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Above The Clouds Website by Plus 360 Degrees |
Home > Winners > Design #55494 >Interview |
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FS: What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
DO: Above the Clouds was inspired from Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” book and from the Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey TV series. But the main inspiration was planet Earth and its beauty as seen from space.
FS: What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
DO: We pursued as our main goal a visualization of planet Earth like never before. We made a cinematic experience for all the users, where they are taken to different parts of the globe and are shown different angles of the planet as rarely seen before. We wanted to give users a moment of awe towards the place we call home.
FS: What are your future plans for this award winning design?
DO: We are updating the project as technology evolves too. The last update the project received was in January 2017. The updates bring mostly visual improvements.
FS: How long did it take you to design this particular concept?
DO: We have worked several months on the project and its realization. The idea started a year before we actually started realizing it, but so it formed little by little from daily sources of inspiration.
FS: Why did you design this particular concept? Was this design commissioned or did you decide to pursuit an inspiration?
DO: This particular design was a personal pursuit. We released it for Earth Day as we wanted to give a tribute to Earth. But we look at it as a tribute that can be shown everyday.
FS: What made you design this particular type of work?
DO: Our work is generally art oriented and we always admired all the beautiful shots of the planet we saw on the Internet from the different space stations. Also, whenever we would see movies including CG of the Earth, we were more drawn towards recreating something similar within a Web context.
FS: Where there any other designs and/or designers that helped the influence the design of your work?
DO: Yes, the work of Google Maps team was inspirational. Generally speaking the work made by many people who developed the tools we use is important for us.
FS: Who is the target customer for his design?
DO: This project in particular targets everyone. We thought that there is no age or gender preference in experiencing this type of content and appreciating it as it is.
FS: What sets this design apart from other similar or resembling concepts?
DO: Above the Clouds is different in that it renders the content in real-time in the browser. That means every second we draw 60 frames. The challenge in this is creating the realistic results, with little available computing memory and processing time, compared with other pre-rendering methods which renders a video in several days and has very high resources, we rely on the power of the device of the user and the browser.
FS: How did you come up with the name for this design? What does it mean?
DO: The name was pretty straightforward for us. We always show shots of Earth from space, where you can see the clouds, and called it “Above the Clouds”.
FS: Which design tools did you use when you were working on this project?
DO: We used tools varying from 3D modeling software, to photo editing like Photoshop and SublimeText for writing the program.
FS: What is the most unique aspect of your design?
DO: Everything is happening in real-time.
FS: Who did you collaborate with for this design? Did you work with people with technical / specialized skills?
DO: We were a team of 3 people: Delia Otetea in charge of concept and design, Ivan Moreno in charge of concept and development and Sean Beeson in charge of music composition.
FS: What is the role of technology in this particular design?
DO: Technology has a major role in our design. We are taking advantage of hardware accelerated graphics to realize the 3D graphics and with any advance in the low level APIs we can deliver better and more performant graphics.
FS: Is your design influenced by data or analytical research in any way? What kind of research did you conduct for making this design?
DO: The research behind this design was mainly technological. How could we take advantage of the technology and the tricks used in video games and film edition to create a realistic 3D presentation on the Web.
FS: What are some of the challenges you faced during the design/realization of your concept?
DO: The hardware diversity was a great challenge.
FS: What did you learn or how did you improve yourself during the designing of this work?
DO: The less layers you have the more memory credit you can spend. But to create the right visuals you must have to find a desired balance.
FS: Thank you for providing us with this opportunity to interview you.
A' Design Award and Competitions grants rights to press members and bloggers to use parts of this interview. This interview is provided as it is; DesignPRWire and A' Design Award and Competitions cannot be held responsible for the answers given by participating designers.
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