Monday, May 13, 2013

Studio Exploration

100,000 Stars is created by Google Data Arts Team.  It lets you explore the nearby stars, nearly 120,000 of them to be exact.  You can even identify and read about 87 of them.  Google is a massive company that dabbles in just about every aspect of technology.  I am very pleased to see them exploring a more creative side of technology.

100,000 Stars is built with THREE.js and CSS3D.  It deals with concepts such as depth of field.  The loading screen looks like something that could easily be done in Flash; it is simply a spinning blob.  Google's intent was to combine technology and data with art.  The interface is smooth and beautiful.  You are allowed to spin, whirl, progress forwards and backwards.  It really feels as though you are travelling through space.  Michael Chang goes into further detail about the process of this creation here: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/100000stars/

You can find the 100,000 Stars project here: http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/?ModPagespeed=noscript

100,000 Stars won the Favorite Website Award for the entire month of January.  This should come as no surprise seeing as Google pushes the limits in most areas of technology.  It is very exciting to see Google popping it's head up in the artistic world and I hope to see more of them in the future.

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