You Can't Photograph a Grid, So We Built a City Around It

TE Connectivity's energy team asked us for an interactive city that shows where its products live across solar, data centers, and the grid. Since July 2026, we've textured and lit their solar CAD, built an expandable 3D city, and wired a clickable solar experience with layered drill-downs. The solar location is in final review ahead of the November RE+ show, and the data center location is targeted for year-end.

Some products are hard to show because they're huge. Others are hard to show because they're small, numerous, and buried inside something huge.

A grounding strap on a solar farm doesn't photograph well. Neither does a splice in an underground cable run or a connector on the back of a PV panel. Each part matters, but it only makes sense once a buyer can see the system it sits in.

That's the problem TE Connectivity's energy group brought us. And it's a good example of what happens when you stop trying to explain a portfolio one product at a time and start building the place where all of it lives.

A portfolio that only makes sense in context

TE's energy business touches solar, substations, overhead and underground transmission, wildlife protection, data centers, and more. Those categories don't stay in neat boxes.

Frank Bloom, who's led the solar technical input on TE's side, described how the product groups overlap: "transmission and distribution is super intertwined." Then, the honest part: "it can get deep quick."

On July 28, 2026, TE opened 4 requests with us: an Energized World interactive, a Smart Grid piece, a Solar Location interactive, and a Data Center Location interactive. The idea tying them together was a single navigable city where each energy sector gets its own location and each location drills down into the products installed there.

There was also an existing data center experience to deal with. Every bit of its text had been baked into the video, which made it hard to integrate cleanly on TE's website. Our team flagged early that it needs a full rebuild so the text is real, linkable, and searchable by AI, and that work is still ahead.

Starting with the stuff in the dirt

The first stretch of the project was assets, and lots of them. The team is spread across multiple countries, and the solar content came together piece by piece.

On August 19, Frank joined a call with an update: "Brazil is in the bag finally. So you guys already got 18 2D images this morning." The grounding content was still outstanding, and Frank was candid about how that was going: "I am standing on people's desks pushing for the other content."

Part of the early work was sanding down the product list. The solar product groups went from roughly 35 to 40 components down to 8, which made the eventual navigation a lot more manageable.

By September 3, we'd textured and lit every STEP file TE sent for the solar location. We ran a quality check and delivered turntable videos, with stills of every product ready to package individually so the TE team wasn't buried in files all at once.

Frank's verdict on September 16: the "turntables are looking really good."

A city with room to grow

At the same time, we blocked out the base environment: a large-scale 3D city that every location would drill down from. Nuclear went toward the back with open space behind it for future industries. Solar, electric, and data center sat close together, since they interact in the real world, with enough separation to click into each one on its own.

The design leaned toward realistic terrain with stylized white buildings. That choice kept the look clean and let us iterate fast.

It also solved a legal problem before it became one. One of our placeholder towers looked a lot like the Sears Tower, and Frank spotted it immediately: "The irony is our grounding guys, their gear is on top of those two spires in Chicago."

It would've been a great reference. But as Frank put it on a later call, "we can't use real buildings because of copyrights."

So the city stayed stylized, with lighter glass and a slightly futuristic feel, nodding to real landmarks without copying them. Our team's view was that this looks better anyway, because it keeps attention on the products.

Yassin Nasser Allah, who's kept TE's side aligned throughout, asked the question that shaped the build: "Just quickly on the city, will we be able to zoom out?" The worry was practical: "as we build also new interactive experiences over the next months and so past data center and solar just want to make sure that we will find room to integrate these."

The answer was yes. It's a full 3D environment, so new locations can be bolted on as TE adds them.

Getting the solar farm right

Solar became the top priority because TE wanted it ready for RE+ in November. Data center work would follow and stay a work in progress after the show.

On September 17, we spent an hour with Frank walking through the solar scene live, with one of our 3D artists driving. The first piece of feedback was about scale. The solar farm, substation, and battery storage needed to move off the roads and spread out into a field, the way large US utility solar farms actually sit.

