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New brand site for Sony uses rendered JPG frames for 3D parallax scrolling
- vinhboy 13y agoYou guys are being way overly critical. I think the website is unique and cool. Reminds me of the those nice story boards on NYTimes. Also, works ok on Chrome Macbook Air.
- TomGullen 13y agoI got a pretty good desktop computer and it's choppy. These things really have to be silky smooth for me or I leave pretty quickly.
- metabren 13y agoclickable: http://discover.store.sony.com/be-moved/ http://discover.store.sony.com/be-moved/
- sehr 13y agoJust realized how lazy I've become, thank you.
- MichaelApproved 13y agoIt's not just about being lazy, this is really helpful for mobile users.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoThe Good: Really changed my perception of Sony as a brand. They're a lot more experimental and ahead than I though. I feel like going out and buying a PS4 honestly. Great job on the marketing team. (I actually watched the videos and was... "moved", wireless lens, underwater ear buds, 3d viewer) The Bad: Over complicated and choppy (anyone else?). It's basically a TV commercial that you have to keep scrolling to watch. I think there are better, simpler, less choppier ways that this brand message could have been conveyed. Alternative: Slides/pages with full screen video? Take each scene and separate it into it's own full screen "slide" (not slide show but one slide after the other on the page) and each mouse scroll moves you down to the next slide.
- robmcm 13y agoIt makes me wonder why they don't just show a much higher quality and perhaps smaller file size video, and then overlay links etc over the top based on keyframes. I guess it comes down to fashion and at the moment these animated scroll things are it...
- alan_cx 13y agoChanged perception? That has to be insane. Just a mere funky web page and you go from not interested to wanting to buy? Good grief. I am stunned that a mere web page can do that for any one in actual reality. You seem far too easily bought. Here, have a shiney thing, there you go...... I had no idea people were so easily manipulated, and equally happy to say so in public. I really don't get on with these scroll down animated sites. As usual with these things, I don't see anything useful or informative on the landing part of the page, begin to scroll, see I'm expected to scroll for god knows how long incase there is anything useful, all I usually see is show off animation, I sigh, then close the page. Why am I suddenly expected to constantly scroll these things? Is it just so some web developer can show off their latest, now tired, seen it all before now, trick? I want to land on a page, see if its worth anything, then possibly click for more info. If I want to see an animation, video, or what ever, just show the darn thing in a normal video. But I want a choice there, not a silly site that auto starts it, often hurting my ears, or waking up the house, with full volume in the process. If the landing page gives me interest, I'll happily watch a short advert, animation, or whatever to get more info. Why all this scrolling? There are much simpler ways to show all this, without me having to almost work to get to see it. Its not my message, its theirs. Why are they making it harder for me to see their message? I just left the page. Just me? Oh, BTW, I have some magic beans for sale on a pretty website. Any takers?
- linux_devil 13y ago>" A journalist once called us a guinea pig because the results of our experiments were copied by others.It was meant as an insult, but we took it as a compliment. Combining artistry and engineering IS an experiment—but when artists work with engineers, every day is a chance to be moved." Found this at bottom of page
- benguild 13y agoInteresting experiment, but even chugs along on my latest generation rMBP in Chrome. Meh
- mattdw 13y agoDoes it still chop after it's had an extra 30 seconds or so to load? It lets you start scrolling before it's fully loaded, but unfortunately the backfill-loading causes the scrolling to go choppy.
- wanda 13y agoWeird. It's fast on my Thinkpad X201s from aeons ago (running chromium).
- X4 13y agoI have a 3y old 1.3GHz cpu with integrated graphics only on Gentoo, but it's so smooth, I can't believe it's not a video! How do they make it so smooth? When I click the last page button on the right side, it runs smoothly through all animations, same when happens when I scroll around. Can't wait to see someone make a blog post on: "This is how Sony exploited HTML5 to run Smooth Parallax Effects on their Page". I ran it in Firefox with about ~100 tabs open having over a dozen addons, an IDE opened and npm install running in the background.
- wanda 13y agoSlack user here. tips fedora
- krisdol 13y agoYeah, fedora runs it, too.
