Find Your Way To OZ

3D Lead Developer

Update

Find Your Way to Oz won The Cutting Edge Award Project of the Year! A huge thanks to all the team members and voters!


“Find Your Way to Oz” is a Google Chrome Experiment brought to the web by Disney. It allows you to take an interactive journey through a Kansas circus, which leads you to the land of Oz after you are swept up by a massive storm.

A Video Walkthrough of the project

In this project our goal was to combine the richness of cinema with the technical capabilities of the browser to create a fun, immersive experience that users can form a strong connection with. But it was important to complement Sam Raimi’s vision for Oz. He has spent five years carefully constructing a world for this story to live in. Our interactive journey would have to live in the same space, and yet could not cover the same ground. In other words, we needed a simple interactive journey that flows towards the world Mr. Raimi was creating on film. That is where the key phrase “Find Your Way To Oz” came in. This was going to be your journey to Oz.

Here is a video of our team talking about the technical solutions we used

The project is a massive collaborative effort between UNIT9, the Google Chrome’s Team and Disney, it was brought to life thanks to the powerful Chrome renderer, making it possible to output a cheerful carnival scene in WebGL along side an ominous storm tornado with GLSL Shaders. The user is immersed in a 3D sound environment, which changes according to the areas the user is exploring. The WebGL environment is combined with the latest CSS3 features; with animated DOM elements using CSS3 transitions. Last but not least, the user is invited to take his own picture or record his own movie using the new getUserMedia API (WebRTC).

Press

Wired

Disney and Google have built something that’s beautiful and fun and points the way toward the future of web technology and marketing to come.

CoCreate

The result is an immersive world that blends visual effects and interactive elements, as users navigate their way through the storm en route to Oz, and even make their own short movies using the browser.

Tech Crunch

This Chrome experiment is fun to play even without knowing all the technical details.

Adobe Inspire Magazine

this web project has not only raised the bar for digital experiences, but it has affected me on a very personal level as well

Credits

  • Creative Partner: Piero Frescobaldi
  • Technical Partner: Gilles Boisselet
  • Technical Director and Partner: Yates Buckley
  • Director of Production: Valentina Culatti Alisi
  • Executive Producer: Alessandro Pula
  • Assistant Producer: Paul Hyman
  • Director: Anrick Bregman
  • Art Director: Fredrick Aven
  • Designer: Jarrod Castaing
  • Designer: Anders Andersson
  • Designer: Elena Lombardi
  • Visualizer: Marcus Punter-Bradshaw
  • UX Designer: Michael Ho
  • 3D Artist: Sophie Langohr
  • Illustrator, Concept Artist: Robert Cheetham
  • Illustrator, Concept Artist: Dan Evans
  • Concept Artist: Adam Kuczek
  • Animator: Sam Cundall
  • Animator: Francesco Bernabei
  • Technical lead: Silvio Paganini
  • Developer: Fábio Azevedo
  • Developer: Sam Brown
  • Developer: William Mapan
  • 3D Tech Lead: Marco Scabia
  • 3D Lead Developer: Daniele Pelagatti
  • 3D Developer: Jordi Ros
  • 3D Developer: Mariano Cigliano
  • Shader Development: Dmytry Lavrov
  • Lead Mobile Developer: Maciej Zasada
  • Systems Admin: Thomas Pedoussaut
  • Backend Lead Developer: Artjom Vassiljev
  • Backend Developer: Kamil Cholewiński
  • QA: Peter Law
  • QA: Jonas Simkus
  • CG Supervisor: Jules Stevenson (Kettle Studio)
  • CG Producer: Phin Glynn (Kettle Studio)
  • 3D Artist: Neil Canterbury (Kettle Studio)
  • 3D Artist: Matt Morris (Kettle Studio)
  • 3D Artist: Nic Groot Bluemink (Kettle Studio)
  • 3D Artist: Meghan Pattern (Kettle Studio)
  • Executive Audio Producer: Tor Castensson (Plan8)
  • Interactive Audio Producer: Calle Stenqvist (Plan8)
  • Audio Programming: Andreas Jeppsson (Plan8)
  • Sound Design: Carl-Johan Sevedag (Plan8)
  • Sound Design: Martin Wiklund (Plan8)
  • Tornado Shader Permission (brainflight.org): Moritz Helmstaedter (Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology)
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