Description
Created by Scott Garner and Loren Judah of Süperfad Seattle, this second entry in the Mission Control series takes things even further with streaming video in a physical 3D space.
View the live version here: Mission Control II: Video Display System
Concept
After completing the first Mission Control, we were highly motivated to push the boundaries of web technologies even further, this time creating a 3D environment for browsing the catalog of Süperfad’s work in a more immersive way than a traditional web portfolio. We especially wanted to experiment with removing the normal layer of flat UI elements in favor of a more pure and tactile set of interactions.
Technology
The backend of MC II is driven by a custom PHP script that pulls data from the Süperfad website in JSON and then processes each project. The script grabs additional video data from the Vimeo Developer API and generates the dynamic background textures with a combination of GD and ImageMagick calls. Theora versions of each video are created as needed with ffmpeg2theora. Key front-end technologies include HTML5 video, CSS3 effects and, most notably, WebGL, which allows for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics directly within a web browser.