Banks’ latest music video includes the viewers themselves in the frame

New York digital production and brand consultancy firm Collins used Google’s cloud platform to develop musician Azealia Banks’ new video “Wallace,” which the company said is the first interactive music video of its kind.

The music video allows any viewer with a webcam to include themselves in the video, with footage rendered and inserted into the music video in near real-time.

“The video would bring Azealia’s fans on stage with her by empowering the video version of Azealia to mirror their movements in real-time. We knew that if we could pull this off, fans could watch the video from anywhere and feel like Azealia stood directly in front of them, singing not just to them, but with them,” explained Brett Renfer, director of experience design at Collins.

“We watched dozens of music videos as we dove into development, and could not find another music video that manipulates actual video files and pixels, in the way that we aimed to. We built a unique app that combined WebGL, HTML5 video, and web camera interaction.”

The company used App Engine in conjunction with Google Cloud Storage and WebGL, where the content from viewers’ web cams were mashed up with the music video footage; the company took about two months to build the application.

“We learned that we could handle really high-resolution video and high quality sound in WebGL in Chrome, but needed some seriously powerful content hosting that provided a high level of configurability,” he explained.

For a closer look at how the firm developed the application check out the below video: