Wind Farm Tour

Xcel Energy

Catch The Wind!

The Wind Farm Tour is designed to be a “first-person” video tour. It is part of Xcel Energy’s Energy Classroom series. Like previous tours, it leverages existing video to build the tour. It is based on research with teachers to define what they need to teach energy concepts. It is designed to be used in classrooms, so all videos and images can be presented full-screen.

The Tour features twelve video stories, an animated 3D wind turbine, photos, and infographics. Users can also “climb” up to the top of a turbine, and see the view from over 300 feet (91 meters) above ground. It is a long climb! Be sure to buckle your safety harness!

MY ROLES
- UX/UI Designer
- Creative Director
- Content Developer
- 3D Designer and Animator
- Illustrator

KEY BUSINESS GOALS
- Design for classroom education for the Xcel Energy market.
- Leverage existing Xcel Energy video of wind farms.
- Enable both desktop and mobile interaction.

KEY USER GOALS
- Have the feeling of actually being at a wind farm
- Learn science and engineering behind a wind farm.
- Understand how wind farms are part of national energy system.

RESULTS
- Positive feedback from teachers.
- Continuing to be used in classrooms.
- Was featured in Xcel Energy promotional materials.

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EXTERNAL LINKS

Wind Farm Tour
Energy Classroom
Xcel Energy

The Wind Farm Tour is designed to create a “you are here” video story. Two enthusiastic hosts join you to tour a wind farm, and explore the science of wind energy.

The tour is designed to work on both mobile and desktop devices. Previous energy tours were created with Flash. This is the first tour created with HTML5 to also perform on mobile devices.

I designed this architecture map to describe how the tour is built upon a basic, single template that is replicated for each topic. This template approach conserved limited funding for this project.

I created a 3D wind turbine to represent its key components. 3D animations demonstrate a turbine’s internal structure and interaction with wind. Photos were combined with 3D images to compare parts of a wind turbine from multiple perspectives.

Play this video shows to see the tour’s 3D animated wind turbine. I created a stylized model to feature the turbine’s main components. Some parts have bright colors to highlight them, and some are transparent to see what happens inside. The animations show the turbine’s yaw and pitch movements, and travel down to its underground connections.

Are you ready to go to the top? In this topic you can climb to top of a tall wind turbine with a first-person point of view.

The wind tour is designed to be presented in a classroom, so all videos and images can be expanded to full-screen. Here you see a video enlarged to full-screen.

Photos can also be expanded to full-screen. When they are enlarged, buttons are included to navigate between the photos in a topic, and to show or hide the photo’s caption text.

For the Wind Farm Tour, I have created a range of infographics and illustrations to visualize concepts and relationships.