BBH NY Chrome Fastball
10.07.10 – BBH approached us with the great idea of creating a browser race to visualize the speed of Google’s Chrome browser. Their plan was to create a time-challenge where users need to perform tasks in popular web services like Google Maps and Twitter.
We thought it was awesome and suggested the following:
- Building a huge Rube Goldberg Machine to visualize the race.
- Creating the whole thing as a YouTube-page, by connecting multiple video players to create an extra widescreen format that would fit the entire machine. Our idea was to let the space between each player expand to display the test modules.
To build a YouTube and Web Services mash-up AND build and shoot a huge Rube Goldberg machine, in the same project! Can it get any better than this? We don’t know.
We started building the test modules and the machine in parallel. Besides digging into the API’s and figuring out how on earth we could make it work, we thought it was important to stay as true as possible to the look and user experience of the original services – which meant taking the essence of them and creating something much more compact, but also trying to get a somewhat consistent look across all the services.
For the machine, we wanted each section to be inspired by the web service it represented. With the help of some really talented people we took apart our ideas for the course and transformed it into something that could actually work, taking into account things like gravity, resistance, propulsion etc.
After a crazy amount of work the course was ready; we shot it using today’s handy DSLR technology and started assembling it into the YouTube page and adding the tests.
After another insane amount of work the whole thing worked and saw the light of day – getting an immediate rush of attention that proved a serious challenge to the servers.