Show HN: We made a 3D landing page for our product | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We made a 3D landing page for our product

demo.shapespark.com

9 pointsmixedbit14 comments

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My impressions:

The loading time was longer than my expectations for the 2021 web.

It I started by trying to pan around the room, but it only zoomed.

For the time I spent, I received very little useful information.

As a landing page, it had very low information density.

If I stop to think about it, it's remarkable to have 3d in my browser. If I don't stop, interactive 3d seems very ordinary.

Good luck.

Yes, for sure the expected time the visitor needs to spend within this page is longer than with a standard 2D page, so we rather plan to use this with audience that already has some context and can be interested enough to invest this time. We hope that in such case the 3D tour will better communicate what Shapespark does than a 2D page with text and images. This is an output of Shapespark, so instead of reading and trying to imagine what the product does, you can load the tour, walk around and hopefully get a better understanding of what you can create with Shapespark.

Practically speaking the "Call to Action" is wait while it loads.

I understand your reasoning.

I think that landing pages and demo pages are orthogonal. Imagine if a database landing page ran an analytics query as part of the initial load. Or an IDE ran a complex compile.

I like those, wish we had more of them. And to think we had VRML in the 90s.

Your inverse mouse dragging is counterintuitive and feels wrong though

Mouse dragging is perfectly fine. Drag to the left to see what’s on the left. It’s things like street view that are counterintuitive.

Unfortunately, this is one of the issues where it is impossible to provide something intuitive to everyone. Some people expect the mouse to work like in FPS games (eyes rotate in the mouse direction), some expect it to work like in Street View (the model rotates in the mouse direction). From our experience with other such 3D experiences, it seems like the FPS mode is now slightly more popular. Anyway, we support reversed mouse, but it is not the default: https://demo.shapespark.com/product-tour/#autoplay&flipmouse

It's different using the cases:

Moving the mouse without dragging: moving my head, since there is no expectation that i am interacting with the world

Dragging the mouse: moving the model around. That's because dragging can also be used to intersect to a wall and center it, in which case i would be literally dragging the model as if it s cardboard.

This is fun, made me think of the late 90s and the weird fun shit everyone was up to. Good luck, weirdos.

Very cool! I only figured out WASD movement on my second load of the page. Mouse-only mode would benefit greatly from an invert-axis button imho.

This is so cool! If you don't mind me asking, how did you build it?

It is built with Shapespark - a desktop application for creating WebGL based tours that our company makes. It takes a 3D model as an input (we have exporting plugins for SketchUp, 3ds Max and Revit, but also support files from other 3D modeling programs), computes realistic, path-traced lighting, allows to configure interactions (like material pickers, HTML popup windows, video texture controls). A finished tour can be either uploaded to our server or hosted on own server.

This was really cool and worked great on my phone

I like this!

Thank you

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