Tool's interactive director HelloEnjoy, led by founder Carlos Ulloa, remains at the forefront of the web-based, interactive 3D revolution with a new interactive music experience starring British singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding. Besides creating an exciting, technologically-forward visual experience for Ellie's album's title track, this interactive piece serves as HelloEnjoy's further experimentation with WebGL, a Web-based software library that allows JavaScript to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible Web browser.
The WebGL interactive music experience is a wholly immersive journey, inspired by Goulding's single Lights - that both enriches the experience of the song and offers up a stunning visual interpretation. A techno-celestial light show allows viewers to soar through the music, cutting their way through the virtual environment with their mouse as their guide. Additional functionality includes the ability to speed up the experience with the click of one's mouse, as well as real-time Twitter comments about Lights integrated into the visuals. The real-time Tweets are powered by Echo's powerful StreamServer platform. The platform allowed the design team to quickly collect, store and serve the live data at the massive scale that's expected with very little engineering effort.
HelloEnjoy worked closely with the record label to develop these interactive features, "We were given a lot of freedom from the start, allowing a high-end interactive director like HelloEnjoy to come up with something unique that blends music and technology," noted Tool EP Digital Dustin Callif. "The result was a meaningful interactive music experience that is an alternative to shooting a music video."
The use of WebGL to design the video vastly expanded HelloEnjoy's capabilities. "Up until now, all the quick graphic programming systems were very limited," stated Ulloa. "But with WebGL, you can enable web browsers like Google Chrome to allow really high-end 3D graphics. Music is the perfect medium to show what WebGL can do.
This was a very hand-crafted project - one that we can't design and then build, but rather have to design and build at the same time through trial and error. As graphics in general migrate into WebGL over the next few years, moving more power into everyday browsers, it's important that the music industry stake out a position in places where fans are watching their favorite videos. When fans get there, they aren't going to want to just sit and watch the videos. They're going to want to be looking around and touching things, which we find exciting and is hopefully what this interactive music piece delivers to fans."