Digital Experience

Creating an immersive digital experience

With the Manolo Blahnik Archives: ‘A New Way of Walking’, we’ve created a digital cosmos that marks the illustrious brand’s milestone 50th anniversary, spanning five immersive rooms.

The idea

A New Way of Walking shows the depth of the renowned haute couture shoe brand Manolo Blahnik’s archives to the public for the first time. Visitors can explore an extraordinary collection of original drawings and experience Blahník’s unique artistic flair in this immersive digital experience. The five rooms that visitors can discover each represent a different chapter in Manolo Blahnik’s extensive career.

The challenge

Our biggest technical challenge was to create a realistic interactive environment that feels fresh and captivating for visitors. It should be on the same visual level as pre-rendered 3D video tours, while working on low-end mobile devices, where over 65% of visitors used Safari as their main browser. Avoiding computer-intensive visual features such as dynamic shadows and post-process rendering in combination with keeping all content within the rooms editable through a single spreadsheet file by the client, were some of the bigger challenges we faced during this project.

We were unable to model, bake and render spaces with the interactive objects in place. Therefore, we had to resort to writing several custom shaders to mimic realistic lighting and shadows specific per room, to get to a point where it would look and feel like an actual physical space.

Accessible to anyone

The platform is available for a global audience and the experience is fully certified as AA compliant to ensure it is accessible to all, including the visually and hearing impaired. To achieve this, we’ve made sure that each visitor can access the curated content through a screenreader or using a keyboard to navigate. Also, we ensured each element was highlighted and described correctly, so it would be easy to navigate for visually impaired visitors.

Highlights

By ensuring every transition and movement is as seamless as possible, each interaction further draws the user into Manolo Blahnik’s archives. This creates a sense of freedom and immersion in the digital experience.