Star Wars Moments Visualizer
Update: Project was retired, but lives on in the graveyard
Holy cow I was excited to develop a Star Wars project, but I had a scheduled vacation right in the middle of our very short development timeline =( @gigafied and I swapped development duties back-and-forth as paternity and vacation schedules permitted which made for a fun and unique co-op development experience. Anyways, the technical requirements for the site were fierce, so a lot of our more experimental ideas played second fiddle to pumping out a polished interoperable experience for the Star Wars Blu-Ray Box Set release.
Front-End Features
One such unpublished feature was an interactive physics-based visualizer hooked to a node.js activity feed. You can see the beginnings of it here (it's just a query-string toggle). Using Box2dWeb (a JavaScript port of the C Box2d physics engine) and some CSS3 transforms, you get a really smooth collision detection "ball-pool" inspired environment. In hindsight, I shoulda used rAF to optimize the animation further.
The sites CSS adapts to mobile, tablet, and desktop screens - one code base, multiple experiences.
Supports TEN different languages (see bottom right of site).
About the Site
Promoting the Star Wars The Complete Saga Blu-ray release, this HTML5 site features 300 of the series's most memorable scenes, the ability to rate, tag and vote on them and an interactive display of those found most popular.
Reactions / Feedback
FWA: Site of the Day Winner Dec 4th 2011. Communication Arts: Web Pick of the Day Nov 1st 2011 Twitter Trackbacks: "This is kinda cool..." Twitter reactions to the site. DamnDigital: Just screenshots of the site I guess.
Credits
Co-developed moments.starwars.com with @gigafied and @AlexTyack, @RedInteractiveand LucasFilms.
