My Role: Design and development

This is an passion project which is still in development. It’s a mobile AR app which visualizes the huge sheets of ice which covered the landscape in the ice ages. It’s intended for use at scenic overlooks amid the dramatic landscapes of the Pacific NW.

The app is build in Unity and uses Mapbox to load terrain data at the user’s location, which the user then orients to match the real-world landscape. Then a layer of ice is placed at a specified height, where the digital terrain masks it out, creating an overlay on the real world.

This app is a work in progress, but here’s a demonstration of its current state.

More info on Mapbox toolset can be found at mapbox.com.

My Role: Lead Developer

ALT is a prototype for a reusable mobile AR platform by Shovels and Whiskey, designed to empower artists, teachers, and students to successfully explore AR with a minimum of coding experience.

Developed in Unreal Engine, the platform allows user to add their own artwork and alternative-history narrative text to a flexible AR game framework, making it discoverable and interactable in locations of their choosing.

This is an ongoing project, and is made possible by a grant from Epic Games. You can learn more on the project HERE.

My Role: Development, animation, and effects

The escape room ghost project is a space-based mobile AR app. It’s an interactive experience that allows the user to see a ghostly figure appear and move around the room. The ghost interacts with objects in the room and provides hints to the escape room puzzles.

The app is set up before each use by matching a pre-existing 3D scan of the room with the room itself. This is done by looking around the room space and allowing the app to detect planes, so that the AR elements can remain steady and and locked into place. The user can rotate and adjust the room scan mesh to match the room. The scan mesh then becomes invisible, but will still occlude the ghost and other AR elements, allowing them to move behind or through objects in the room.

The app then detects the presence of cards that the user finds and scans. Each of the cards triggers a unique animation in which the ghost appears in a puff of smoke, moves around the room to give the player a hint about the puzzle they are trying to solve, and then vanishes into smoke again.

Created by Sprocketship for Mental Trap Escape Room Games.

My Role: Developer

The Thinking Machine project is a VR experience by Shovels and Whiskey. It’s an educational tool that allows users to interact with information in the form of objects: selecting, moving, and categorizing customizable data “blocks”.

The experience is built in Unity using Windows Mixer Reality. You can learn more about it HERE.

This project also has a testing version which was built to explore various interaction modes. This included different methods of transporting around the scene, and of interacting with objects via the controllers.

Different combinations were then created and tested to see which ones were most intuitive to new or inexperienced VR users.

My role: App development in Unity

This app was created to showcase the incredible work of 360 Labs. Designed to be easily customized and extended, it draws videos and related content from Vimeo and allows the user to explore featured 360 films and learn more about the company. Users can look around the videos by turning their device or by swiping to rotate the view, and can download content to their device for offline access. The app also has a VR viewing mode for use with Cardboard headsets.

Get the App

My role: Asset design, modeling, and texturing, VR scene setup.

This ongoing mobile XR app uses a nautical theme for interface elements, and a “magic window” style VR scene that allows the user to look around by rotating their phone. I created and textured light, low-polygon models to prototype the VR elements, and rendered UI elements from 3D models to keep the look and style of the app consistent.

My Role: Development and Design

This very simple app was a gift for my parents; it’s a tide chart app that is specific to their favorite beach here on the Oregon coast. The goal of the app was to let the user see when the next high and low tides will be without needing an internet connection, as the area lacks cell coverage. The app contains three years’ worth of NOAA tide charts for the area. Created in Unity.

My role: Development, VR scene setup, model optimization

A prototype of an educational VR experience for 9iFX. Built for the Vive, the experience allows the user to observe and interact with a model of a Saturn rocket engine in various ways.

• Mode one displays the rocket at full size, and the user can spin the model on the Y axis to see all sides of it.
• Mode two provides the “exploded” view, where the user can see the individual pieces of the engine, and hover over each to see them highlighted and labeled.
• Mode three allows the user to rotate the model on two axes, and provides and interactive “cutaway” plane, which can be moved through the model to show its inner workings
• Mode four guides the user through assembling part of the engine. Pieces can be highlighted and labeled, rotated, grabbed and moved using the controllers.

My role: Effects creation, texturing

The Wisps are enemies in the fantastical VR fencing game Willowisp VR. They are real-time generative effects built in Unity, using a combination of particle systems and semi-transparent textures to create fire and magic effects.

Each Wisp is made up of simple particle systems that use partially transparent, additive textures to appear more complex. The limited number of particles keeps the effect efficient and the variety of textures makes each Wisp recognizable and visually engaging.

An example of particle system layers (left) and the texture they use:

Core layer:

Effect layer:

Edge layer:

Complete Wisp:

The edge layer’s opacity is limited to the outside rim, which gives the Wisp a clearly defined spherical edge from any angle. This matches with the object’s collider in-game and shows the player clearly where their target is.

Wisp styles:

My role: Animation

As a student in Clackamas Community College’s first Hololens Development course, I was part of the team tasked with creating an app to help students in CCC’s automotive courses visualize the workings of the gearbox in an automatic transmission. The interactions of the gears and the power flow of the device is notoriously hard to explain using 2D diagrams, so the transmission was chosen in part to showcase the power of AR as an educational tool. The app was started by the class as a whole and completed by a small group of students, myself included, after the course was over.

The Transmission app in action.

My role: 3D modelling

360 Labs contacted me to create a 3D representation of the spherical grid object that is part of their logo. Converting the flat image to a 3-dimensional form presented some challenges — the image is somewhat ambiguous about the geometry of the “ribbons” and how they connect on the sides and back of the sphere. However, careful observation and attention to perspective allowed me to create a shape that both matches the image and remains visually pleasing from all angles.

My role: Polygon reduction

In order to be used in a game engine or many other applications, models made in CAD programs need to be converted into mesh models. These converted models are often very high-polygon and need to be reduced in order to be usable. This was the case with the model used in the VR Saturn Rocket visualization project. Below is the model before and after reduction — visually essentially unchanged, but with a drastic difference in geometric complexity.

My role: 3D modelling, optimization, and texturing

This scale model of a Capri 22 sailboat was constructed based on photo reference to be part of a promotional AR experience. Meant to be viewed either life-size or scaled, the geometry and texturing are optimized for AR — a careful balance between realism and the processing constraints of the Hololens.

The model includes texture maps for color, surface normals, and specularity, as well as emission to simulate the translucency of of the sails where light and shadow calculations would be too computationally complex.