, illustrated what a web app can do with the functionality.
Movi.Kanti.Revo does the same: if you have a camera hooked up to your computer and a browser that supports getUserMedia out of the box, i.e. Chrome or Opera, you can navigate through the entire experience using gestures alone. You need to dig through about:config in Firefox to enable getUserMedia.
But the experiment doesn't just demo WebRTC or getUserMedia, it's a showcase of what the rest of the modern web can do.
Everything you see on the screen is displayed using markup, aka HTML, and CSS. It's all a bunch of divs (and images and other elements) moved around and changed via CSS 3D transforms and animations.
The video and audio are displayed via HTML5 video and audio respectively, as you'd expect. What's more, if you're using a mobile device, you can navigate using the accelerometer.
If you're interested in the actual implementation, Google put up a case study on HTML5Rocks.com which details how everything was built, complete with code snippets.