KOKUYO｜Special Content “Curiosity is Life”

Duration: 10 months (January 2025 – October 2025)

To let people intuitively experience KOKUYO's tagline "Curiosity is Life," we adopted the metaphor of a pop-up picture book staged on the iconic Campus notebook. Focusing on the moments of KOKUYO's manufacturing across past, present, and future, we shone a spotlight on the many scenes in which products and services have been born and spread over the company's long history. With a structure in which ideas are continuously brought to life from past to future, we set out to portray the whole of KOKUYO while simultaneously deepening understanding of the company and embedding the tagline. Rather than explaining in words, the design lets people grasp "Curiosity is Life" through their senses by enjoying the experience.

On the website, we implemented a mechanism that lets you feel the flow of KOKUYO's creativity as though you were turning the pages of a real notebook. Based on the illustrations, we created more than 100 3D models and animations, combining them one by one and conforming them to the curve of the notebook to realize the interaction. Each time you turn a page, 3D model animations unfold three-dimensionally on the notebook. On top of this, eight pieces of music — switching seamlessly section by section — make every page-turn an exciting moment. It is an immersive, experiential piece of content in which vision, sound, and interaction become one.

Because the quality of the objects and animation would determine the quality of the entire expression, we worked from the very beginning on the premise of making everything three-dimensional and implementable. From the rough-illustration stage we commissioned 3D production from MORIE Inc., using Blender to place the flat illustrations into 3D space while verifying the result through repeated iteration. Placing flat materials into a three-dimensional space tends to introduce unnatural perspective and uneven density of information, so fine adjustments to placement, scale, and sense of density were essential. Handling roughly 500 objects in total, we redid the layout again and again to strike a balance that holds together as a coherent space. Beyond placing objects in 3D space, we also stepped into the implementation domain — adding animation within Blender and editing JSON files directly. Through close collaboration with illustrator Ayumi Takahashi and CG animation studio MORIE Inc., we brought flatness, dimensionality, and motion together into a single, consistent expression rather than letting them fragment.

For the notebook's page-turning, we initially prioritized physical accuracy and attempted an implementation driven by physics simulation using 100–200 calculation points. This approach, however, carried a heavy computational load and left performance issues unresolved. So we reconsidered our approach and adopted "Bézier surfaces," which generate a smooth curved surface from just 16 control points. This let us achieve lightweight, stable page-turning while preserving the naturalness of the expression.

The most technically demanding challenge was the processing that links the 3D models to the movement of the page. As a page turns, the animating 3D models placed on it must follow along in real time — and verifying that this was even feasible took about two weeks on its own. 3D models such as birds and figures are composed of large numbers of triangles and are constantly animating. By acquiring the coordinates of all of their vertices and recalculating them in step with the deformation of the page, we synchronized the movement of the page with the movement of the 3D models. After repeated verification and adjustment, we made it possible for the 3D models to keep moving vividly even while a page is mid-turn — realizing one of the experiences that symbolize this content.

The music was created by Ryo Arimura. Rather than a single BGM track, we structured the sound so that it changes as the experience progresses, producing eight pieces in total to correspond to seven sections. As you move through the pages, sounds are added and the mood shifts, so that the unfolding of the experience itself is complemented through sound. In creating the sound, we deliberately incorporated the tones of live instruments, ambient sound, the sounds of tools, and human voices rather than leaning toward electronic sounds. As with the visual expression, we avoided an overly produced feel and valued sound that carries texture and a sense of human presence.

In production, a mechanism for switching music without interruption as pages transition was also a key requirement. Fully frame-level synchronization places a heavy load, while simply switching playback introduces misalignment — neither was the optimal solution. The method we ultimately adopted preloads the next track to be played and starts it by carrying over the playback time of the track currently playing. Strictly speaking, a slight discrepancy may occur, but it feels seamless in practice, allowing us to maintain the balance with performance. Thanks to this mechanism, the visual motion and the changes in sound move together without fragmenting, making the entire page-turning experience flow as a single continuous whole.