Saturday, May 14, 2011

New tech but lack of tooling

I was flicked an email to the rome interactive music video. I was not sure what to expect but I was most impressed by it. This really is a great showcase of the mixing HTML5 and WebGL. The music was really cool... might even get myself a copy of the single/album . But once I had played it a couple of times through I was thinking exactly how easy is this? Changing pixels on the screen is one thing but how fast did it take them to do it?

My experiences with JavaScript is one of a love hate relationship... but I'll leave that for another post. So I was wondering how did they generate all the JavaScript files for the models etc. It's cool to have something that can play/run it but how about something productive to generate it? I was hoping the behind the scenes tech vid would shed some light on this but it didn't... other than going on about WebGL and HTML5. As a developer at heart I want to know how hard was it? Like really, how hard it was? It is really cool that you can do this but having something render your vision is one thing... how you create it in a form to render it is what interests me. Which really comes down to tooling.

Time will tell if this is just one cool example/demo application of these techs destined for history or is there a larger movement out there with tooling to follow? At the end of the day I'm always thinking about productivity and great tools make great techs hum. So for the meantime I wait an see what great tooling comes out on top for creating such visionary pieces of work.

1 comment:

Adam said...

I think the biggest clue comes from looking at the credits (http://www.ro.me/credits) ... TD was Mr.Doob who's been doing this kind of stuff for years in Director & Flash, and the production team was massive and included two well established companies, Mirada (http://www.mirada.tv/) and North Kingdom (http://www.northkingdom.com/). From that I get the feeling that the bulk of the tooling is pretty much what we use already, just bent to a different target... HTML5 instead of Flash.