The Wilderness Downtown Experience

The Wilderness Downtown is an interactive movie website created using HTML5, the next major HTML on the web. As I was browsing Twitter, I've read a tweet from Reddit saying "I cannot begin to describe how mindblowing this is.... (tip: view in Google Chrome) [programming] 358 points http://reddit.com/d7vqx"

SPOILER ALERT: I suggest you should check this site first to have your own The Wilderness Downtown Experience as well. The following paragraphs will spoil you if you haven't checked the site yet. ;-)

And so I checked it out since I'm into programming myself and I'm using Google Chrome as my browser. So when I got there, I'm confused why do I need to enter my address, but I submitted it anyway. 

As to my astonishment, I just saw the coolest thing I've seen on the web. I'm an avid music-lover myself and my jaw dropped while watching the movie which is Arcade Fire's "We Used To Wait." 

The reason why you'll be typing your address is that the movie itself will be featuring your neighborhood on the video. This is thanks to the power of Google Maps. But since I'm from the Philippines, the result showed that my address does not contain enough information to run the experiment so I entered a different one. If maybe I was seeing my neighborhood on the video, I'll become a little nostalgic. However, it doesn't stop me from smiling while watching the video. 

The scenes are played by small separate windows that will pop in and out, letting you see different angles and views of the movie while watching it. My favorite part is this: 

Upper left: Satellite view. Upper right: My view.

Below: A zoomed satellite view of myself.

My another favorite part was when I get a chance to write something using The Wilderness fonts (the tree branch designs). I wrote an inspirational note for myself.

...and when the birds flew by from the note to the city.

On the note: Dear Self, You can do it! =)

After watching the video, I felt like I went outer space for minutes and seeing only things that made me happy. I thank the creators behind this Google Experiment project for that.

I was wondering, will this technology kill Flash now? I just thought of that after watching the movie, I felt like this is a lot simpler than using Flash for interactive websites. Well, only the future could tell.

TheWildernessDowntown is a Google Experiment project created by Chris Milk.

Article by Loading-Info