The details mattered. Fenced zones. Access roads to the inverters.

Underground cable views near the substation. Panels shown from the back so the connectors are visible and clickable.

Frank's read on the equipment we'd placed: "So as far as the actual gear, that's pretty like accurate for what we would have out in the, out in the dirt."

Where 3D models for grounding products weren't available yet, we used static images as placeholders so the build could keep moving.

Showing it early on purpose

On September 30, we shared a clickable version of both the solar and data center locations. It was still high level, with no componentry yet, but the camera moves and views were wired up so TE could see the angles.

Yassin wasn't expecting it: "Very, very nice. Love it." And then: "I wasn't expecting this kind of update at all for today. I was expecting it in two to four weeks still, but not today."

The reason for showing it that early was simple. Catching a bad angle in September is cheap; catching it a week before the show isn't.

Yassin asked to share the link internally right away, then added, "As long as it's not costing you more time to do edits later on." We asked to wait until the next level, partly because we already had our own list of fixes. (Our team admitted the road texture looked like the road worker was about to get fired.)

That review also settled a few structural calls. Products would sit under broad categories, with a carousel planned to avoid clutter. Missing 3D models would be swapped for high-res PNGs to hold the schedule.

Battery storage would get a prominent spot in the data center scene. Solar and data center would stay separate for now, with integrated menus planned after the trade shows.

Three layers, five silos

By October 14, the solar location had pop-up placeholders with product renderings inside, buttons pointing to specific spots in the scene, and an updated trench that looked properly dug up. Aaron Bandolin, who manages Yassin, joined to see it firsthand and asked right away, "Is it possible to point at specific spots?"

It is. The plan is for hovering to highlight a part and for hotspots to link out to product pages or PDFs.

Frank framed the moment well: "because we had to get through A and B before we could start talking about C." Then: "So now we're just C finally."

The information architecture became the main conversation. Yassin laid out the challenge on TE's side: "We have, we have part numbers and we have product grouping." Some belong at one level and some at the next. "And that's on us to provide you this architecture of what should show now and what should show after."

The group agreed on a few rules:

• Keep navigation to about 3 clicks so buyers don't wander off.
• Use around 20 rotatable GLB models, with short animated videos for smaller parts that'd be confusing as freestanding 3D.
• Show connector internals rather than only installed views.
• Collect feedback as comments on screenshots in our portal instead of spreadsheets.

Frank summed up the pace: "we're in the four to five week window so it all starts speeding up."

On October 28, Anita Lucia Costamagna joined the review. One open question was whether to move solar and data centers to the center of the opening shot, since the city itself isn't TE's core business. Frank explained why the experience would open on solar for now: "Right now, quick and easy is our tier one is the solar view."

The long-term picture is bigger. "This thing's going to have 10 or 15 buttons on it and the city is going to be in the middle," Frank said. Below that, "the tier two really is five different silos."

At that point, 16 STEP files had become 3D objects, the solar location had 22 buttons, and the data center location was shaping up to need 40 to 50 products. The plan: finish solar, then reuse the same tiered structure for data center.

What's built and what's still in progress

As of November 6, here's where things stand.

Built and in review: the expandable city, the solar location with new home buttons and a tagline, leader lines that animate to each product, additional zoom-ins (the load break disconnect box drills into the complete trunk solution), grounding pathways, labels, and every GLB TE provided placed into the drill-downs. A transparent substation cutaway was restored so the grounding stays visible.

Still open: final product images where GLBs weren't provided, some product videos, a road texture swap to blacktop, and making the perimeter fence easier to see from the wide view. An offline package for the show is targeted before November 17, with a USB backup planned.

Planned: the data center location, targeted for year-end. The rebuild of the existing data center experience with real, searchable text. More sectors in the city as TE adds them.

The solar location hasn't been in front of buyers yet. RE+ is the first test.

What TE will have going in is a single place where a utility buyer, an EPC, or a data center operator can find their part of the grid, click in, and see exactly where a splice, a strap, or a connector does its job. For a portfolio this intertwined, that's the picture that was missing.