Posted on 2011-05-17

ROME "3 Dreams of Black"

$Rome \$

I'm happy to announce that ROME "3 Dreams of Black", a project I was working on for the last 5 months has been released last week.

"3 Dreams of Black" is an interactive music video directed by Chris Milk for Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. It features a song from their latest album ROME, performed by Norah Jones. It's part of the Chrome Experiments series and was created entirely with HTML5 and WebGL.

This is the second time I collaborated with North Kingdom. It was a big project, and other parties involved were the team from Google Creative Labs, including Aaron Koblin and Mrdoob as well as the teams from Mirada L.A. and Radical Media. I would like to take the occasion and say thanks to guys at North Kingdom for letting me be part of it. I have never been working with such talented group of people!

The project was a big challenge and an incredible learning experience. I intend to write a longer post with more details as soon as I get some time. Meanwhile go to ro.me and enjoy the show! You can also watch a video from the project below.

Technology

Also be sure to check the behind the scenes/tech page which features information on the technology we used and a very cool model viewer. You can download the entire code base from there too - the project is open source!

kszyniu commented on May 17th, 2011

well done Bartek! congratz to you all!
joshRen commented on May 17th, 2011

looks amazing but it doesn't work on my browser…

it really surprises me that those who develop great stuff in html5 seem to expect people to happily go back to the days of “this site is best viewed in [insert favorite browser here]”

it just ain't gonna happen - sorry but it never was.
Shawn commented on May 17th, 2011

2 minute long preloader and then a black screen for me :/

Chrome 11
Jeff commented on May 17th, 2011

The big outdoor parts are pretty sweet: the depth of field and bright coloring are very nice looking, makes the big poly's work great as artstyle.. I'm not sure about some of the video effects, but maybe that was my just my chrome 11 glitching (lots of vertical bars).
bartek drozdz commented on May 17th, 2011

@kszyniu thanks!

@joshRen I see what you mean and I agree. I'm not a fan of “works best in…” and would prefer to have all browsers support the same standards. But for the moment it's not the case. Though it's getting better all the time. Webgl is still very young, and not all manufacturers added support for it. Currently it only works in Firefox and Chrome, but Opera and Safari should follow soon. Sadly MS doesn't seem to be interested in adding support for Webgl in IE, but we all hope they will change their mind :) Our aim was to show what's possible and push the limits a bit. We didn't use any Chrome specific features, and we hope that as support for HTML5 and Webgl will get wider, so will the availability of this site in other browsers.

@Jeff @Shawn we experienced some problems with rendering videos in webgl on windows + ATI cards. If you can paste me your OS/GPU information, it would be helpful. Also, maybe this tip from @ChromiumDev will help: “If Angry Birds or ro.me is not working w/ your MacBook, try starting with: -ignore-gpu-blacklist -disable-multisampling See: goo.gl/ao5gp“
Ringo commented on May 18th, 2011

Freaking amazing and love the music!:) Well done;)
Karl Macklin commented on May 18th, 2011

Worked fine in my Chrome 11.0.696.68, and the video was amazing!

Also, I'm loving looking through all these Tech demos, it's great to finally see some cool (read interesting/inventive) WebGL stuff.

Good job!
ou-jedi commented on May 19th, 2011

What happened with everyday3d?! Now it has become everyday3D, ok but why you speak only about Unity3D, WebGL, html5? what about Molehill and flash? it's not exising for you? it be important to talk about it, no? it is not better than any other…..
PFFFFFFF!
bartek drozdz commented on May 19th, 2011

@ou-jedi heh, appreciate your concern. Times are changing, aren't they? I started to play with Unity before Molehill was even announced, mainly because the old Flash didn't offer enough performance to do interesting things. Then I started this WebGL project and for the moment this is what's keeping me busy. I did not forget about Flash, I just didn't have time to check it out yet.
ou-jedi commented on May 20th, 2011

@bartek
Ok, thanks for response.
Andrew Wooldridge commented on May 20th, 2011

I'm glad you are focusing on WebGL instead of older technologies - it needs a boost from amazing folks like you. Notice how mrdoob has removed all of his flash projects in favor of his new stuff. Looks like a tipping point has been reached. http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/715
oled commented on May 20th, 2011

I HATE THIS. Yes the demo is great but Google is becoming like Microsoft, showcase unrealistic staff to push what they want. We are not going to use WebGL for years (if ever), it's hard to believe that Microsoft developers are going to put a DirectX competitor in their browser.

But what I hate the most is javascript, it's not made for complex things, but they are still using it. Why they don't put Javascript 2 instead of focusing on this pointless cosmetics stuff(oh yes, cause they use a java compiler, they already know that coding in javascript sucks). They don't care about developers, nobody does, they just want to show that their browsers run faster a slow language for marketing reason.

It pretty obvious now that all the new HTML5 features are just going to create much more fragmentation between browsers (IE without WebGL, FF without WebSQL, Chrome without h264, the usual CSS random adoption, and the DOM…). I'm old enough to remember the first browsers war, we were finally close to see the light, and now the hell again.

By the way, I have several problems with WebGL on firefox and it crash Chrome sometimes. It doesn't even works on my laptop ( where there is a pretty good nvidia ). Yes webgl it's young, but if it doesn't works don't publish it. On the other hand the molehill demos work flawless on all the pc/mac I tested, and it's still a beta.
bartek drozdz commented on May 22nd, 2011

@Andrew thanks! I would never go as far as mrdoob though.

@oled I think you are missing the point about what Webgl and Javascript is. A few months ago I did share those views, but I changed my mind. Explaining that merits a separate post however. I will write it soon.
Michał commented on May 30th, 2011

Great project to be working on :) Congratulation!
0533 373 81 23 commented on October 23rd, 2014

Have you ever thought about creating an e-book or guest authoring on other blogs?

I have a blog centered on the same ideas you discuss and would really like to have you share some stories/information. I know my audience would appreciate your work. If you're even remotely interested, feel free to shoot me an email.

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Everyday3D is a blog by Bartek Drozdz