The IE team has been working with many different partners to showcase the power of HTML5 and of course, how well IE10 performs at displaying modern web pages. We have seen everything from an interactive music video to a Vyclone partnership that allows you to edit video on the web.
This time around, the IE team is showcasing Mt. Everest and has paired up with climber David Breashears, the first American to scale the mountain twice, to build this new experience. The page is highly interactive, has a plethora of gigapixel images, and you can see how global warming has affected the glaciers in the Himalayas.
If you are a fan of high quality imagery, you will want to look around the site as there is a ton of information for you to absorb and it’s all done in a rich, immersive environment. You can navigate around using your mouse and keyboard but if you have a touch-enabled device, you can get highly interactive with the page, as it is gesture enabled.
The entire site is a narrative that is rich with media content and shows how web developers can transform the web from a flat-linear story into a rich experience using HTML5 and a modern browser. In fact, the platform used to build this site is what Microsoft calls RIN, or Rich Interactive Narrative, and is a product of the Microsoft Research Center in India.
Microsoft describes RIN as a "nonlinear, interactive and cinematic narratives that seamlessly stitch together various media including gigapixel panoramas, videos, terapixel online maps, traditional paginated documents, and data visualizations." While Microsoft isn"t opening this platform up to external developers at this time, the company does plan to use this tool in future projects.
You can head on over to the site, using this link, and if you are a fan of Mt. Everest and high-quality images of the Himalayas, you better set aside a bit of time as you will likely find yourself lost in the experience.
View: Everest: Rivers of Ice