Into Pokhara
About the Project
A premium digital tourism scrollytelling platform commissioned by the Nepal Tourism Board. Designed as a cinematic virtual tour of Pokhara's lakes and mountains, the site relies on dynamic parallax transitions, ambient music transitions, and vector-drawn scrolly outlines. The site offers visitors an editorial-style narrative experience that adapts dynamically as they scroll, providing an immersive taste of the region's geography and culture.
The Challenge
Synchronizing custom desktop smooth scrolling (handled via Locomotive Scroll) with mobile touch physics created a disjointed experience. On mobile, scroll-driven timelines were laggy and failed to align background mountain silhouettes with foreground callouts. Additionally, rendering auto-playing video backdrops caused significant battery drain and CPU spikes, especially on devices with high-refresh-rate displays.
The Solution
I resolved the synchronization bottleneck by building a custom scroll proxy class in Javascript, bridging Locomotive Scroll's rendering loop directly to GSAP's scroll handler. I designed viewport-dependent CSS media rules that automatically scale down parallax velocities on smaller devices. To handle video playback efficiently, I implemented intersection observers that pause off-screen video wrappers and toggle low-power static images when battery-saver flags are detected in the browser.
Technologies Used
