The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks

A hundred years ago, the National Park Service was created as a way to preserve and share US public lands for generations to come. The 58 parks are every American’s cultural inheritance, a treasure on par with the great works of art of Europe.

We partnered with Google to celebrate the National Park Service’s centennial with an interactive tour of five of the most spectacular parks for desktop and mobile.

Featuring breathtaking cinematography by Adam Newport-Berra, 360° video, ambisonic audio and music by modern composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, the site is truly immersive. Shot from helicopters, mountaintops, horseback and underwater, over 11 terabytes of footage gathered over 26 days and 18,949 miles was edited down to over 25 minutes to create the final experience.

Leveraging new techniques related to 360° animation, directional audio and WebGL, we created additional layers of interaction to let visitors gain a richer understanding of topics like climate change, astronomy and bat echolocation.

I was the tech lead on this project. I managed and resourced all developers on the project, and also coordinated with clients and our London office in using their platform. We built the project in WebGL with ThreeJS in a React Framework. The build process exported a completely static instance into a Google Cloud Bucket.

My early prototyping defined how we developed all the 3d experiences. I worked closely with an Animator in optimizing 3D object files so that we could have a performant experience.