Parallaxing Comics

[Xepher]

So, I came across this new comic. http://hobolobo.net/ Check out the scrolling effect, and especially check out page three, which integrates sound.

It's not the comic itself (and I'm not a big fan of the art style itself either) that impresses me, but the "new" format its in. Parallax is a big word meaning that things look different from different angles, and in motion between those angles, gives you the illusion of depth. It's so simple, yet adds just the right kind of depth to something like that. The first time I saw a magic newspaper in the harry potter movie,  I was enthralled. The pictures were moving, but yet it wasn't really video. It was some new thing in between, where subtle animation enhances an otherwise textual/still medium, instead of replacing it. So far the web has been sorely lacking in that. If you got to a news website, you either have static pictures, or a full video clip/report. Imagine how much cooler it would be if even just normal "still" pictures slightly moved. Granted, we don't exactly have cameras and such to easily do that yet for real life, but for a comic format, this is nearly the same thing, and I love it. Be sure to check out the what is this page at the top left corner. The guy who created it has some links to a tutorial on how its done, as well as released the source under the creative commons so other people can use it as well. I'm not a good enough artist to really do something cool with it, but maybe some of ya'll are.

[Databits]

The reason it hasn't been seen in the web is because doing it is a bit more intensive than simply rendering a web page.  It required technology that the web has, until recently, been sorely lacking in "browser power wise".  But now that we have hardware accelerated graphics, JITed JS code, and things like WebGL, this has become a possibility now.

[Xepher]

I get that it may not have been easy in JavaScript and "pure web" until recently, but I remember playing "Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure" on my 386, and super mario world on the SNES. Both of those had the basic premise down. Have layers, and scroll them at different speeds. It's not exactly an intensive computation, especially if you're not having to interactively animate the layers as part of a game. I'm pretty sure shockwave/flash has been perfectly capable of this for nearly a decade, and I've been annoyed by raining javascript snowflakes and such on sites for many years now as well. I don't think it's been a technology problem, but just that no one has really seen the use-case for it I think. Regardless, it's doable now for sure... I just wish I could draw well enough to make a comic. :-P