Adobe unveils finalists for “The Cutting Edge Project of the Year”

 

 

Every week, Adobe awards a website the title of "Cutting Edge Project of the Week." These sites push the boundaries of what websites are able to achieve through interactivity, communication with mobile devices and much more. Now Adobe has taken all 52 winners from the last year, and is pitting them head-to-head for the Cutting Edge Project of the Year — and since this is Adobe we're talking about, there's more than a little photography to be had amongst the shortlist.

Each week of the finalists competition will see the number of entries halved, with the less successful attempts being culled based on popular opinion. We're already one week into the proceedings, and the field has been trimmed to 26. Of that lot, here are some of the more interesting on a photographic front:

• Clouds over Cuba is an interactive documentary about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Put together by the JFK Library, it's a combination of still images and video from the period, as well as interlinked expert commentary. 
• Corona Perspectives gives a whole different view on tennis matches. It starts with a match being played by athletes with cameras strapped to their chests, arms, and rackets — but the meat of the site is a 3D analysis of three ATP games, with each hit mapped through space.
• Greenpeace's Into the Arctic is an interactive journey through the Arctic and where and how it's currently threatened.
• The REI 1440 project is probably the most purely photographic of the lot. It's a minute by minute timeline over a 24 hour period, populated by photographs taken at every possible time throughout the day.
• The Zoetrope is actually a music game, where you spin a zoetrope in time with the beat. But zoetropes, and similar early moving image setups, were a key part of early photography and imaging. So we think it counts.

If any of those (or anything else in the competition) strike you as particularly interesting — be sure to vote so that the design you like the most wins! Just be careful, some of them are pretty processor intensive, the Zoetrope struggled even on my brand spanking new MacBook Air.