WebGL showcase: 3 Dreams of Black, the browser film

WebGL is a part of the HTML5 canvas element that gives web browsers hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without a plug-in. 3 Dreams of Black was made to show what that can do. Written and directed by Chris Milk, it is an interactive music video based on the song Black from Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's album ROME, built in WebGL and optimized for Google Chrome.

The story follows Temple, a girl born after an apocalypse, through lucid dreams in a ruined landscape. The characters are voiced by Norah Jones and Jack White, and the experience is framed as Norah's dream that the user can enter and control. Most of what appears on screen is real-time rendering of 3D models, mixed with live action and 2D animation, and not pre-recorded video. At points the viewer can pan the camera around the scene, and Google made it possible to upload your own 3D models into the film.

The project is not a training game. It is listed here because of the claim made for WebGL at the time: that the browser becomes an open game console where the web feels like a game. For learning designers the showcase demonstrated that interactive 3D could run in a standard browser. The project's code was open source and hosted on Google Code, and a technology page explained how it was made.

As a WebGL showcase the film demonstrated a technique and taught nothing itself.

The old address, ro.me, forwards every address on it, including ones that do not exist, to Google's experiments page for the project at experiments.withgoogle.com. That page describes 3 Dreams of Black as an interactive music experience that combines 2D drawings and animations with interactive 3D sequences, dated June 2011 and built with 3D and WebGL. Google launched it as a web-based movie experiment to show the power of WebGL animation. The page adds that the viewer steers the protagonist's point of view with the mouse and that a 3D model creator lets users make relics. It states that the experiment is no longer active, while a link to launch the experiment is still shown. Because the page itself says the project is inactive, the entry is recorded as discontinued.