- talmand 13y agoThey are images being pushed into a canvas element and then they are stepping through them as you fake scroll. Fake scroll, meaning they take over scrolling duties from the browser. Other elements such as the text are layered on top of the canvas and then are parallaxed into/out of view as you scroll. It's quite a simple and elegant way to do it, other than the incredibly large number of images required to pull it off. You are essentially watching a video frame-by-frame. As for the smoothness of it, your mileage may vary based on various things to do with your personal setup. For me it is not smooth on Firefox. It's choppy but still presentable. The experience is much better in Chrome on my Mac.
- waltercfilho 13y agoAll that, and they couldn't get the damn Twitter icon right.
- mineo 13y agoThe text and images also cut off on the left and right if your browser window is "only" 1200px wide.
- Oculus 13y agoReally cool website. I've noticed that really cool brand websites for large Fortune 500 tech. companies tend to be done by a high end agency rather then the companies' own teams.
- coolnow 13y agoDoes anyone else have an i7 4702Q with a HD4600 running Chrome (Windows 8.1)? Is smooth scrolling, actually smooth for you? It doesn't for me, and even Internet Explorer (which surprisingly runs most pages 60fps smooth) runs the page really badly. edit: firefox runs the page smoothly, but on other pages, still can't top IE's smoothness. What a weird world it is now.
- robin_reala 13y agoAny reason why they didn’t just use a paused video and step through it frame by frame on scroll? Seems like it’d be a much more efficient experience for the user.
- tagawa 13y agoMy guess is it's to get attention by sparking discussions like this.
- prr 13y agoReverse scrolling a video is really slow, unless you set the key frames close together (in which case, you don't really gain much file size wise).
- robin_reala 13y agoAh, I figured there was a reason I was missing. Thanks!
- Kiro 13y agoHow does this work exactly?
- talmand 13y agoSeries of images are loaded into a canvas element that steps through them as you scroll. The text is layered on top and parallax-ified as needed.
- Geee 13y agoWhat's the point of these scrolling sites? It's really hard to control the scrolling speed and stop just in the right place. Just let me press a button and then proceed to the next "slide" if you want fancy transitions.
- gbog 13y agoVery choppy and hard to go back. On the plus side, I didn't know about these "Smartphone Attachable Lens-Style Camera", is there someone here able to tell me if it is worth it? (I have a Galaxy Note and no other camera).
- robin_reala 13y agoDPReview had a preview in September: http://www.dpreview.com/previews/sony-cybershot-dsc-qx100 http://www.dpreview.com/previews/sony-cybershot-dsc-qx100
- anujkk 13y agoLike many other verticals there are many technological innovations happening in photography too. This "smartphone attachable lens-style camera" is one of these recent innovations. I can't comment on quality of the lens itself but they must be far better than that of a standard camera installed on mobile phones. These lenses can be used both attached/detached to the mobile phone. They use NFC (if your phone is into that sort of thing) or create their very own Wi-Fi signal to connect with the phone. I first read about such lenses and other similar products on http://photojojo.com/store/ http://photojojo.com/store/ . They have such products for both android and iphone. Now, is it worth it? Depends on your requirements. If you don't want to get into professional photography but still want to improve the quality of your photographs you can use one of these. However, remember that these don't replace DSLRs. 1. Mobile Camera : average quality/almost zero creative control/very good mobility 2. Mobile Camera + Lens accessory : better quality/almost no creative control/good mobility 3. Point & Shoot Camera : decent quality/little creative control/good mobility 4. Hybrid/Zoom Camera : decent quality/very high optical zoom/decent creative control/poor mobility 5. Mirrorlesss/Interchangeable Lens Camera : Good quality/Good Creative Control/average mobility 6. DSLRs : Good quality/Good Creative Control/Poor Mobility I personally prefer to keep [1] in my pocket & [5] in my bag(along with lenses). I also have an old Zoom Camera that usually sits in my home. I occasionally use it together with a teleconverter lens to take photographs of sun, moon & objects/people that are far far away.
- Tloewald 13y agoAccording to reviews, the lens cameras don't work well in large crowds (e.g. Sporting events, your kids' school play). Physically docking to your phone would be more sensible (there's a kickstarter project along those lines). But frankly the gap between cellphone cameras and the rest is closing to the point where 1-3 is a wash, and 4 is pretty crap anyway. So it's 1-4, 5/6. If Sony would produce some decent lens options for reasonable prices...
