Killers Bring the Web to Life

This experimental site for the Las Vegas band The Killers is a wide-screen Nevada desert landscape that scales vertically to fit your window. As you sweep across the scene, you'll encounter icons of the group's history plus artifacts of 20th-century industrial culture-for example, a newspaper vending machine (which links to band news), a Vegas-bound bus (for tour info), a jukebox (their discography), an old photo booth (photos), a drive-in movie screen (videos), a severed forearm (an interactive discography), a tiny gravesite (their fan club), a street sign to Somewhere (their discussion board), and a neon-lit gift shop (guess!).

Thanks to HTML5's Canvas feature, clicking most of these objects loads content while applying various effects to the underlying panorama. For example, clicking the photo booth dims the background and loads up an interactive gallery. Clicking videos slides you up into the darkened sky, where each planet expands into a high-quality H.264-encoded video file right on the same screen. Especially cool is the world tour map, which is built using SVG--a blazing-fast native vector graphics language.

But the really cool part is that you never load a new page. You're going to see a lot more of HTML5's ability to support Web sites that act less like a poorly organized loose-leaf binder and more like an application--the kind of sites that Internet Explorer 9 was made for. Selecting a link or pulling down a menu won't send you off to a new page. Rather, content will be updated right there on the same canvas.

The digital agency Sparkart designed this fascinating site using Clique Tools, a proprietary development platform that will eventually be offered for general use. Meanwhile, you can check out a few other sites based on the platform, such as JanetJackson.com and Damien Marley's DistantRelatives.com.

This story, "Killers Bring the Web to Life" was originally published by BrandPost.