Animated blog post cover for my last blogpost https://ander.agency/blog-posts/when-to-rebrand-real-signals

Cool

Meet Sol, 

my entry for Rive x Contra interactive character challenge. 

Sol is a data-driven and interactive Weather Dashboard.

Sol reacts to live data inputs - temperature, windspeed, precipitation and weather state (cloudy, rain, heavy rain etc.) influence his emotions and behaviors.

He gets happy, sad, relieved and scared - depending on the mix of those data inputs. Those data points also influence his surrounding. Rain, Snow or Hail get thicker as precipitation rises. 

As the Wind gets stronger you see a visual representation of the flowing air and rain starts to fall at an angle. 

If it gets really stormy you might see Sol having a hard time staying in place. 

Temperature directly influences Sol's color and behaviors - if temperatures drop low you see him turning blue, his lips start to shake and if it's really cold his whole body will start shaking. As it gets hotter his color changes to orange and red, he will start to sweat and if it gets too hot you will see him start panting. 

During the day he is a quirky fella, but if it turns night he will have trouble staying awake and fall asleep after a few seconds - you will always be able to wake him up but he will go back to sleep if you don't move your mouse. 

There is also a 7-day forecast he will react to. 

Sol is now live on our website and linked up to worldwide weather data - feel free to enter your hometown to see how Sol would feel there. 

Or (if you're up for adventure) try the „surprise me" button and travel to random places all over the world. Sol will have a look at your actions if you choose to hover over that one - he is very curious. 

One final thing — if you enjoy Sol's company, he is up for a game. 

Click on Sol to start a mini game where you have to catch rising bubbles. If you manage to catch more than 80% you will reach the next (a bit more difficult) level. There are 11 of them waiting for you.

Creating Sol was a lot of fun and a nice learning experience. 

Setting up the data-driven emotion system that mixes emotions for eyes, pupils, mouth shape, mouth movement, face movement and body movement depending on different data points. Connecting everything via data binding, creating custom scripts and converters for additional functionality and hooking everything up to an API (with last-minute ideas like the „surprise me" button and Sol's behavior when you use it) was a lot of fun. 

Try the real world data-driven version here: https://www.treetop.at/sol Or look a bit more under the hood: https://rive.app/s/1ErADmKwg0_PAbOqW75XYQ/?runtime=rive-renderer

Let me know what you think of Sol — what other features would have been fun?

That's so much fun to watch! 🙌