Portfolio

Bunker Hill VR

Bunker Hill VR is a VR recreation of 1930s Downtown Los Angeles. As a VR developer, I worked with architectural and humanities scholars across institutions to create 3D assets from historical photographs and civil engineering schematics to create web, desktop, and VR applications. We benefited from collaborations with many institutions such as the Los Angeles City Archives, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, the Library of Congress, the Getty, and the Huntington Library.

Booksnake AR

Booksnake lets you explore digitized archival items in the real world. It uses the International Image Interoperability Framework or IIIF, an open framework used by dozens of leading galleries, libraries, and archives, museums around the world to share archival images. Booksnake uses IIIF to download an item's image and metadata, then creates a custom virtual object for you to explore in the real world. During this project, I executed technical aspects of project management, scoping features, designs, and app data architecture.

Booksnake is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities under a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (HAA-287859, “Booksnake: Building and Testing an Augmented Reality Tool for Embodied Interaction with Existing Digitized Archival Materials”).

Bodyscape and other fashion pieces

Bodyscape is a 3D printed fashion piece by media artist Behnaz Farahi whose form is generated from langer lines, sparing the otherwise brittle material from forces of the model’s movement. It features lights that move along the body in response to torso movement by using hidden accelerometers, a fingernail-sized microcomputer, and special circuitry to reduce form factor and power.

I wrote the software for this piece as well as maintenance and safety code for Caress of the Gaze, which includes bespoke pneumatic systems, and Synapse which uses an EMG based brain computer interface. Unique constraints for wearable software include low computational power, using temperature and pressure readings to regulate model safety, and bluetooth communication for remote operation.

Breath Garden on the Brains@Play platform

Breath Garden is a WebXR based immersive environment linked to breathing exercises integrated with the Brains@Play BCI platform. It was built for the 2021 XR Brain Jam. Graphical elements of the environment can be connected to guided breathing exercises or data from heart rate sensors, hemoencephalography (HEG), or electroencephalography (EEG) by way of exposing shader uniforms. I wrote the graphics code for this environment and worked with an interdisciplinary team to design the experience.

Brains@Play is a community based initiative to proliferate access to BCI technology. They develop a platform that links many different sensors and health devices to front-end javascript based apps for distribution through Chrome based PWAs. Currently, the team is working on multiplayer functionality. Brains@Play was started with administrative support and funding from the Ahmanson Lab – In the early days of this community, I provided networking expertise and distribution advice, and since then it has garnered contributors beyond the university, gained funding through grants, and created an impactful international competition to encourage ethical BCI use.

Building a Virtual Renaissance Library: Stanza Della Segnatura

In Building a Virtual Renaissance: Stanza Della Segnatura, the Ahmanson Lab collaborated with the Vatican to build an annotated rendition of one area of the Raphael Rooms, which contain multiple important frescoes originating in the High Renaissance. The 16th century art historian Vasari compared figures in these frescoes across the room, creating a 3D narrative that would move between the walls and the ceiling. This project’s large interdisciplinary effort led to the implementation of an annotation interface— lines that criss-cross and entangle this space, a merit that would help this project gain a substantial grant from the NEH.

Due to the pandemic, we used the affordances of WebGL to share the experience with those that could not view the experience in a headset. I worked on the publishing aspect of this project, running WebGL builds and performance profiling to ensure that the 3D application could be experienced in a web browser with computational constraints.

Minerva

Minerva is a Raspberry Pi based telepresence robot that serves as an educational platform to allow students to practice implementing features in a computationally limited environment such as networking, controls, and computer vision.

I helped Professor Phil Ethington build out the circuitry over zoom during campus closure, and when we returned, I specified a network architecture and taught students how to implement various features.

Spectra

Spectra is a prototype WebXR based 3D application that currently displays linguistically relevant phonetic data and acoustic properties of a voice sample from the Mozilla Common Voice dataset. My original goal was to compare and contrast audio samples in VR and to automatically calculate phonetic indicators to reduce analysis time. I hoped to take advantage of 3D affordances to present information dense diagrams and use the web to asynchronously load data from a backend – offloading computation from the rendering device and allowing researchers to work with more data.

It takes advantage of a custom three.js based VR development workflow based on techniques by Bruno Simon that helps minimize development time and enables rapid distribution through Github Pages.

YUR Watch

The YUR Watch is an engine plugin that enables an end-user to wear an in-game smart watch that displays fitness information such as estimated heart rate, squat quantity, and calories burned. As an engineer, I worked on code migration, security, authentication, and OpenXR integration.

Selected generative art pieces

These are some of my favorite generative art pieces that primarily rely on three.js and shader code. I use this creative practice to study techniques in graphics. One of my favorite pieces, Diwali on the Styx uses a technique popularized by Inigo Quilez called domain warping.