Responses by OFF+BRAND.
Background: Aether 1 was conceived as an experimental product-launch site designed to test the boundaries of WebGL, audio reactivity and interactive storytelling. The fictional product, a pair of earbuds, was a narrative device rather than something for sale. Our goal was to show that “sound without boundaries” could exist on the web as both a visual and auditory experience.
The target audience was creative technologists, designers and producers who look to OFF+BRAND. for innovation.
Design core: The site blends 3-D assets, particle-based motion fields and custom scroll interactions to create a seamless, immersive narrative. Infinite scrolling, audio-reactive shaders and fluid cursor simulations give the impression of a living product page that evolves as the visitor interacts.
A key feature is the built-in AI chatbot, which acts less like a support widget and more like a narrative guide. It introduces users to the fictional product, answers questions about the site’s technical build and adapts its tone depending on the visitor’s input. This layer of real-time AI interaction ensures the experience feels conversational and exploratory rather than passive.
Favorite details: We’re proud of the way performance and immersion coexist. Achieving 60 FPS on mobile devices required careful technical decisions, such as baking animations, faking bloom and depth of field, and downscaling simulations.
Challenges: The infinite scroll loop was deceptively complex. Early approaches with existing libraries produced broken states and inconsistent transitions. So, we wrote a custom controller to manage forward and backward scene states, ensuring smooth continuity.
Equally challenging was integrating the custom AI chatbot in a way that respected both performance and design. We needed it to speak in the right brand voice, align visually with the cinematic interface and never introduce lag into the real-time WebGL environment. Achieving this balance required tight coordination between engineering, design and narrative teams so the chatbot would feel like a natural extension of the experience, not an afterthought.
New lessons: Aether 1 reinforced for us how important it is to treat design, engineering and brand storytelling as a single process. Our 3-D pipeline spanned Midjourney sketches, Cinema4D unwrapping, Blender exports and custom WebGL builds, with every step influencing the next. We learned that the more fluidly we integrated these workflows, the more ambitious we could be without sacrificing performance or clarity.
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