ORRERY: from a cloudy Rotterdam to a clear night.
ORRERY is an invented planetarium in Rotterdam. DTB WEB designed and built the website as a concept: one continuous film in 3D that starts on a cloudy afternoon and ends in a clear night full of stars. Meteorites hang between the clouds and travel down the page with you.
The question
How do you make an evening at a planetarium tempting on a screen? The first version of ORRERY was light and calm, but it repeated the same block over and over. The brief for the second version: keep that calm, but make visitors feel they are inside a film.
The idea
The planetarium’s promise is: cloudy over Rotterdam? Under the dome it is a clear night every day. The site does exactly that in one scroll. Halfway down the sun sets, in the dome the stars switch on in a wave from the projector, and the team appears as the closing credits. An etched piece of Gibeon iron plays the lead and travels the whole page.
The technique
Behind all the text lies one WebGL world, built with Next.js, TypeScript and three.js. The meteorites were made in Blender with their light and relief baked in, so they look real without heavy work in the browser. The stars sit in their true places from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, for the sky above Rotterdam. The sound is made in code. The site is in English, with a Dutch version.
A concept, not a client
ORRERY does not exist. The shows, halls, prices and people on the site are invented, and the site’s colophon says so too. What is real: the stars in their places, the site itself and how it works.
From the live website
