2020 - Present
For the last 4 years, I have focused on co-founding a studio with several of my former colleagues at Magic Leap and becoming an XR consultant for non-profit organizations such as the United Nations and The World Bank. This era was filled with the learning of new skills in business development, fund raising/pitching, art direction, UX, product strategy in AR and Web3, and becoming a pioneer in the space of XR for sustainability and world issues.
The World Bank
XR Project Manager
Visualizing Fragility is my first project at the World Bank - an application on Quest 3 utilizing world bank data around extreme poverty, climate change, food insecurity, and debt distress for fragile countries.
Debuted at the Fragility Forum 2024 event, it was World Bank's first mixed reality experience using passthrough XR. As a project manager, my role was in working with our clients on the FCV team (fragility, conflict, violence) and our internal development team to build a moving narrative based experience that visualized how fragile countries are more impacted by the effects of environmental and economic struggles.
QXR Studios
Co-Founder, Director
QXR Studios is an international team of veteran storytellers, game designers, and technical innovators. We are a transmedia creative studio building rich interactive worlds using emerging technologies.
As a co-founder, I am responsible for business strategy and partnerships, brand and visual design, art and creative direction, website creation, and experience design/UX for our augmented reality and Web3 projects.
Ship of the Dead
Art Direction, UI/UX, Visual prototyping in Unreal
The Ship of the Dead is an augmented reality audiobook experience created by Qxr in partnership with international best-selling author, Kate Mosse. We have brought one of Kate’s beloved ghost stories to life on your phone fusing immersive visual and sound design with narration by the author.
Metropolis Origins
Design, UI/UX, Production, Release Management
Metropolis Origins is a Web3 trading card game set in QXR Studios' own cyberpunk IP. Produced over 100 cards with unique abilities and artwork and minted on the WAX blockchain. Build your deck, choosing from Government, Corporate or Underground factions, and play against an AI or other players from around the world. Use muscle, cunning, or hacking skills to make your way up from the dark alleys to the bright lights of Metropolis. Just don't lose.
Metropolis for Snap
Experience Designer, Environment and UI/UX
In partnership with the Snap Ghost innovation program, QXR Studios built a narrative based application where a character can navigate around your room and interact with you and your furniture. The application was built in Snap Lens Studio and showcases environment sensing, table/chair/wall/floor detection and a hidden 3D scene behind a door.
United Nations Development Programme
XR & Technology Innovation Specialist
Researcher & Solutions Architect
I am supporting UNDP's digital innovation and initiatives by providing advisory for the deployment of XR technologies and solutions to their pilot programs. In collaboration with the UNDP team, I lead the research and use case definition creation of Augmented Reality applications towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly targeting areas of carbon footprint reduction and climate change. This involved investigating high risk geographical locations and available data, directing the drawing of use case concepts, and architecting software solutions that could be built or licensed.
Solutions focus on digital co-presence (volumetric or avatar-based telecommunications) and spatial data visualization.
The first half of these initiatives were done while I was at Magic Leap and I am now continuing them with UNDP as an advisor.
2015 - 2020
I joined Magic Leap in 2015 as an SDK PM during the early stage of the company. The hardware functionality and form factor were not yet final and the software requirements were still being defined. Due to the rapidly changing environment, I shifted to R&D efforts. During my time there, I built and managed 2 R&D labs that focused on "first turn-on" CV tests, micro-experience prototyping, early product design exploration, and mid-far applications of AR in collaboration with a wide range of strategic partners.
My role was fluid, ranging from sr technical producer/PM, R&D & innovation lead, systems designer, and researcher.
Magicverse
Researcher, Systems Designer
"Magicverse" could be best described as the Magic Leap's version of the Spatial Web or XR Metaverse. The idea was first conceived in 2018 and I was brought on to help put some definition around what the platform is and could do. The early concepts were based around a city (or planet)-scaled XR platform that powered different layers of applications that serviced each industry or sector.
I conducted preliminary research on the key sectors such as transportation, education, energy, healthcare, urban planning, entertainment, manufacturing, to get an understanding of their existing pain points. I then performed another set of analysis on the current state and trajectory of emerging technology pillars that would be needed to realize a "spatial web" and how they could address those pain points. These included: XR, smart city, IOT, blockchain, artificial intelligence, cloud, 5G, volumetric streaming, digital twin and geo mapping.
From there, I drafted a series of early architecture diagrams of the Magicverse platform with these components and worked with the technical leads at the company to take them to the next stage of software and product requirements definition.
Smart Cities Data Visualization
R&D Lead, Experience Designer
A predecessor to the Magicverse work, this proof of concept of a miniature city was created for one of our strategic partners in large scale city planning. Based on some of the early sector research done, we decided to overlay different datasets on a digital twin of a globe and downtown Los Angeles.
Datasets pulled from open sources were visualized:
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Aviation paths
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Population
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Pollution
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LIVE Traffic density
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Planned construction
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Bike share depots
The street layout of downtown LA was pulled from Mapbox and the buildings were manually modeled, textured, and lit in Unity.
The purpose of this application was to demonstrate sample functionality for the future of urban planning that included rapid design and iteration of new construction and seeing potential impacts from invisible data such as pollution and energy waste. The app was shown to hundreds of partners, clients, executives, investors, scientists, and showcased at numerous events.
