News By Ryan Whitwam Jul. 2, 2014 2:23 pm
Very little has changed about the essential nature of music videos in the last few decades, but Google is taking them in a weird new direction with a Chrome experiment. The Cube is an interactive music video created in partnership with the indie band The Presets. You can use The Cube to check out The Presets’ new single and explore a multifaceted music video along with it.
As the name suggests, The Cube is a standard six-sided box rendered in HTML5. It only works in Chrome on the desktop and Android. You can either click or tap and drag it around to see each face of the cube, or click in the upper right to get a flattened out map of the sides to click on. Yes, it autoplays. Sorry.
Each side has its own video that plays in sync with all the others, whether you can see them or not. Some of the videos feature people, but others are abstract animations. The track plays continuously on its own, but shifting between the sides alters the pitch, vocals, and even introduces new sounds into the music. You sort of create a new version of the song as you play with The Cube.
That alone is cool, but The Cube really takes this 3D thing seriously — you don’t have to be perfectly lined up with a single side. If you have two or three sides showing, you can see bits of each video, of course, but the audio effects from each side merge together. It’s pretty trippy.
The new single from The Presets titled “No Fun” is available exclusively on Google Play Music for the next two days, hence the crazy promotion with The Cube. Google has done music promotions like this before in Chrome experiments, but the company refers to The Cube as a platform. It would be cool to see it used for more tunes in the future, or possibly for some artistic venture we’d never imagine.
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As the name suggests, The Cube is a standard six-sided box rendered in HTML5. It only works in Chrome on the desktop and Android. You can either click or tap and drag it around to see each face of the cube, or click in the upper right to get a flattened out map of the sides to click on. Yes, it autoplays. Sorry.
Each side has its own video that plays in sync with all the others, whether you can see them or not. Some of the videos feature people, but others are abstract animations. The track plays continuously on its own, but shifting between the sides alters the pitch, vocals, and even introduces new sounds into the music. You sort of create a new version of the song as you play with The Cube.
That alone is cool, but The Cube really takes this 3D thing seriously — you don’t have to be perfectly lined up with a single side. If you have two or three sides showing, you can see bits of each video, of course, but the audio effects from each side merge together. It’s pretty trippy.
The new single from The Presets titled “No Fun” is available exclusively on Google Play Music for the next two days, hence the crazy promotion with The Cube. Google has done music promotions like this before in Chrome experiments, but the company refers to The Cube as a platform. It would be cool to see it used for more tunes in the future, or possibly for some artistic venture we’d never imagine.
More...
