AURA SPATIAL

Configurators are usually forms wearing a 3D costume: a viewport, a swatch row, a price. The brief was to remove that framing entirely and build something closer to standing beside the object in a controlled room, where changing a material feels like a decision rather than a click.

Treat the configurator as a lighting stage instead of an interface. The vehicle sits in a dark studio; the UI dissolves into the scene as the object rotates and only re-forms when the visitor comes to rest. Every choice is expressed as light behaviour first and a label second.

The visitor orbits a single object with inertial drag, cursor-proximity parallax and momentum that settles rather than snaps. Material changes cross-fade over eight hundred milliseconds so surfaces appear to cure rather than swap. On touch devices the orbit becomes a one-finger drag with a two-finger dolly, and the panel collapses into a bottom sheet.

Obsidian environment, one dominant key light, and a single accent hue per material family. Typography is reduced to mono labels and thin rules so nothing competes with the reflections. Negative space carries the premium signal — the object is never centred, it is composed.

• Three.js / WebGL2 with a custom PBR material pipeline
• HDR lighting stages with pre-filtered environment maps
• Draco-compressed geometry with progressive LOD loading
• GPU-instanced trim variants to avoid re-uploads on every change

• Material and lighting studies rendered offline to lock the target look
• Real-time approximation pass — matching the offline render inside a frame budget
• Interaction prototyping for orbit, settle and material cross-fade timing
• Device tiering with resolution scaling and a static fallback frame

The result is a configurator that behaves like an object rather than a form: it holds attention through material and light instead of options, and it holds sixty frames per second while doing it. Performance was treated as art direction — the frame budget shaped the lighting model, not the other way around.

• Real-time WebGL configurator
• 3D experience design
• PBR material pipeline
• Interaction design