While the official word from W3C is that HTML 5 won’t be the standard for another couple of years, we’re already seeing the implementation of HTML 5 in both modern web browsers and new site features. This includes straightforward extras like Google Instant, but it has also opened the door for entirely new forms of applications on the web. From WebGL’s in-browser 3D acceleration to the myriad of game apps, there’s plenty more to explore – assuming you have a browser capable of handling this new level of coding. To demonstrate just how capable the Chrome browser is of doing just that, Google has teamed with the panoramic image company GigaPan.
GigaPan has already been alive, well, and recognized in the market as a panoramic image service that can be used directly through your web browser. Now the company is setting itself apart with a feature called “Time Machine.” Time Machine, on the surface, looks like a time lapse photo viewer with some extra controls (speed up, slow down, skip ahead, skip back, and so on). What differentiates Time Machine, though, is that users can zoom in – and have the video display maximum detail on every portion of the photo.
To do this, the videos take advantage of HTML 5’s video tag feature – along with the required acceleration and support from modern browsers like Chrome – to create new videos out of the zoomed area, transitioning to the freshly created video seamlessly. The project demonstrates how effectively HTML 5 can be used for new concepts of how media is displayed, for personal or scientific reasons. Time Machine can be found on the official GigaPan site, or on Chrome Experiments where the project is being highlighted by Google as an apt example of what the modern web can do.
[via the Official Google Blog]
