Attention, citizens. You’re cordially invited to a tour of the Capitol in Panem without having to leave your seats. To ensure a smooth experience, citizens are advised to access the tour in Internet Explorer 9.
Ever eager to show off IE9’s HTML5 capabilities, Microsoft is capitalising on the popularity of blockbuster movie The Hunger Games and has teamed up with entertainment studio Lionsgate and design and developer agencies Nerdery and Ignition Interactive to offer fans a virtual tour of the dystopian future.
Some of the attractions include the Avenue of the Tributes and the Capitol Skyline. The visuals are pretty great, and users can pan around looking for titbits of information pertaining to the film, such as the cast, characters and background story.
Not all areas of the site are working yet, so users might want to register as “citizens” and sign up for e-mail alerts when these sections are open. Since the site is coded specially for IE9, users can also pin the tour to their Windows 7 task bar and be notified once new content becomes available.
It’s quite a remarkable site, and one can easily mistake the whole thing to be built in Flash. But it’s built completely in HTML5, and although Microsoft recommends you use IE9, the experience in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox isn’t too bad either. Maybe the days of “write once run everywhere” HTML5 isn’t that far off!
The Capitol tour follows a successful porting of the hit mobile game Cut the Rope to IE9, which is also completely coded in HTML5 and worth checking out if you haven’t.
