Aristoteles SKY

After ARISTOTELES, ZULU and IRIS, ARISTOTELES SKY is the fourth of Kaiserwetters products to receive a new key visual graphic and interactive WebGL application. Aristoteles Sky is a real-time production data enriched energy cloud platform for nations. It is designed to mitigate energy transition risks and to improve accuracy for planning of new capacities like renewable energy generation, storage or grid expansion.

As with the other key visual designs, Aristoteles Sky also needed to be visualized in the same diorama art style. The main challenge for this project in particular was the correct presentation of scale on a heavily stylized visualization. The floating island should be recognized as a large country or continent instead of featuring a small area like in the Iris and Zulu projects. We achieved that large-scale feeling by a number of processes. Aside from a higher-fidelity mesh, the entire environment is slightly rounded to represent the earths curvature. The cameras field of view has also been increased and a slight fog effect has been applied to simulate atmospheric refraction. Details like the two cities and towns play into the illustrations diorama style and also represent the huge scale of the environment more directly.

As usual, we had to keep performance and data size in mind for the WebGL portion of this project. Parts of the 3D model which are not visible in the app have been deleted in order to reduce file size. Additionally, some geometry was duplicated and placed by script rather than imported as a whole mesh. Shadows, ambient lighting and ambient occlusion have all been baked into a texture and applied onto the models tightly wrapped UV layout. For the latter, finding the right balance between quality and file size is especially important.

The WebGL app features control variables to change position, size and animation speed to allow quick and easy customization for web deployment. We also implemented a new style of particle effect and made use of our mouse and tilt interactivity feature. The entire WebGL project requires just 1300KB and works on all WebGL supported devices.

You can see the app live at: kaiserwetter.energy/en/products/aristoteles-sky/

Client: Kaiserwetter Energy Asset Management
Agency: Apollo7