Web Lab

Web Lab is made of up 5 Chrome Experiment installations that bring the extraordinary workings of the internet to life and aims to inspire the world about the possibilities of the web.

The installations have been part of a year-long public exhibition at the Science Museum in London and can be interacted with by anyone, anywhere at chromeweblab.com.

Worldwide visitors both on and offline will be able to make music with people across the world; launch information into cyberspace and see where images on the web live; watch their portrait being processed, translated, and then drawn in sand by a robot; and travel instantly to far away places all over the world.

This Open Source project makes two of the experiments - Orchestra and Sketchbots - available for you to build and host yourself.

Why Open Source?

We fundamentaly believe that what we have learnt building and developing this project should be available for everyone to learn from and be inspired to build upon.

There is a lot of new technologies in this project that the WebLab was the first major project to use in production. getUserMedia for example was integrated in a single day on the day it landed in Stable Chrome.

Why not all 5 experiements.

We had to start somewhere and the two most popular and interactive experiments seemed like a good idea.

Is this the exact same code as in Web Lab.

Yes and No. We used a HUGE amount of the code, but there are parts of the weblab that detract from the core-experience so we have removed them (such as user account management).

You have the ability to build the hardware and controllers to the same level we had them in the museum, and we improved the launch experience too. Heck, we even added some features such as WebRTC to the orchestra just for this project.

Pre-commit hook

We use Git Hooks in this project to allow each contributor to run the exact same procedures before committing code.

To install the Git Hooks used, just open your terminal, locate the folder of the project and run ln -s ./pre-commit.sh .git/hooks/pre-commit