Ok, this is just a quick little post and I did already tweet about this, but ‘Rome’ has impressed me so much that I felt a blog post was needed too!

Basically Rome is a short feature film created by Chris Milk in partnership with some Googlers,  which depicts you travelling though a sequence of dreams. Its not just a simple movie though! As the rendering is done in real time, you the user can actually impact the movie (by moving the mouse cursor). Its quite hard to explain, but its pretty damn cool!

It has been constructed using HTML5 and more importantly: WebGL. WebGL allows rich 3d graphics (with hardware acceleration) to be rendered within the HTML5 canvas element. I believe the consequences of this technology will dramatically shape the future of the web and ‘websites’ as we know them.

You can view the movie here. Please note that this is fairly cutting edge technology and so browser support is not widespread. The latest stable version of Chrome will sort of work, but (as they recommend) Chrome Canary (a beta build) will provide better performance.

One things for sure, with WebGL in its armoury, the future of the web looks… sick.