Now that the protection of honeybees is more important than ever, personal care product brand Burt’s Bees brought the homestead of its founder, Burt Shavitz, from its original location in Maine to the brand’s headquarters on Durham, North Carolina’s American Tobacco Campus, and opened it to the public to educate them on the environmental importance of honeybees. In collaboration with Google and with the personal care product brand, Raleigh, North Carolina–based creative agency Baldwin& and digital production company MediaMonks brought Burt’s homestead online for all to experience with a virtual reality–compatible site. With three interactive 360-degree spherical shots of Shavitz’s home—inside and out—visitors can explore the installation through still content tags, marked by yellow honeycomb shapes; these content tags summon images and videos that introduce visitors to Shavitz’s lifestyle and personality, like his passion for his motorcycle and his habit of getting up when the sun came through his window and going to sleep when it became “too dark to read.” An intuitive navigation enables users to travel to different spheres by clicking on stairways and doors or by an omnipresent hamburger menu; on mobile devices, the gyroscope can be used to browse the spheres. To develop the site, MediaMonks used its custom Gaia framework; the site itself uses CSS, HTML and JavaScript with plenty of SVGs to seamlessly combine HTML videos with JavaScript animations.
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