Prepare to Pioneer is one of those agency self-promo pieces that actually delivers on its promise. Built by Dogstudio/DEPT as a campaign for the broader DEPT agency network, the site asks "What kind of pioneer are you?" and guides you through an AI-powered personality quiz. The star of the show is "Entity," a real-time point-cloud visualization that shifts between human-like forms, abstract processing clouds, and object representations as you interact with it. It's less chatbot, more shape-shifting digital oracle.
The tech under the hood is where things get interesting. Dogstudio used their proprietary WebGL framework, AstroGL, tightly integrated with a Nuxt.js frontend. The AI dialogue is powered by GPT-3.5, but the clever bit is context awareness: your answers (and even your email domain) influence how Entity responds, so IKEA employees get a different conversation thread than someone from a local bakery. The CGI promo video was built in Houdini over three weeks, with each shot essentially "programmed" before camera work.
Give the experience a try yourself and take the quiz yourself, or dig into Dogstudio's full case study for the breakdown on process and production.
