Responses by Pavel Novák, designer and 3-D modeling; and Michal Ščuglik, developer, polyperfect.

Background: This interactive microsite was created for the 20th anniversary of Univerzita Tomáše Bati (Tomas Bata University) in Zlín, Czech Republic. We have selected the university’s 20 biggest milestones and translated them into digital forms.

Design core: The huge 3-D model of the city of Zlín. Visitors can take a tour and see how Tomas Bata has helped change the city.

Challenges: Right from the start, the biggest challenge was the visual quality of the WebGL experience and the mobile performance. We had to overcome a lot of technical challenges, utilizing Unity and its URP pipeline for the interactive part. However, we’re quite happy with how things turned out.

Time constraints: The site took us five months to develop and we did spend all the time we had, including long working hours and weekends, to do everything we wanted. In terms of programming, we could have probably invested mored time into shader optimization or polishing the UI.

Divergent paths: If we’d had all the technical answers from the beginning, we would have loved to spend more time on the 3-D modeling.

Navigation structure: The initial idea was to use a timeline to navigate users through time, but since the team was not able to put the events in chronological order, we switched the timeline concept for a tour through Univerzita Tomáše Bati’s milestones.

Technology: We used WebGL exports from the Unity game engine with JavaScript for browser communication. We think that Unity is an effective tool for creating interactive experiences, and it opens up new visual possibilities for the web—especially for those without the deeper knowledge of 3-D graphics programming.