Sunday 19th May 2013
The impressive online promo for The Wilderness Downtown has just won an FWA (Favourite Website Award). Multiple windows show off video, beautiful canvas animations of a flock of birds (at one point laid over moving google maps), all over a great song. The video has been brilliantly shot without any location-specific footage, so the surrounding visuals (your home town) complete the picture. Good work Chris Milk, Aaron Koblin and B-Reel!
Rumpetroll‘s literal translation from Norwegian to English is Ass Troll. But the Rumpetroll website is an impressive (and quite exciting, if you’re geeks like us) demo of what can be achieved with the HTML5 canvas, javascript and css, and it’s the first application of websockets that we’ve seen. It’s an instant-loading, smooth looking and innovative chat room, put together by some extremely clever Norwegians.
Link: http://rumpetroll.com/
Peter Molyneux, ex Lionhead Studios boss demos Milo, a hotly anticipated video game for Microsoft’s Kinect controller. Perceptive and impressionable like a real 11-year-old, the virtual boy watches, listens and learns—recognizing and responding to you.
Impressive stuff that demos several developments in the way that we can interact with technology, and how our actions can shape a unique experience.
Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_molyneux_demos_milo_the_virtual_boy.html
Earlier today we quickly helped Sam Smith put his new laysick.com holding page together and used some simple, neat CSS to create an edge to edge scalable background image, no matter what size your browser window. The two information panels shift with the window size too.
Link: http://www.laysick.com
We’re at a disadvantage in our offices as we use Macs and have a PS3 for those rare recreation times, but Microsoft have released a visual coding language - “Kodu” - aimed at encouraging children to create their own games. The toolkit is entirely icon driven, no complicated C+ frameworks in sight. Sounds very interesting; obviously it’s PC and XBOX only, but if successful we’re sure that similar software for other platforms will become available. (Wikipedia gives a nice overview of the language/method for anyone that’s interested).