Dave Eccles: InDesign

Reflection on my Immersive Experience’s presentation.

My Presentation on Immersive Experiences.

This is a written conclusion of my findings while researched for the five immersive website experiences. To begin my research I became more familiar with the technicalities of what makes a website immersive. The Google definition for immersive (websites) is (of a computer display or system) generating a three-dimensional image which appears to surround the user. Being interactive to fully immerse the user. This narrowed my search down to three-dimensional using websites that entrance the reader by surrounding them with 3d imagery, sound effects and interactive details.

The first site chosen was justareflektor.com. This website was created by Google Chrome and allows the user to control the lighting effects and camera positions using your mouse, web cam or tablet. This experience is immersive as the music surrounds the user while they interact with the making of the music video. The perfect way to immerse yourself into this website is to use headphones/earphones, this allows the pitch and volume of the music to be changed as you move your mouse across the screen. Using the mouse to hover over the video changes the video in different aspects depending on where in the video you are. At the start the mouse is used to change light direction, the middle brings up illustrations of the protagonist in the video being held by ropes, and at the end the mouse controls the camera positions and lighting.

The second site I used was deadliestcatch360.com which is a 360 view on board the ships that feature in the show The Deadliest Catch. This website was immersive as it has little to no boundaries in terms of being fully 360, the site allows the user to click on different graphics to bring up stories of the crew, facts of fishing and other trivia is also included. The site allows the user to go on a full tour of each shipping vessel (five in total) with amazingly clear images. Different parts of the ships are explained through pop up facts and figures to do with the fishing trade and difficulties such as weather during the long haul seasons. The cast and crew are also interactive as you are enabled to click on anyone you like to find out personal stories, facts and skill lists.

Another immersive website chosen is the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum online which uses 360 tours using Google maps and location to show the difference between photographs taking during the Holocaust to the street view of the area in 2015. This website is immersive in different ways, as it tells a story throughout after you interact with the site and choose a story to follow. The site uses long-form mixed with sound and illustrations to coincide with the stories.

Inside Abbey Road is another immersive site, as compared to the previous website seems far more immersive just because of the 360 tour of the whole building, in studio rooms, managerial rooms, orchestra sound recording rooms. The experience is made immersive with the use of interactive graphics which you can press and take you anywhere you want to go to learn anything you wanted to know about Abbey Road. Inside Abbey Road was defined by it’s crystal clear 3D images and felt much more like watching a movie than clicking your way through a large building.

The final interactive experience is The Wilderness Downtown, which was created by Google Chrome Experiments. This website asks you to enter a postcode, and then asks to allow pop-ups. This website was the first of it’s kind and was released in 2013. The site uses pop-ups and tabs in your web browser to show images of a person running to the sound of the background music (We Used To Wait – Acrade Fire) and uses Google Street View of the postcode you entered to draw the user (who knows that area) into the happenings on screen. The wilderness Downtown is an interactive multimedia video coded in HTML5 and was published to show the capabilities of the new Google Chrome browser.

Each of the sites I selected was in their own way immersive, using 3 dimensional imagery to surround the reader. The most immersive from the list The Wilderness Downtown as it uses so many different techniques to create the immersive experience, for example the use of choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering… this Chrome Experiment has them all. “The Wilderness Downtown” is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait” and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.