Locomotive releases its first Pilot® project, Moment Zero, an immersive experience inside worldwide seismic activity using USGS Open Data. This is a concept we decided to prioritize 18 months ago by green-lighting our first Pilot® project. The fruit of this experiment, Moment Zero, is an immersive experience that delves in our world's seismic activity.
Innovative Web agencies understand that being ready for the next generation of projects demands continuous learning from their teams.
Moment Zero can be experienced on multiple platforms. However, we had 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: bridging together the very raw open data and a highly immersive concept known as virtual reality in 360 degrees.
Some neat things we built
The USGS’s earthquake data set for all available years (from 1970 onwards) is huge and provided much more data than we needed. Since the design and UI requirements were bound to change along with the development of the project, we developed a versatile shell script to extract the needed data from the USGS API. It combed the API month-by-month, from 1970 to 2017, calculating values that were originally unavailable (average earthquake magnitude for a month).
Furthermore, navigating in a 360˚ virtual environment means developing 3D skills in order to deliver a fully immersive experience. One thing was clear from the beginning: this project had to be developed with technologies we could easily tackle. That’s why we went with wholly web-based solutions. We veered out of our comfort zone, and we learned a great deal.
