UX design · Interaction design · 3D
Navigating racks, levels and tanks in 2D and 3D
3 min read
Role
UX and Concept, 3D Modeller
Timeline
2025
Scope
UX design · Interaction design · 3D
Industries
Indoor vertical farming
Outcome
2D and 3D navigation shipped in the platform
A map of the farm with live data on it
The farm map is how you navigate an indoor vertical farm on screen. It has two views of the same building: a 3D model you can move through, and a 2D map from above. Click a rack, a level or a nutrient tank and it shows that object’s current conditions, energy use and equipment status. I designed the concept and the interaction, built the 3D models, and oversaw the development, which the engineering team did in Flutter.
The floor map walkthrough, drilling into one rack's live conditions
The brief
The farm already collected plant health, environment and equipment data for every rack, level and zone. Getting to it was the problem. Finding one value meant knowing which screen it was on, and the people who needed it most were on the floor, mid shift, with the least time to go looking.
A farm is a physical place, but the software described it as a list. A grower could point at the rack in front of them and still have to turn that into a menu path.
The same problem hit new staff. Someone starting on the floor had to learn the building and the menu structure at the same time, from people who were busy.
Rack view switching between current conditions, energy meter and nutrient tank
3D walkthrough with clickable rack labels and a nutrient tank readout
The solution
The 3D view is a walkthrough. Racks sit where they sit in the real room, each one is labelled, and clicking one opens its conditions, its energy meter and the nutrient tank feeding it. The 2D view is the same farm from above, for when the question is which rack rather than what is in it.
Both views cover the same objects: racks, levels and zones, and the equipment serving them, including the nutrient tanks and the meters. One control switches between them and both read the same live data, so a grower can go from the whole floor to one level of one rack without losing track of where they are.
The process
I started outside agriculture. Warehousing, fleet management and cold storage had already solved navigating a large space full of changing numbers, so I studied those before drawing anything, then mapped the flows and the data points as wireframes.
I built the 3D models in Blender and sliced them into the 2D layers, so both views come from one source and stay in step when the farm layout changes. The development team implemented it in Flutter, with live updates behind both views.
The impact
How a shift starts now
A grower opens the floor, sees which rack is off and goes to it. Troubleshooting starts from the object rather than from a menu, and someone new can find the nutrient tank on their first day, because the screen is shaped like the room they are standing in.
It is the difference between a printed floor plan and street view. Both are accurate, only one lets you recognise where you are. Nothing was measured before and after, so the claim is a change in how the farm is navigated, not a percentage.
Annotated AGEYE system diagram: sensors, HVAC, fertigation and plant lifecycle stages