By Ricardo Cabello (aka Mr.doob), Google Data Arts TeamLast August, we released “
The Wilderness Downtown”, a music experience that brought together HTML5 and JavaScript, as well as the Google Maps and Street View APIs. Today, we’re excited to introduce our newest project, “
3 Dreams of Black”, made with WebGL, HTML5 and JavaScript, and designed for modern browsers like Google Chrome. We previewed this music experience yesterday with web developers at Day 2 of the
Google I/O keynote.
“3 Dreams of Black” takes you on a journey through three dream worlds constructed through a combination of rich 2D drawings and animations interwoven with interactive 3D sequences. Throughout various points in these dream worlds, you can grab your mouse and guide the protagonist’s point of view through the experience. This music experience also includes a 3D model creator that allows you to create your own relics and contribute to the shared collective dream. “3 Dreams of Black” is written and directed by Chris Milk, and developed with a few folks here at Google.
In creating “3 Dreams of Black”, we’ve had the opportunity to build many tools, libraries, and models. We’ve fully opened up the source code and made it available for web developers to tinker with us at
www.ro.me/tech. In addition to the code, a few other highlights include eight WebGL demos, a fun model viewer for interacting with some of the animals from the web experience, and the
Three.js 3D library used for building the experience. In addition, a big part of the project was to define a good pipeline for getting all the animals and environment models right in WebGL -- for this, we extended
Blender with
custom plugins so we could manipulate and export the data with ease.
“3 Dreams of Black” is set to the song “Black” off the album
ROME, presented by
Danger Mouse &
Daniele Luppi, featuring
Jack White and
Norah Jones on vocals, to be released soon on the record label EMI. Because it’s built in WebGL, it requires a WebGL-supported browser like Chrome, and Windows Vista / Mac OS X 10.6 and above to help ensure that your computer has the necessary and up-to-date graphics drivers. We hope you’ll take a moment to dive into the experience and the developer resources at
www.ro.meRicardo Cabello is a designer/developer in the Google Data Arts Team. He is the creator of several popular Chrome Experiments, including Google Gravity, Ball Pool, and Harmony.Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor
