The Virtual Choir - Google Earth
When Delete takes on a new project we constantly search for innovative ways to approach it. This ensures we remain on the leading edge of web development, and our clients ahead of their competitors. Our latest project for Universal Music was an excellent opportunity to try something new and deliver a unique solution. View here
Acclaimed conductor and composer Eric Whitacre has recently begun his second Virtual Choir project, which aims to bring budding singers from around the world together via a dedicated YouTube channel in one combined choir. Participants are encouraged to record themselves singing a part of a specially created piece of music via their personal webcams. Early next year Eric and his team will combine these videos into an international virtual choir - in what will be a spectacular example of social networking and musical collaboration.
The problem for Universal was that they had no destination for presenting the video submissions, and no way of illustrating the global perspective of this project. Working closely with them we set about creating a platform that solved this problem.
The solution encompassed three components: the YouTube videos, Google Earth and Eric's website CMS (Wordpress). The approach was to develop an application that pulls the videos directly from YouTube and places them on an instance of Google Earth for users to view. The simplest method for achieving this was to create a custom Wordpress plug-in that allows the administrator to search and import relevant videos, which are then automatically placed on Google Earth based on the contributor's location.
The result is a simple yet powerful combination of YouTube content and Google Earth that demonstrates how far the Virtual Choir project is reaching across the globe. We look forward to watching it grow. Maybe we'll even convince one of our team to belt their own version out someday soon...
- By Tom Dougherty
- Category
- Technical, Projects, News
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Future of CSS
Even though some people might argue that CSS3 is quite a bit off, it's still amusing to dream a little about what's going to be possible in the near future. CSS3 and HTML5 are basically the new versions of what makes the foundation of the web. They are both still in a 'draft' state, meaning that they will probably end up quite different to how they look today - once the W3C are done with them.
There's a lot of cool examples out there, like this animated Starwars AT-AT Walker robot built entirely in CSS3 by Anthony Calzadilla (you need a webkit browser like Safari or Chrome to view it).
The most recent and mind-boggling, however, comes from Róman Cortés who made a spinning Coca-Cola can without the aid of any Flash or Javascript. What's more: This technique doesn't even use the new CSS3, so one can only imagine what's going to be possible when the time comes.
- By Julius Mattsson
- Category
- Technical
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Decode: Digital Design Sensations
Code and raw data wouldn't normally appeal to traditional exhibition goers but this is Digital Art at its most breathtaking.
The raw material whether from social media, a day's worth of flight routes or human movement and sound is programmed using a mixture of Processing and other open source technologies which are constantly evolving through interaction.
Featuring Weave Mirror by Daniel Rozin, Joshua Davis' Hype Framework and Karsten Schmidt who created Social Collider - rewritten in Java to interact with Nintendo Wii remotes, visualising connections between Twitter data steams and there propagation.
The works attempt to disillusion the overwhelming amount of information that exists in Digital by showcasing data through abstract art, visualisations and interactivity.
Highly recommended, open until 11 April, 2010
http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/decode/
- By Don Brown
- Category
- Culture, Technical
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iPhone Applications in development
As some of you know, here at Delete we've a bit of a passion for all things technical (we're also prone to a bit of creative dabbling), So it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that we've decided to focus our attention on a bit of iPhone R&D.
As you read this our industrious dev team is busy beavering away on an iPhone App that should see the light of day (if it gets passed the pearly gates of the App Store) in the next few weeks. Unfortunately as it's highly top secret and we can't yet divulge it's true nature (who knows what type of nefarious idea poachers might be reading this). Suffice to say you won't want to leave home without it, especially as the silly season approaches.
Stay tuned for more – this should be the first of many to come out of the delete workshop.
