John Smith's Blog

Ramblings (mostly) about technical stuff

Experimental rhythm action game using HTML5 video and Safari 3D CSS3 transforms

Posted by John Smith on

UPDATE: this is currently broken on my iPad, suspect it's iOS 4.2 related. I think I might be able to do a hacky fix, but I'm still working on it. It should work OK on regular Safari though.

It's probably not the most sensible thing in the world to publicize a >10MB video file that's being hosted on an Amazon EC2 'micro' instance, but let's see how long this lasts before I take it down to avoid too much damage to my credit card...

Photo of an iPad running the game

One of the things that surprised me when I got an iPad was that in Mobile Safari, embedded YouTube videos would play within the browser, rather than launching the standalone app as they do on the iPhone/iPod Touch. (Assuming that they've been embedded using the iframe method, rather than a Flash video.) This inspired me to start playing with HTML5 video, which previously hadn't struck me as that interesting.

Unfortunately, the embedding of YouTube video in an <iframe>, coupled with the way the underlying video file URLs are uniquely signed - presumably to inhibit hotlinking - means that it's difficult to impossible to have a lot of customized interaction with the YT video itself, but by hosting the video myself, I've able to build something really, simple but (hopefully) effective.

Anyway, at http://bit.ly/aRoq3V is a very basic rhythm action game. It's primarily aimed at the iPad, but will work acceptably on Mac/Windows Safari. Other browsers will have mixed results, as currently none of them support the 3D transformations added into WebKit's CSS, not even Chrome. The 3D stuff is super-simple, and could probably be 90% faked using regular CSS/JS/images, but as this is purely experimental, I've not been inclined to try. If this was a serious project, I'd probably do it in Objective-C, but I was really only interested in the HTML5/CSS3 aspects.

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About this blog

This blog (mostly) covers technology and software development.

Note: I've recently ported the content from my old blog hosted on Google App Engine using some custom code I wrote, to a static site built using Pelican. I've put in place various URL manipulation rules in the webserver config to try to support the old URLs, but it's likely that I've missed some (probably meta ones related to pagination or tagging), so apologies for any 404 errors that you get served.

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About the author

I'm a software developer who's worked with a variety of platforms and technologies over the past couple of decades, but for the past 7 or so years I've focussed on web development. Whilst I've always nominally been a "full-stack" developer, I feel more attachment to the back-end side of things.

I'm a web developer for a London-based equities exchange. I've worked at organizations such as News Corporation and Google and BATS Global Markets. Projects I've been involved in have been covered in outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Register and TechCrunch.

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