The ability of browsers has come one such a long way in a short time. When I started creating websites (about 12 years ago), the most advanced visual features were the dreaded <blink> and <marquee> tags!
But now browser makers are pushing the boundaries with some astonishing experiments in the browser. An amazing example of one of these is Chrome’s ‘100,000 Stars’.
This interactive view of all the stars in our galaxy on Chrome Experiments is a stunning and mind blowing 3D visualisation of over 100,000 stars in our galaxy. In the past I’ve posted a couple of videos of incredible star-scapes – but this is done all in the browser – no video used!
You can take a tour through the galaxy – zooming in on one of the stars that have already been studied in the galaxy (and amazingly small number!) or zoom out to see the whole of the milky-way.
To see the experiment, you need a browser that supports ‘Web GL’ graphics. (and it’s a great reason to install Chrome if you haven’t already done so!)
Not only is this an incredibly inspiring look at ‘our galatic corner’ of creation, but as a web designer it’s very exciting to see what the capabilities of browsers and what we can now do in them!
Marek says
Firefox 17.1 works too ,)