As many of you know by now the band Arcade Fire has released their new album "The Suburbs." After seeing them on Saturday Night Live last weekend I thought I'd go check out their website and when I did I found one of the most creative uses of HTML 5 thus far. Keeping in mind that the HTML 5 specification is far from complete we are beginning to see new sites popping up daily using the language. These sites are starting to push the envelope on just what can be done with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Applications that were being built almost purely in Flash and Silverlight are now emerging as HTML 5 apps leaving us, as developers/designers, scratching our heads and asking "how did they do that?"

When I went to the Arcade Fire website I found one of those "how did they do that" gems. I saw a link titled "We Used to Wait," knowing that I liked this song I clicked the link and was brought to a page that had a link to the music video so I clicked it thinking that I would see a plain ol' music video. Boy was I surprised! The link to the video led me away from the band's site to a new site www.thewildernessdowntown.com. On this page I was asked to give the address of the house I grew in and I thought this was strange but after looking around a little more I saw that the site was "made with some friends from Google" which made me feel better for some weird reason so I put my old address in.

The video started and I saw some pretty amazing stuff. It began popping up widows showing Google's Satellite and Street Views of my old house and neighborhood with birds flying, trees growing, cameras rotating, and a guy running. I was absolutely blown away by what these guys had done. So open up Chrome, go to www.thewildernessdowntown.com, enter an address that you'll recognize and prepare to be blown away too!