Last week, we talked about what makes Internet Explorer 9 Beta all around fast.  Earlier this week, we talked to Myspace about the improved experience they can offer their millions of users on an all around fast browser like Internet Explorer 9 Beta with the new features in HTML5.  Today we conclude our series of posts on “All Around Fast” by taking a step into the future with Stimulant to see a dynamic web experience that truly pushes a browser to its limits.

Stimulant is a development firm with offices in San Francisco and Seattle.  They create digital experiences across a number of formats from Flash, to Silverlight, to multi-touch applications for the Microsoft Surface table.  For the launch of Internet Explorer 9 Beta, we challenged Stimulant to create an amazing and beautiful web experience that pushed the limits of HTML5 and the underlying browser.  They came up with www.webvizbench.com, an interactive visualization of many years of playlist data from local, independent radio station KEXP.

Earlier this week, we sat down with Josh Santangelo from Stimulant who walked us through an update to WebVizBench which was demoed at this week’s Professional Developers Conference.  The updated version allows you to drill into KEXP Playlist data by DJ as well as by date.

In the video below, Josh walks us through a demo that shows off the amazing web experiences that HTML5 allows developers to build when it’s running on a fully hardware accelerated browser like IE9 Beta.

You can try the demo for yourself at www.kexparchive.org.  Since this demo is designed to push your browser to its limits you’ll get a different experience depending on which browser you are using.  There are a number of keyboard shortcuts you can use in the demo to turn on extra features to further push your browser :

Off camera, we asked Josh how web standards like HTML5 might change their approach to developing compelling digital experiences.

“A lot of what we focus on is the rich, large format experience.  So if we do a large multi-touch table, we’re still going to do it on Surface,” Santangelo said. “But HTML5 opens up development options that weren’t there before.”

WebVizBench also features a “benchmark mode” where it runs through a number of pre-determined user actions so you can compare the capabilities of different browsers.

“The motivation for the benchmark was when the IE9 platform preview came out, there were benchmarks included, and we wanted to create something that really represented a next generation web experience that might actually happen,” Santangelo said.

To try out WebVizBench on IE9, download the Internet Explorer 9 Beta on www.beautyoftheweb.com.