"Ambience Antarctica" - Internet radio and live visuals!

[Marziponder]

Hi everyone - I'm super excited to share my project with you all! I hope that this may become a regularly visited bookmark for some of you.

The site is www.ambienceantarctica.com. It's an internet radio station that cycles through a bunch of fun visuals. It's like a hybrid between The Weather Channel, a nature documentary, and those little flight tracker visuals on the screens in the back of airplane seats?

I want this site to be something that you can spend awhile watching to relax in bed, or pull up on a second monitor while you work, have it on in the background, or even in the foreground if you feel like listening to music and watching the weather in a very magical part of the world. I'd absolutely love it if the station could reach some consistent listeners, as I think it could be a really special place to some people out there if they can just find it. There was a site sort of like this long ago that I remember fondly and I've missed it ever since, so this project has been my attempt to bring something like it back to the internet.

I'm very proud of this project, so let me tell you just a few of the parts I think are coolest:

1. I got special permission from the Antarctic Meteorological Research and Data Center at the university of Wisconsin-Madison to use their live satellite imagery, webcams, and weather info. I automatically compile this data every hour into some special visuals that are not available anywhere else on the web. So some of the webcams there will show you how it looked in Antarctica just an hour ago!

2. You can spot animals with varying levels of rarity. It displays a photo and facts about them with a fun animation  , and you can view a log of all the animals you've seen. I hope it's fun to see the different animals!

3. There is a live listener count, and its real internet radio, so you can feel a sense of community as you listen. (Well, nobody is listening yet, but in theory...)

4. There's HD animal footage, flyovers, trivia questions, weather forecasts, etc. Lots of fun stuff!


Right now there are 36 visuals in the rotation, and so it takes about 18 minutes to see them all (unless you change the speed in the settings, which is a thing you can do! ) I would be so happy if even just one person actually listens/watches that long!


Please let me know what you think and if you have any feedback!

[rolypolyphonic]

Gave it a quick look and the visual style is very cool and appealing.    I will give the actual music a listen once I can sit down on a PC. Great job with it 

[Dan Q]

This is a delightful and fun project! The penguin videos never seem to load for me, though.

I've shared it in a couple of places (e.g. on Metafilter, where there'll doubtless be somebody who digs it) and the listener count seems to be rising... hopefully others will love it too!

[haumeaGeth]

This is insanely cool??? This is why I love the indie web, you can't find stuff like this anywhere else. Added the button to my site and immediately started whipping the link violently at my friends. The music it features is even right up my alley. Absolutely going to be popping this open regularly.

[Marziponder]

AHHH WOW!!340 different listeners in just the day since I posted this!?!    I can't believe my eyes! I never thought I would get this kind of traffic, or especially not so quickly. (And I'm happy to say my server has held its own despite being a very cheap little thing hehe) It looks like there's been around 10 listeners average at any given time. So cool!! Thank you everyone who took a look!


Dan Q, I really appreciate you sharing the site on metafilter. It seems like a lot of the crowd came from there. As for the videos, yeeeah I sort of crossed my fingers and hoped that full HD videos with hardly any compression would load okay for people, because I really wanted to show the beauty of the vids. But I noticed they were loading even slower than usual with the traffic, so I decided to give in and reupload them in a much more compressed form. One of them ended up a little too crunchy    so I may revise that one, but mostly they actually ended up looking pretty much the same. So hopefully the videos should load better now. Most of the penguin videos are in the second half of the rotation too, so maybe I should move them forward a bit...

Rolypolyphonic - how cool to hear from you - I just started reading your webcomic last week or so when I was looking at the new users list. I thought the music sync effects were really neat, and your art style is great. Your kind words mean a lot!

haumeaGeth, I'm so glad to hear you like the music and it's really nice of you to share the site with your friends. I plan to keep adding stuff to this, I want to get the wildlife species count to around 200 eventually (I added 8 new ones just a few minutes ago), as well as adding more music, visuals, etc. It's sooo encouraging to work on updates when someone says they'll visit again.


Well, you all have made my day. This is the first sort of thing I've done like this and I couldn't have imagined a nicer response

[rolypolyphonic]

Rolypolyphonic - how cool to hear from you - I just started reading your webcomic last week or so when I was looking at the new users list. I thought the music sync effects were really neat, and your art style is great. Your kind words mean a lot!

I've given the actual music a listen and let it play in the background and I find the choice of music fitting for the visuals, it's also nice that you've curated some free use and 'niche' music, it is a nice way to discover more artists. 

And thank you very much for checking out my work