A skier descends the steep upper face of Lhotse Couloir above a sea of clouds, during the first-ever ski descent, September 2018.

FUTURELIGHT™ Lhotse Experience

An Interactive Ascent

PROJECT: Mobile AR & WebGL experience, built for a print feature
CLIENT: The North Face + The Atlantic Re:think
ROLE: Strategy, 3D, UX/UI Design, Front-End & Back-End Development
RESULTS: 5.9K engagements in the first three months

The finished experience. How we built it follows below.

17,500 FT · BASE CAMP

A dazzling mobile AR experience

The Atlantic's tech-issue print feature needed a companion piece mobile readers could carry with them. The magazine's creative studio, Atlantic Re:think, teamed up with The North Face to bring Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison's historic first ski descent of Lhotse Couloir, completed September 30, 2018, into a mobile AR experience.

A wide panoramic 3D render of the snow-covered Everest massif, built for the experience's 360-degree skyboxes.

The Everest massif, rebuilt in 3D for the experience.

19,685–21,000 FT · THE ROUTE

Finding Another Way In

WebAR wasn't ready yet. So we built our own way in.

We started down the WebAR path first. But platformless WebAR wasn't mature enough yet to carry an entire experience on its own. So we built our own way in: a QR code that dropped readers into a mobile, gyroscope-responsive WebGL encounter, tuned to get the adrenaline going. One scan, and readers stood inside the Himalayas. No more scrolling past, they moved through it, immersed in the ascent as it happened.

Aerial 3D map of the Lhotse route: the climbing line marked in red, running from base camp up through three high camps to the summit.

The actual route map from the Lhotse experience. One scan of a QR code dropped readers into this mobile, gyroscope-responsive WebGL encounter. This page's altitude markers are drawn from this same map: Base Camp at 17,500 ft, Camp 1 at 19,685 ft, Camp 2 at 21,000 ft, Camp 3 at 23,625 ft, and the summit at 27,940 ft.

23,625 FT · THE BUILD

Recreating Everest and Lhotse in 3D

We didn't want a flattened, pixelated stand-in for the Himalayas, so we rebuilt an entire segment of the Everest massif from the ground up. We sculpted the mountains in Z-Brush, hand-textured every surface in Substance Painter, then double-baked the peaks into a literal, walkable mountain complex. Each expedition camp was rebuilt to match the real thing, down to independently parallaxing 360-degree skyboxes. Octane Renderer gave us fluid shadows and true-to-life sunlight. Once baked, the finished Lhotse model held intense detail in a single texture map, light enough for Three.js to load on a phone.

SCULPT

The same mountain after texturing and baking: the finished, walkable terrain readers explored in 3D.

BAKE

Sculpt to bake: the Lhotse massif before and after texturing.

Exploded view of the terrain build: a rainbow wireframe mesh, a normal map, and the final textured model of the massif, stacked to show the pipeline.

A ground-level view up the snow couloir from inside the 3D experience, with orange expedition tents pitched below.

The process, exploded: wireframe mesh, normal map, and final texture. The same mountain at three stages.

The experience's intro screen, with a photo of climbers Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison at camp and an invitation to explore the couloir.

A night scene inside the experience: stars over Camp 2's orange tents, part of the 3D environment's built-in day-night cycle.

An early design mockup of the Base Camp screen, used to test the layout before final content was written in.

An early design-phase mockup of the Base Camp screen, kept here, placeholder text and all, as a glimpse of the process.

The Lhotse Couloir landing screen, marking September 30, 2018, the day of the historic descent.

27,940 FT · SUMMIT

Base Camp to Summit in 38 Days

This project had a hard deadline: The Atlantic’s tech-issue press date. Not only did we hit it, the industry noticed before the issue even hit newsstands.