Perceptive Media

Powered entirely by HTML5 and open source JavaScript libraries, One Millionth Tower is loaded with photos and information from all over the web, and exists in an online environment that is about as close to three-dimensional as something on a flat screen can get.

It exists in a 3D setting made possible by a tool called three.js, which lets viewers walk around the high-rise neighborhood. Moving through allows viewers to see the current state of urban decay, then activate elements to show ways the residents would change their world, like an animation showing where a new playground or garden would go.

The interactive movie is chock-full of photos from Flickr, street-views from Google Maps and changing environments fueled by real-time weather data from Yahoo. Everything is triggered by Popcorn.js, which acts like a conductor signaling which instruments play at what times

Johnstone's teachings Whilst he was running the Writer's Group at the Royal Court, he began to teach that drama occurs from dynamic levels of status. He came to this realisation as a result of reading several books by Desmond Morris. Johnstone was the first theatre professional to introduce the term "status transactions" into modern theatre,[citation needed] believing that a high proportion of drama comes from the multiple and tiny ways that people attempt to get what they want by raising or lowering their social status. His teaching included exercises in which students practiced a low-status role by entering the classroom, and acting as though they were accidentally interrupting a very important meeting. The exercise was then repeated by the student. In Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Johnstone reports that the increased shows of deference that students acted out often triggered uproarious laughter in the class. He attributes this to a deep-seated human interest in the acting out and renegotiation of status roles. One of Johnstone's major interests is the use of masks and costumes which represent different emotional states and social roles. He found mask-work to be a powerful learning device. The student's ability to be "in the mask" became so powerful that several fellow instructors reported they were afraid to allow students to use masks in class because some students became overtaken by the mask character. In Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, he speculates that this effect occurs because masks allow students to let go of their day-to-day identity, especially after the effective exercise of seeing and acting out their new identities before a mirror.

Popcorn made it possible for the filmmakers to control a 3D environment in WebGL, and then augment it with real time information pulled from  Wikipedia, Yahoo’s Weather API, Flickr and Google Maps. The result is a  unique viewing experience customized in the browser for each viewer.

“What we’ve done with One Millionth Tower is not the future,” Cizek said. “It just points to it.