Skier on the first ski descent of Lhotse Couloir in 2018, opening Triptych's The North Face case study

FUTURELIGHT™ Lhotse Experience

An Interactive Ascent

PROJECT: Mobile AR & WebGL experience, built for a print feature
CLIENT: The North Face + The Atlantic Re:think
ROLE: Strategy, 3D, UX/UI Design, Front-End & Back-End Development
RESULTS: 5.9K engagements in the first three months

The finished experience. How we built it follows below.

17,500 FT · BASE CAMP

A dazzling mobile AR experience

The Atlantic's tech-issue print feature needed a companion piece mobile readers could carry with them. The magazine's creative studio, Atlantic Re:think, teamed up with The North Face to bring Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison's historic first ski descent of Lhotse Couloir, completed September 30, 2018, into a mobile AR experience.

Panoramic 3D render of the snowy Everest massif, built by Triptych for The North Face skyboxes

The Everest massif, rebuilt in 3D for the experience.

19,685–21,000 FT · THE ROUTE

Finding Another Way In

WebAR wasn't ready yet. So we built our own way in.

We started down the WebAR path first. But platformless WebAR wasn't mature enough yet to carry an entire experience on its own. So we built our own way in: a QR code that dropped readers into a mobile, gyroscope-responsive WebGL encounter, tuned to get the adrenaline going. One scan, and readers stood inside the Himalayas. No more scrolling past, they moved through it, immersed in the ascent as it happened.

Triptych's 3D route model for The North Face Lhotse experience, marking base camp to the summit in red

The actual route map from the Lhotse experience. One scan of a QR code dropped readers into this mobile, gyroscope-responsive WebGL encounter. This page's altitude markers are drawn from this same map: Base Camp at 17,500 ft, Camp 1 at 19,685 ft, Camp 2 at 21,000 ft, Camp 3 at 23,625 ft, and the summit at 27,940 ft.

23,625 FT · THE BUILD

Recreating Everest and Lhotse in 3D

We didn't want a flattened, pixelated stand-in for the Himalayas, so we rebuilt an entire segment of the Everest massif from the ground up. We sculpted the mountains in Z-Brush, hand-textured every surface in Substance Painter, then double-baked the peaks into a literal, walkable mountain complex. Each expedition camp was rebuilt to match the real thing, down to independently parallaxing 360-degree skyboxes. Octane Renderer gave us fluid shadows and true-to-life sunlight. Once baked, the finished Lhotse model held intense detail in a single texture map, light enough for Three.js to load on a phone.

SCULPT

BAKE

Sculpt to bake: the Lhotse massif before and after texturing.

Exploded terrain layers from wireframe to textured mountain, showing Triptych's The North Face pipeline

View up a snowy couloir past orange tents inside Triptych's 3D The North Face experience

The process, exploded: wireframe mesh, normal map, and final texture. The same mountain at three stages.

The North Face Lhotse intro screen with Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison at camp, designed by Triptych

Night sky over orange tents at Camp 2 in Triptych's 3D The North Face experience

Early Base Camp screen mockup with elevation and oxygen readouts, from Triptych's The North Face build

An early design-phase mockup of the Base Camp screen, kept here, placeholder text and all, as a glimpse of the process.

Lhotse Couloir landing screen for The North Face and The Atlantic, designed by Triptych

27,940 FT · SUMMIT

Base Camp to Summit in 38 Days

This project had a hard deadline: The Atlantic’s tech-issue press date. Not only did we hit it, the industry noticed before the issue even hit newsstands.