Follow the yellow brick road! (Or, at least, follow the blinking cursor).
Those who are waiting with anticipation for Oz the Great and Powerful can now “find their way to Oz” with Google Chrome’s new interactive experiment.
When you first venture into the “Find Your Way to Oz” website, you find yourself in a dusty traveling circus. You can play with the music box, experiment with moviemaking curtesy of the zoetrope, or have fun in the photo booth. You can also see the world from a hot air balloon, but be careful… strange winds have been blowing in these parts.
It is the winds – and the 3D graphics, CSS3 transitions, and GLSL shaders – that make the landscape come alive. Disney, Google, and UNIT9 teamed up to create the technology that makes the wind blow and the other graphics look equally stunning and immersive.
If you’re interested in peeking behind the wizard’s curtain, you can check out the Find Your Way to Oz Case Study. As one of the developers notes, “at the big-picture level we are dealing with views, composited one on top of the other. At the top you see a UI layer, with a 3D scene below it: itself made of different scene components.”
If you make it through the simulated tornado in all of its glory, you will be treated to an excerpt from the upcoming the film!
To follow the yellow brick road, simply enter the URL FindYourWayToOz.com into your Google Crome browser and you’ll be off to see the wizard!
