I worked with the guys who built this (we're a DC design studio) and can tell you that it doesn't gracefully degrade simply because it's not supposed to. As some people grasped, this was for a frontend conference where everyone would be expected to be running the latest and greatest browser. There's no guarantee it will work on your setup but when it does, it's a cool experience.

Followup on how it was built here: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/17/beercamp-an-ex...

Full repo here: https://github.com/nclud/2012.beercamp.com