USN
With Ale Lazos and a international team, we re-designed the entire website of UltraSuperNew creating a futuristic 3D city with WebGL
Industry: Professional Services
Year: 2021
Visual Approach
Our visual approach had a single purpose: to create a fictional city that mixed the style and architecture of our three branches, Tokyo, Singapore, and Taipei. We wanted to set the city in the future, though not in the real one but an idealized one. Thus we decided to pursue the cyberpunk aesthetic—multicultural, multilingual, edgy, clearly Asian, much like UltraSuperNew.
UI Design:
The UI created is dynamic and has a slick layout, but is not trying to steal the show from the 3D background, the website's centerpiece. Finally, the design for buttons & rollovers isn't arbitrary: they suggest tail lights, a ubiquitous sight in urban landscapes.
WebGL, the big challenge:
We used more than 200 textures and 300,000 polygons were needed to achieve the level of detail we were aiming at. Thanks to the use of segmented loading through the implementation of 'Web Workers', the process-load has been optimized by 90%, and performance remains above 30fps throughout all the scenes.
An UltraSuperTeam:
Ah, the perks of globalization: Getting to brainstorm and collaborate with people from all over the world, each with a unique time zone. Just look at this crazy setup:USN Tokyo, USN Singapore, USN Creative Director in lockdown in Portugal, M2 (3D modeling): Germany + Singapore, Ale Lazos + estudio/nk (UX/UI Design, Web Development & WebGL): Argentina. Just between Buenos Aires and Tokyo's time zones, there are 12 hours of difference. In the end, we found a way around it: one status Zoom call every Wednesday for the past five months. The reality is that nowadays, it is more important to gather a great team of good (and somewhat crazy) professionals than to have them all in the same room. It is telling when you see people giving the extra mile for a project like this because that means there is love behind the scenes, not only code.