- scarredwaits 13y agoApparently the RX1R PREMIUM COMPACT CAMERA (third from the end) includes a slice of cheese in the middle of the sensor. Easter cheese? :-)
- nebulous1 13y agohttp://flashvhtml.com/ http://flashvhtml.com/ Feels better in my opinion. The jpg method seems too jerky.
- taspeotis 13y agoCare of Chrome's developer tools... Network tab: 1410 requests | 51.4 MB transferred | 2.0 min (load: 1.2 min, DOMContentLoaded: 4.29s) Console: 15 errors, 12 warnings
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoI was wondering how big it was, that completely blows away what I expected. That's really not usable for huge swaths of people.
- daeken 13y agoHow many people that can't handle 50MB of content are really in Sony's target market?
- talmand 13y agoPeople who buy their electronics that happen to have data caps? They could at least load it all that image data on demand.
- JohnTHaller 13y agoI don't think Sony is marketing the products depicted on that site to the folks worried about downloading 50MB.
- talmand 13y agoWell, yeah, that's probably true I suppose.
- neals 13y agoAt some point, wouldn't you just rather play a movie than have me scroll all the time?
- kjhughes 13y agoAfter all, it's not about what we make; it's about what we make you feel. What their site, their opening punchline, the responsive design problems, and the slowness make me feel is that they're overly focussed on superficial form at the expense of deeper functionality.
- vanderZwan 13y ago> they're overly focussed on superficial form at the expense of deeper functionality Then again, isn't that what almost all advertising is trying to do these days: draw your attention to the superficial form so you forget to criticise fundamental flaws with the design?
- headgasket 13y agowater resistant IP65 smartphone is a real enhancement, as in 100M deeper functionality. I wish the iphone had that instead of lighter/ taller/ thiner fonts. Yeah I dont take calls underwater but I keep a bag of rice handy...
- leephillips 13y agoAgree: cellphones should be waterproof. One of the two iPhones that I destroyed in 2013 drowned in a waterproof case that was not closed properly, when I took an unexpected swim in the Atlantic. The silver lining was that I discovered Android, which I prefer. Also, I visited the site using a Thinkpad T60, which dates from around 2006 and would not be considered high-end. Using Chrome on Ubuntu, it was pretty smooth - but I let it load before trying to scroll.
- larrys 13y ago"cellphones should be waterproof." It would be nice if they were. But all manufacturing involves design and price tradeoffs. I have a Sony Rx100ii (great camera) and it would be nice if that were waterproof. But it's not and Sony (and others) offer a different camera that is waterproof (but doesn't have the features of the Rx100ii). Any feature adds to cost (or maybe makes something else not practical or not as good). Even a slight increase in cost can change the demand curve. Or performance (take a car with 4 wheel drive vs. 2 wheel drive). Etc. By the way my own example of "should be" involves desktop or rack mounted servers having at least a nominal surge protection or UPS. Obviously that has been thought of and ruled out for various competitive reasons. (Weight, size, cost, demand).
- bigd 13y agothere's a Venus de Milo inside the ps4 controller! can't wait to open mine!
- leephillips 13y agoOne implied claim that stuck out was that their recent full-frame digital camera produces images comparable with "medium format film". This is extremely unlikely, and casts all their claims in doubt. Also, I couldn't find anything about their creative research into incorporating rootkits and other exploits into their products: I know what that makes me feel.
- _pmf_ 13y agoAh, that explains why it works without crashing Chrome (as HTML5 WebGL monkeying does).
- tambourine_man 13y agoSomething is wrong when you are selling image quality and your site features blurry artifacted images. The animations are nice, but they are basically doing frame by frame 704 × 396 movie that look terrible when pushed to 1920 wide. Just use a proper video format, which is much more efficient.
- justMaku 13y agoTry running them on MBPr then ;) And don't forget that they get blurred even more by webkit while scrolling - I guess -webkit-translate is the culprit responsible for that.
- cyphunk 13y agoI'm curious why the images have artefacts (or pre-loading fuzz)? A year or so ago Andreas Gysin did something very similar http://ertdfgcvb.ch/p2/sm/play/protog3 http://ertdfgcvb.ch/p2/sm/play/protog3 and for some reason does not have the artefact issue. (code for that here http://ertdfgcvb.com/sequencer/ http://ertdfgcvb.com/sequencer/)
- pwpwp 13y agoI don't see any parallax here. Seems like normal 3D triggered by scrolling.
