Description
Dragonfly Tours is a luxury helicopter tour of the world, given as a gift. It begins with things you can hold: a 3D-printed helicopter; a pop-up card where a skyline of seven landmarks rises with the helicopter hovering in front; and a boarding pass with the passenger's name written by hand. Scan the boarding pass and the flight begins in your browser.
You arrive in a quiet hangar where your helicopter is parked on its landing pad. Walk around her, then press Depart: the rotors spin up and you take your seat in the VIP cabin. Look out of the big side window as a passenger, join the pilot at the windshield, or switch to the view from outside. Below you are real cities in photorealistic 3D: Tokyo Tower, the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate, the Sagrada Família, São Paulo, N Seoul Tower and Shanghai's Oriental Pearl Tower by night. Between cities, you cross the globe in a few seconds.
It is for older people who may never fly again; for people who are ill, or caring for someone who is; for anyone who cannot afford the trip; and for everyone who is afraid to fly. The tour is calm and gentle, at your own pace, with nothing to be afraid of. In Indonesia a helicopter is called capung besi, an iron dragonfly, which gave the tour its name.
The helicopter, the pilot and the landmark models were generated with Tripo, and the hangar and the VIP cabin were created with World Labs Marble. The cities are Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles; Shanghai by night uses Mapbox with OpenStreetMap data. The tour runs on Three.js in any modern browser, best on a laptop or desktop. The physical helicopter is the author's Tripo model, 3D-printed and hand-painted: 33 cm long, with a main rotor that spins by hand. The pop-up card and boarding passes were designed for this project, printed by a local print shop and assembled by hand.
A gift for anyone who can't go, from someone who wishes they could.
How Tripo was used
Tripo is the core of the project: one Tripo helicopter is both the digital star and the physical gift.
- The helicopter: the same model flies in the browser and was 3D-printed at 33 cm with a spinning rotor. The author split out its rotors to animate them, cut it from 66 MB to 5 MB with glTF Transform, and added logo decals.
- Pilot and seat: also made with Tripo; the pilot sits in the VIP cabin.
- Landmarks: the Oriental Pearl Tower and N Seoul Tower models were made with Tripo and placed into the Google and Mapbox 3D cities.
- The pop-up card: a render of the helicopter model became the card's cutout.
