Is this the future of music video?

Alpha Beta Fox is a self-described 'dreamy shoegaze' band from Adelaide, Australia, and its latest futuristic, psychedelic video
fits its music style perfectly. But of more interest to web designers will be the way it's been created to work interactively on the web.

Built by Adelaide-based developer and friend of the band James Reid, the site uses the three.js WebGL library for its 3D graphics, and the Web Audio API to play the music.

At one point, viewers even get the chance to alter a video clip of the band by changing parameters with dat.GUI. (In layman's terms: wiggle the arrow keys about and see what happens.) The site isn’t optimised for mobile, but it does work in one, less common environment: it has a VR mode for Oculus Rift or similar devices.

Learning experience

It seems the site was something of a learning experience for Reid, as he included many references to classic processing algorithms and models from other 3D graphics projects: Game of Life cellular automaton, the 4D tesseract cube, Kaliset fractals, Hopalong Orbits …

"I was reading about tesseracts, then thought, 'Why not put it in the video, with people dancing around it in space?'," he says, while Alpha Beta Fox singer Tanya Giobbi adds: "We thought it was pretty awesome."

Words: Peter Gasston

Peter is a veteran web developer who now works as a technologist and frontend lead at rehabstudio. He's the author of The Book of CSS3 and The Modern Web.

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