Whenever the name Aaron Koblin is mentioned everyone goes crazy about digital arts, technologists, web arts & Google itself. We’ve talked about him here a few times (more particularly about his arty-duets with Chris Milk), but today… today we shall have a look at his latest idea.
Koblin's The Single Lane Super Highway
Crazy as usual, “The Single Lane Superhighway” is simply a website that lets you draw your own car and add it to the 7000+ line of vehicles already present on the site.
Behind the project is car insurance company “Progressive” and their Art Collection which each year commissions a new artist to produce a piece for the company. This year….Mr Koblin of course, as well as Bitforms Gallery who worked with programmer Mr. Doob on the Superhighway, which reflects “the personal bond people have with their automobiles.” Give your own car a draw, this way.
One of the most productive & successful creative duos … Mr Aaron Koblin (you know, one of Google’s creativitists-technologists behind their “creative lab”) and Chris Milk whose collaborations have brought some buzzy videos already…their previous Chrome Experiment with Arcade Fire, or the Johnny Cash Project, are repeating interactive browser modus operandi (less interactive this time though) for Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi’s ROME (which also includes Jack White & Norah Jones).
One of those “Chrome Experiments” trying show the wonders of Google’s browser by exploiting the recently released WebGL to provide some amazing mix of 2D & 3D graphics with live footage, the trend you know. Another “music video made for the browser” which is an obvious (but beautiful) campaign for you to install Google’s browser… and to buy ROME’s album of course.
Together with the video you’ll find a tool to create your own “dream”, up in the sky or down on the ground.
basic (and annoyng) but if you have spare time....
In building “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 http://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.
