KIRA: music you can hold.
KIRA is an invented product: a portable music player whose albums each live on a card of mother-of-pearl. DTB WEB designed and built the website as a concept, to show how a luxury product can feel online. Slide a card into the player and the world around it changes.
The question
How do you make a luxury product felt on a screen, without a row of product photos? We wanted a genre that was not yet in our work: Japanese design, a touch of retro-futurism and an object you want to pick up. Light and 3D could join in, but quietly.
The idea
The player descends from the Walkman and the MiniDisc. Its albums live on cards of mother-of-pearl, after raden, the Japanese craft of inlaid shell. Slide a card in and that album plays while the sky behind the player turns into the place it belongs to: six cards, six places, from a sea of clouds at first light to stars above the clouds. The cards live in a binder with nine pockets to a page.
The technique
The site is built with Next.js, three.js, GSAP and Lenis. The player was modelled in Blender with all of its parts, so chapter five can take it apart: shell, dial, display glass, card reader and battery. The shine of the shell shifts as a card moves. Sound runs through Web Audio and starts only after your first click or tap. three.js loads after the first paint, so the page is on your screen quickly.
A concept, not a client
KIRA does not exist. The player, the cards, the editions and the reservation were invented for this design, and the site says so itself. Anyone who reserves a player reads at the end that there is nothing to reserve and that nothing is sent. The website itself is real: you can open it, change cards and listen.
From the live website
