A Delightful Scene

During our initial brainstorming for the Digital Delight website, one of the main features we wanted was an interactive scene at the top of the website.  We wanted a dynamic solution where the world would appear to occupy the same timezone as the visitor.

For the illustration we commissioned the talents of Giorgos Vasileiadis from Sloorp World, because we really like his style, and previous work.  He came back with an illustration based on our concept, and we were very pleased with what he delivered.  We created five different scenes that span the entire day, from morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and night.

When the page is loaded we use Javascript to extract the hour from the current time on the visitor’s machine, and then use this to decide which image to display. It’s a simple, but effective approach, and it gives returning visitors a surprise.

The recent Perseid meteor shower gave us a great opportunity to add to the scene, and we used jQuery to implement random meteors shooting across the night sky.  We opted for a very subtle usage, so as not to distract users from the page content, but enough for them to notice it out the corner of their eye.  “Did I just see a….?”  We liked it so much, we’ve actually decided that it should stay there permanently.

We think the final scene works really well, and we’ve received some very positive feedback, so we can clearly see the potential it has.  In the future, we’d like to extend how the scene behaves, and implement some more of our ideas, such as adding the visitor’s local weather into the scene by geocoding their IP address, and having the characters react with other elements on the main site. The majority of our ideas would require us to move to a platform that offers more flexibility, and can provide truly dynamic rendering, such as Flash.

We thought it a good idea to include a zip file with all the files needed to create a similar dynamic scene.