Xtra Tribute

Xtra's Xville is an iconic image of the early New Zealand internet, way back in the 1990s.

Here it is in all its glory.

I always wanted to see around the village so I upscaled the image and manually separated layers in order to animate them with a parallax effect.

swipe left/right to animate
or press ← →

Image Map

An image map is a way of having links within an image by specifying coordinates for shapes. It's not used much these days.

I've preserved the original XVille coordinates and made them visible which you can toggle withimage map

How?

I'm a programmer and on the weekend of the 4th of September 2021 I had some free time so I did this.

Why 2D with parallax?

I always wanted to look around the village in 3D but I don't think the original 3D file was ever released, nor was any higher resolution 2D render, so we've just got this original image as reference.

Creating a 3D scene from a 2D image is possible but from the one vantage point there's so much obscured. For example, what would people see behind the Theme Park? I could make a guess, but I wasn't interested in doing that kind of speculation / interpretation of the image.

The original image has 3D models of varying detail which could be a sign of 'kitbashing' from 3D clipart for some of the scene. I could never find any of the 3D clipart though so this is just speculation. But even if I did find them it wouldn't necessarily mean they were used as-is in the Xtra image so it would be speculation, so again it was a dead end.

So rather than 3D I decided to enhance the 2D with better resolution and some parallax scrolling. This felt the most true to the original image.

Disclaimer

This site is unaffiliated with Xtra, Spark, Chorus, or anyone from a telco at all even slightly. This animation is intended as a tribute artwork. If Xtra/Spark lawyers want this taken down just email me. Please don't sue :(