Brian Kadar

Every now and then a project comes along that reminds you how much fun it is to be a developer—all the other sites and banner ads before it were just practice. It’s when the design, technology, and client all work together to make something that’s seriously cool.

There’s something very tangible about this design. It takes 3d on the web from a passive experience to a participatory sport, challenging the user to experience a website hands-on. The elements are incredibly simple—when you break it down it’s just basic geometry—but it’s engaging, and that’s the beauty of it.

That’s not to say that it’s easy for everyone to use. It’s a tough mental exercise to use your mouse, which only moves up, down, left and right (problem somewhat solved, I think), to truly interact in 3d space—and all while trying to solve a puzzle. So the challenge was to make the site tactile and intuitive, and I think we succeeded in doing both. I added things like the 3d hand cursor that helped position the user in the 3d space and give a more physical feeling to the experience.

Nevertheless, it’s still fucking hard—but that’s a good thing, and you get rewarded along the way with a bad ass visualizer. The average time of the site is out of this world, people are spending 30, 45 minutes, an hour on the site. Yes, some Pearl Jam fans will do anything to sneak a peek, but it shows that users are accepting the challenge of a new kind of online experience. Armando Alves (@armandoalves) wrote up a nice piece about the site, suggesting that the current online generation is expecting higher levels of engagement on the web. To be honest, I was a bit surprised by the positive reaction of hardcore PJ fans… Here’s a snippet that only gets better…

…here’s the thing. The whole thing hovers in this trippy 3-dimensional space that you can rotate any which way with your mouse, so you can actually see the board and the puzzle pieces from virtually any angle. If you were so inclined, and this is not necessarily condoned by MamaPop, Pearl Jam, or this article’s author, BUT… IF you were inclined to smoke a little pot before playing the Pearl Jam Ten Game, I’d be willing to bet that you might pass a nice chunk of time…

I got to work side by side with Vas Sloutchevsky, who designed the site and is one of the founding fathers of interactive design as we know it. A lot of designs come from excuses to use a certain technology, and that’s where fads arise. Vas treats things differently, and embraces the latest technologies (in this case, 3d) as tools to better display information and create more interesting interactions. By doing that, his designs become inevitable—neither the technology nor the design could exist without the other. Same goes for Pearl Jam, he didn’t design with Papervision3D in mind, but it seems as if Papervision3D was designed for it. Nothing is out of place. Inevitably, this deserves a post in and unto itself.

That sense of inevitability between the design and technology made the development process really exciting, and surprisingly fast. Of course, I had a little help from my friends to get it off the ground—and hopefully I can return the favor in short order. I had one month to finish the site (lucky for me, that month was February, the shortest of them all). Here is prototype numero uno. In my next posts I’ll be sharing some of the behind-the-scenes ideas and source code that I think you’ll find very useful.

And if you’re wondering what I’m talking about: rock on.

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