Innovative Web agencies understand that being ready for the next generation of projects demands continuous learning from their teams. This is a concept that Locomotive, the award-winning Montreal agency, decided to put to the forefront 18 months ago by launching its first Pilot® project.
Today, Locomotive presents the fruit of this experiment: MOMENT ZERO, an immersive experience inside worldwide seismic activity.
MOMENT ZERO can be experienced on multiple platforms. Locomotive’s team, however, has a distinct interest in experimenting with VR technology, as expressed in Pilot®’s first few meetings. This quickly put the team on the path of its very first challenge: building a bridge connecting something very raw, such as open data, and a highly immersive concept such as virtual reality in 360 degrees.
A world premiere for visualizing USGS seismic activity Open Data
Through its Open Data Web Services, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), is releasing all the seismic activity tracked from their very first surveys in the 1970s to this very moment, MOMENT ZERO.
Something that caught the Locomotive team’s attention, while exploring different Open Data options for this project, was the multi-data opportunity: a time and place, a force (magnitude) and a geo-position (latitude and longitude), making it a perfect candidate for their R&D experiment. And who could resist having Planet Earth as a subject?
The pure 360 VR experience online: perfecting WebGL
Navigating through the 360 VR technology (for Virtual Reality in 360 degrees) means developing 3D skills in order to be fully immersed in this dimension. For Locomotive’s team of developers and creatives operating in the Web industry, one thing was clear from the beginning: this project had to be web-based to develop the knowhow they were looking for with this R&D challenge. As with anything that involves 3D, a Graphic Library was necessary to generate the rendering. In 2011, WebGL (for Web Graphic Library) made this possible by providing a JavaScript API and shader code based on OpenGL. It was an ambitious but exciting first try with this library that works with any compatible web browser and without the use of any plug-in.
What is Pilot®?
After 10 years in business, Frédéric Marchand, Jean-François Chainé and Mathieu Ducharme met to discuss moving up to the next level in an industry where they were already being acclaimed for outstanding performance.
18 months ago, they chose to put the members their team at the centre of company culture, keeping them motivated, and created Pilot®.
Pilot® was born to empower all team members in expressing their creativity and curiosity through internal R&D projects that they manage on their own. A great way to develop reflexes and be ready for what’s next in an ever-evolving market.
“ Pilot® helps our team grow and develop new skill sets in an educational and collaborative work environment. It’s a way of developing some of our own projects, exploring possibilities and testing new technologies along the way. ”
- Quentin Hocdé, Front-End Developer
Brought to you by Locomotive
Locomotive is growing and is looking for highly motivated members for its crew. If you understood all the “geek” in this media release and got excited about it, chances are you might be a great fit on the Locomotive team. Experience MOMENT ZERO, send us your feedback, and if you feel up to it, send us your resume!
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