Mission Control
Interactive Design
You remember the War Room in Dr Strangelove right? Well that’s basically the setting for this project. A dimly lit room where layers of nervous cigarette smoke linger in the air giving way to an atmosphere of fear and ego. Maybe not AS dramatic as at description but still moody. Mission Control was a project done in collaboration with good friend Scott Garner. Our mission; to visualize website traffic data in a manner befitting a Hollywood production, and do it all in real-time.
To do this, we turned to WebGL as our rendering method. At the time, WebGL was a pretty new idea so Chrome nightly builds were our only way of actually seeing this thing in action, but we had a hunch that if we built it, something would come. Creating the finished look was a delicate combination of rendered content with real-time WebGL rendering. Our end-goal was that cinematic look with interaction so our processes demanded a lot of back-and-forth, learning WebGL while WebGL was being written.
I’ve included a number of production captures to show the processes as we moved along.
