Columbus Convention Center, Web Stories, Et Cetera

Here’s a slide show of sorts that I created a couple days ago. It’s for my “Love Letter To Columbus” project but seemed appropriate to post here. Mainly because as chaotic as that site might appear, it’s at least intended as something somewhat orderly, and is slowly starting to take shape over time. Whereas this blog here is pure randomness, so I can post whatever. Anyway, this is the creation in question, which you should be able to click on and view right here. And doing so might help you make sense of the off-topic rant I’m about to compose:

Columbus Convention Center: a visual tour

So yeah, this is a “slide show” about the Columbus Convention Center. I’m actually really happy with how this turned out, as far as what I was intending vs. the finished product. This almost completely matches the vision I had for that particular undertaking, which as I’m sure most of you can relate to, almost never happens. I always think back to that quote from some Sonic Youth liner notes (although I believe they were quoting someone else) about, “once the music leaves your head, it’s already compromised,” and how much I relate to it. So everything’s actually good on this front – this was a somewhat slight undertaking, took me a few hours to knock out, but it looks cool and is pretty much what I wanted – though it has kicked off a series of unexpected associations in my mind.

First off, for the unfamiliar, this is what’s known as a Google Web Story and was my first experience creating such. The learning curve was not too horrible and I was able to muddle my way through it over the course of those few hours. As you can see, it’s not quite a blog post and not quite a video, but exists in some murky nether region in between.

Which kind of set my mind racing, because I do believe I’ll be creating more of these. But the bigger takeaway to me is this kind of highlights the shortcomings of the internet as a whole: I wish every page of my website could look exactly like this, with this kind of functionality, except taken to an even greater extreme. And why don’t we have such, at this late stage in the game? For example, it seems that you should be able to have a web page with a photograph taking up its entirety. But then could adjust the point of view to look in different directions. But then could also play it as a video if you wanted. And then could have information about everything you’re looking at, as an overlay if you wanted it.

That’s the basic vision I’ve had all along for my website. I don’t know, maybe these things exist and I just haven’t seen them. But I’ve been looking for possibilities for a solid decade and what’s out there seems very limited. It’s been a frustrating slog with my limited coding abilities and so on just to maybe come up with a tiny bit on my own. In fact, you could make a strong argument that websites look a lot less cool and are far less advanced than they were ten or even twenty years ago. It’s like everyone just kind of gave up on doing anything interesting. Seemingly every site you visit has the same look – white background, black type; same looking ads splattered everywhere, same pop up videos.

Not to mention the smaller screens we have all fallen in love with. A lot of what I’ve worked on looks far better on a normal computer screen, but then you look at the stats and can consistently see, month after month, 90% of the people are viewing your stuff on their phones. It’s only inevitable that after a while you start to consider you have to cater to this crowd, and begin designing things so people on their phone can actually use them, even if it doesn’t look as nice or work how you envisioned.

Let me give you a good example of what I’m talking about. This is such a commonplace and boring experience in real life that you don’t even think about it, and yet, to my knowledge, nobody has even bothered to recreate it online: your point of view while driving somewhere. The best option right now is probably to have a dashboard cam type view, assuming you have a pristine windshield and terrific camera. But even then, what happens if you wanted to look to the left or to the right, i.e. the scenery you would no doubt be glancing at as you were driving?

I haven’t encountered any immersive videos with this kind of functionality. To parcel out the two sides of the road, then, and separate the two sides might be your best option. But where you would you place them on the screen? Let’s say you were driving west and wanted to display the left hand side of the road. Where would that even make sense to display it on a computer screen? Anything I’ve tried in this regard ends up being either kind of wacky looking, or currently impossible. In reality I think you would need some kind of vertically scrolling video. And this is without even getting into the ability to interact with said video. Or how you would tackle the same landscape for someone driving east instead along the same road.

When you look at it like this, I think references to “virtual reality” or “augmented reality” or the “metaverse” are a long way off – not even remotely realistic, not even close to happening. Either that or people have just kind of leapfrogged over even thinking about that or working on such things, preferring to create these cartoonish, video game experiences instead, with or without legless Mark Zuckerbergs.

Anyway, those are some of the ideas I’ve been grappling with for quite some time, which this last project brought to the surface. If any of you have any thoughts or suggestions on the matter, I would love to hear about them! And oh yeah, I do hope you like this little Web Story as well.