Website is designed for desktop with pretty good UX tbh even if it looks like breaking common patterns. It’s a very small learning curve considering it achieves the immersion it intends to.
It's nice because scrolling is a 1d interaction, and the path you're navigating is 1d. It's superior to a movie because this scheme makes it super simple to control how long you spend at various points, and they open up optional interactions at various points.
I don't understand why a lot of scrolling would be problematic, doesn't seem different then e.g. pushing arrow keys over and over when playing a video game.
A single repeated movement is very tiring. You compare to games, but games have you press different buttons, and there is usually either some rythm and variety to it, or at least hold the button (e.g. in a racing game you usually hold the acceleration button)
In this website you need to keep scrolling, which is pretty monotonous, it would be equivalent of spamming "next" on an overly complicated late 2000s Windows software installer. Or watching a Youtube video by spamming the frame skip shortcut.
If you want to make a scroll interactive experience (please don't), then at least do the courtesy of having 1 scroll gesture = 1 piece of information, don't have users scroll their wheels like 6 times just to wade through a path slowly. Or at the very least support the page up/down buttons!
Look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ52fo5g03Q. I even accidentally skipped over some text sections because I was scrolling furiously to be able to go anywhere. Finally, I accidentally used the tilt key of my scroll wheel and it went to the previous page, and I had to start all over.
Oh. This has nothing to do with the fact that it's a scroll-based interaction. It looks like it just doesn't work correctly with your mouse—i.e. you ran into a bug, not something that's wrong with scrolling in principle. But yeah, that looks like an annoying bug (maybe related to mouse having very high res scroll?).
I tried with trackpad and mouse on my end, and the app is well-configured for both of my devices at least: I'm able to have fine-grained control over my location by making small adjustments to scroll position.
> In this website you need to keep scrolling, which is pretty monotonous, it would be equivalent of spamming "next" on an overly complicated late 2000s Windows software installer. Or watching a Youtube video by spamming the frame skip shortcut.
Or scrolling through a long document, as the scroll wheel is designed to do?
You're not supposed to scroll straight through, there's stuff to see and read! If you want to skip around, there's navigation on the right side.
> Or scrolling through a long document, as the scroll wheel is designed to do?
And it does with a reasonable speed configurable by the user, which is easily mentally mapped to how much it will move since it's just a 2D surface. For example, I have mine set so each full scroll gesture (as you see in the video) is mapped to a whole screenful of movement. So I know that a complete scroll will show me all new information.
Scrolling through this path, each segment has different lengths and speeds, so you need trial and error to reach a specific point. And then sometimes it's just an animation and your scroll doesn't matter beyond initiating it. Not to mention that it's roughly 3 full scrolls to reach a new POI, the in-between is just transition.
> [...] there's stuff to see [...]
There is not [any more stuff to see thanks to the scrolling], because I can't look around, so it's just a video that wastes more GPU power.
> [...] and read!
Yes! And I skip right through some of it because when there is not a text in sight, I need to spam the wheel to get anywhere and overshoot.
> If you want to skip around, there's navigation on the right side.
True, but it's a miserable experience, since I have to hover each dot individually to know what it's about, as they don't show up on the overview map.
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Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing recreation full of very interesting information, it's just presented in the most frustrating possible way to use it. Take heart to the interactive medium, give me WASD and mouse-look! (Or at least a Google Steet View like spherical navigation, since it's probably more accessible) Let me go and walk to a corner so I can look back and see the full scale of the architecture, or wander among the columns of the great halls! This is so much wasted potential just in terms of interactivity.
Idk, I thought the text was frequent enough for the experience to work.
> I can't look around, so it's just a video that wastes more GPU power.
Fwiw, you can drag to look around most scenes. (Although I actually don't think this added much and agree that using WebGL was probably wasteful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965352)
Out of all places this is exactly the place where that actually works. “Scroll to walk” is better than “push a button to walk” and works on both mobile and desktop.
