Canadian collective Arcade Fire decided to do something a little different for their new video for the single “We Used to Wait,” off their excellent new album The Suburbs. They teamed up with director Chris Milk and Google to make an interactive video starring the house you grew up in.
Yes, your house. Just plug in the address of where you lived as a kid, and satellite photos and Street View shots from the area are gathered and incorporated with moving images of that exact area into the journey of the hooded jogger in the video (that's supposed to be you, by the way).
The project is called "The Wilderness Downtown". You should definitely check it out, because it's a very interesting new use of technology... and everyone's already talking about it. But be warned - if you're susceptible to homesickness or your system crashing when it's being bombarded with information, I'd suggest clicking away (Chrome is strongly suggested for optimal user experience).
Stick it out till the end, because users are invited to write a postcard to the past which is then animated, and the video ends with shots of the neighborhood overrun by computer-animated trees. The project relies on the feature-rich HTML5, which Google has been pushing in conjunction with its Chrome browser.
The video is also the latest of Google's "Chrome Experiments," which showcase the capabilities of HTML5.
