Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Street Views & Sounds of Medellin


Pregoneros de Medellín is a wonderfully immersive virtual journey around the colorful streets of Medellín in Colombia. The experience is vaguely similar to exploring locations with Google Maps Street View - only with sound, smoother transitions and lots more interactivity.

Pregoneros de Medellín was not created with panoramic images but with video. But this isn't video as you normally know it. To progress through the video you need to scroll down on the web page. As you scroll you move through the stills of the video.

While you stroll around Medellin you can listen to the sounds of the streets and the street vendors. You can also interact with some of the characters you find on your journey. The interactive characters are indicated on screen with map markers positioned above their heads. Click on the markers and you can view short documentary type videos about the selected individual's lives.

Making Pregoneros de Medellín was obviously a huge technical challenge. You can read about how the video was captured (using a GoPro camera attached to a gimbal and fixed to a bike), how the immersive sound was added (customizing Sounds of Street View) and how the video interface was created, in this Making Of post.

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