The Wilderness Downtown

[Melooon]

I found myself thinking of this today. It’s an interactive music video / digital artwork created by Google and Chris Milk in 2010 to demonstrate the power of the upcoming HTML5 update.

My first web design teacher showed it in class when I was just starting out. It was so exciting to see! I remember not knowing why or what I wanted from web crafting back then; but after seeing this I felt like “someone gets it, now we are getting somewhere”

The work is made using a series of pop ups that show a mix of video, 3d animation, street view maps, animated text and audio. It ends with a request to send a letter to your past self.

I suppose in retrospect is a little cheesy and a little corporate, but most of 2010 was like that   

Anyway I’d love to know what you think of it and if you watched it back in the day. Also do you know anything like it? I don’t know any webbrevival sites that have used pop ups quite like this 

Try it here - http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ (not sure how well it works on modern browsers)

It does not support mobile at all, so if your on mobile here is a video instead:

EDIT: I was able to get it working in fully Firefox by disabling HTTPS only mode; allowing popups from the site and then refreshing! - It kinda worked in Safari and did not seem to work in Chrome.

[CableCat]

I never saw this back then! But I do remember hearing about an HTML5 update and people making a big deal. I was a young teen then, so I don't recall HTML5 changing the way I used the internet much, I just remember the webcomic Homestuck having to remake all their interactive point and click game pages to work on HTML5. Around that time, I was big into using my iPod Touch and I'd owned an iPod touch for about 4 years by then.

It's cool to see you bring this up, because everything I remember about the context of that time and the things I had access to already make me forget about any changes that came with HTML5 on the web. 2009 and 2010 are also the years I remember all my classmates and their mothers and grandmothers jumping headlong into Facebook. A lot of us kids and teens started using Facebook then for more than half our time on the web! I feel like we all slept on this big change, or that we were so sucked into social media corporations for the next 10 years that we missed out on the artistic capabilities of HTML5.

[brisray]

I haven't seen this before and for a while I thought it was broken - it takes a minute for everything to load and display properly. It works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera after allowing pop-ups and insecure content.

It's always interesting to see people pushing the edge edge of these technologies and MDN Web Docs has a list of some of them.

I always thought it was cool seeing the artwork people are creating using just CSS.