The Ashes

Sebastian Deutsch has a nice new experiment that uses HTML5 audio + Processing (which uses Canvas) to visualize Twitter streams sync’d to music.

In their words:

We’ve created a litttle experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML5 and displays them using a javascript-based particle engine. Each particle represents a tweet – click on one of them and it’ll appear on the screen.

The original particle engine was ported from a Flex/AS3 project to javascript. We’re using processing.js for particle rendering on canvas which is a very useful graphics library created by John Resig. The music will only be played if the browser supports the audio tag. To detect if the audio or canvas feature is present we use the awesome modernizr library. We could have used a fallback solution like playing the sound via Flash. But this experiment is about HTML5 – and who needs Flash anyway?