Aaron Koblin (@aaronkoblin) is no stranger to online crowd sourcing. With great works like The Sheep Market, Ten Thousand Cents and The Johnny Cash Project, Aaron has built up a solid reputation as a real visionary, not only in the tech world, but the art world as well. His latest project is no exception.
The Single Lane Superhighway is essentially one big user-generated traffic jam in which users name, draw and submit their own little car to this beautiful piece of collaborative work. The overall goal here: to reflect the personal bond people have with their automobiles. Commissioned by Progressive, and developed by CreativeJS frequent, Mr. doob, The Single Lane Superhighway has proved to be quite a hit.
As you might expect, there is a clever mix of browser tech running the show. The rolling hill is a simple svg wave. The cars are cleverly saved as a single image, with each part (the chassis and wheels) loaded into seperate canvases at run time, where they are moved and rotated via CSS. There is even a flash fallback, for older browsers, so no-one is left out.
From the about page:
There are now 50,000 cars on the road. The project is complete. At some point we may add additional cars, until then, please enjoy the ride.
Sadly, its too late to add your little piece to the Superhighway. Nonetheless, there are hours to be whiled away watching this creative compendium of cars roll on by.