- talmand 13y agoCould you define parallax? Because I see it, as I know it, in several places throughout the page.
- Raphmedia 13y agoI really like it! Imagine how easy it must be to create something like that! Simply export a video into jpegs, add some JS and BAM! A nice scrolling effect. I like it!
- thrillgore 13y agoOw my CPU load
- smackfu 13y agoSo I follow the URL, and it takes 30 seconds to show me three lines of text on the screen, and I can't skip forward or anything. How is this better than Flash landing pages, exactly?
- sp332 13y agoBecause now you can make people's iPads slow, too :)
- hnha 13y agoIt does not require proprietary nonfree software.
- talmand 13y agoSo crappy performance and bad customer experience is okay as long as the software involved was not proprietary and free? I don't understand what you're statement means in terms of what it is replying to.
- jwcacces 13y ago"Scroll Down to Explore" So, where's the scroll bar?
- dfxm12 13y agoAnd I generally use the space bar to scroll. That's not working here :(
- calciphus 13y agoScroll wheel on my mouse isn't working either. Nor are arrow keys. Someone tried a little too hard to optimize for Safari and OSX and forgot that's like 8% of the market. Chrome on Win 8.1. Site is nearly un-usable (I can click in their custom scrollbar to make it move).
- talmand 13y agoThat all works for me but everyone's mileage may vary because of the way it appears to have been built. It doesn't use the browsing scrolling and likely attempts to take over all the normal scrolling duties to do what it wants. So if you browser of choice is not on the list for whatever reason, then their will be problems.
- sp332 13y agoYou can click the "scroll down to explore" arrow.
- Pxtl 13y ago... I really want to like Sony. They seem to have the best chance of bringing Apple-style quality to more open software-platforms. But seriously, this is crap (at least on Firefox). It's slow and choppy and it has a (however brief) unskippable intro. Pretty, but broken.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- TeeWEE 13y agoVery nice and breathtaking. Just a superb experience, this is the most awesome site I have every visited. Seriously. Ok, it is big, it is huge. But c'mon, they are stretching creativity, nobody else would come up with something like this, i didnt even know it was possible at all. It not all TECH API's and BITS and BYTES. Its sometimes creativity what matters. Abusing technology to create something cool often is the first step to making the technology better support something cool like that. So somtimes there is no proper way to do it with current API's. But there is a hack todo it. This is how HTML5 video was created. Because you could hack it in with Flash. But flash was not the best way todo it.
- chrislgrigg 13y agoThis trend of sites that break gesture forward/back, space bar scroll, and other standard browser features needs to stop.
- yourad_io 13y agoIt is interesting to note that even if I ever manage to create a splash page as awesome as this, HN will still (partly) respond: Meh - choppy.
- talmand 13y agoI think it has more to do with the choices in technology than art direction. It is cool, but if it sucks performance-wise for enough people then it sucks no matter how cool it looks. I haven't been a big fan of these types of pages, especially the type that take over the scrolling functionality. I was recently tasked with building one. The creatives love it, I dislike these pages even more now.
- aplusplus 13y agoWas it done in-house at Sony USA or who produced it, does anyone know? Quite funny how the use meta keywords like its 2002 … "download movies online, online movies, internet movies, video on demand, movies on demand, tv shows, watch movies online, watch online movies, support, technical, service, repair, fix, USA"
- pdknsk 13y agoI was distracted by blurriness and compression artifacts. Homework for Sony web designers: try the site on a rotated 1920 x 1200 screen. Then you'll also notice that it's cut off left and right. Apple has the same problem on their Mac Pro site, which uses a very similar mechanic.
- tsunamifury 13y agoDesign should not force the user to relinquish tactile control. I spent more time aware of the broken scrolling physics choppy animations than reading anything.
- mrdude42 13y agowow...
- ihatetomatoes 13y agoCurious how it was build? Here is the Be Moved site deconstruction - http://ihatetomatoes.net/sonys-be-moved-website-deconstructed/ http://ihatetomatoes.net/sonys-be-moved-website-deconstructe... Nicely done Sony.