Cosmic Buddha Remote Presentation Experience
R&D Lead, Experience Designer
In partnership with The Smithsonian Institute Digitization Office, our team ported their digital Cosmic Buddha statue from their ancient Chinese art collection to Magic Leap and added real-time multi-user features and beautiful storytelling visual effects. The goal of the project was to showcase an example in the future of education, to see how we can extend the museum offerings to remote locations and classroom scenarios. A curator was able to drive the visual effects highlights over the body of the statue in real-time to 10-20 remote users simultaneously while switching between different presentation modalities. The app was showcased at numerous educational events showing off the early capabilities of remote learning and even remote conference attendance. The app was built in Unity and Playfab was used to handle the real-time multi-user sessions, data, and audio.
Splashing Whale (in Gym)
R&D Lead, Experience Designer
I had the privilege to produce our iconic "whale in gym" for the device. A high quality model of a humpback whale was polished, textured, lit in Unity and animated to splash into any meshed flat surface. The experience was showcased at Leapcon and at the University of Miami gym, where we connected the experience to 3 industry grade fans and a master controller where we would trigger the whale app on multiple headsets at once and blast the users with wind and deep splash sounds effects from sub woofer speakers.
Astronaut
R&D Lead, Experience Designer
The astronaut was produced at the same time as the whale, both being examples of pushing the graphics and rendering quality of our technology to create realistic looking content. Because of these goals, these projects fell inside the R&D space, allowing us to perform a variety of visual-technical-performance trade-off tests around materials, model lighting, environmental lighting, shadows, textures, and interactions. The astronaut had knowledge of your physical location via headpose and jumped to you and waved.
Raining Code
Producer
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Matrix, we set out to create a Magic Leap inspired version of the raining code that would be used to play on large projectors at events and inside executive presentation decks. I took the color scheme of our brand at the time and designed the aesthetic. I worked with two technical artists to create the looping video and also an application that skinned a meshed room with the texture. The video was used at Leapcon during the announcement of the Magicverse platform and numerous public events.
Magic Kit - SDK Sample Apps
Program Manager
I was the technical PM for the Interaction Lab, a multi-disciplined team of engineers, designers, and artists within the Systems Engineering department. The team had conducted over a hundred of "first turn on" CV tests which involved rapid prototyping micro-experiences using those features to uncover good interaction combination that were candidates for full releasable applications. Our R&D tests combined different input modalities and computer vision features such as eye tracking, head pose, 6DOF controller, touch input, meshing, voice, planes, and gestures with each other.
As we neared the launch of the Magic Leap One headset and SDK, the team isolated a handful of micro-experiences that would be released alongside the SDK to provide best practices and sample code for making their own apps. Examples included an eye-gaze and head pose responding cloud asset, a meshing and 6DOF controlled set of vehicles, voice and gestured controlled content and more.
Other Projects
World's Fair Expo 2020
Program Manager
During the concept phase of the World's Fair Expo, I became the technical program manager overseeing several projects that conceptualized and prototyped experiences that could be showcased inside their pavilions and site-wide. The workstreams I managed included: visitor walk through narrative creation, the creation of over 100 pieces of concept artwork, the development of a fly-through digital simulation of the fair grounds in VR/AR, experience design, technical feasibility analysis, and the integration of materials into several 100+ page proposal books. In addition, I also oversaw logistics and tech demos for hosting teams of executives and the UAE Minister of State.
Defend the Cake LLC
Creative Designer, Co-Founder
Developed a mobile game with two colleagues and formed an LLC around the app. Inspired by StarCraft custom games and the tower defense genre (and food), I came up with an idea for an accessible mid-core tower strategy game that could be played on mobile. I provided early concept drawings, game assets, world and environment designs, and designs for characters, builders, towers, and enemies. The game is available for mobile and PC and has been showcased at multiple conventions and Twitch & Youtube livestreams.
2015 - 2007
Magic Pixel Games (Acquired by Kabam) - 2013-2015
Producer and Release Manager
Mobile Development
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Managed a 30 person independent studio (Magic Pixel Games later acquired by Kabam) through entire lifecycle of team formation, product concept, prototyping, development, release, and product live maintenance.
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Content development, full release roll out, and live support for online mobile game "This Means WAR!" on iOS and Android.
Blizzard Entertainment - 2012-2013
Technical Producer
Internal Tools & Web Development
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Managed the development of several company-wide live service web applications and tools that required 24/7 uptime service used by over 6000 international employees.
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Managed feature requests, backlogs, requirements, delivery, and software deployment schedule.
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Implemented Agile Scrum, Kanban, and Lean processes to shorten development times and increase response time for live issues and software tool feature requests.
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Game Credit: StarCraft II: HotS, Diablo III: RoS, Hearthstone
Riot Games - 2010-2012
Producer and Test Engineer
Automation, Development Pipelines, Process Improvement
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Researched and deployed the ‘Continuous Delivery’ model and performed a gap analysis of the company's development process to identify bottlenecks, pain points and areas of critical need.
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Built and managed a team of engineers to develop internal tools and automated systems to improve company processes and customer experience.
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Built the company’s first compatibility laboratory and created automated tests for collection and analysis of game performance data, telemetry, and user data.
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Implemented “Pair Wise Testing” techniques to our QA process to reduce test cases by 90%.
Raytheon - 2008-2010
Radiation Effects Engineer
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Researched space orbit radiation levels, conducted radiation effects tests on semiconductors and integrated circuits, and presented results to space program leaders and stakeholders.
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Managed semiconductor parts qualification for multiple space programs, ensuring all components going into assembly were tested, approved, and completed on schedule.
Education
University of California Berkeley - 2007
Bachelors in Physics & Electrical Engineering
Research conducted on the following topics and fields:
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Cataclysmic variable stars at Lawrence Berkeley Lab
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Physical and mathematical scale laws
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Nano-materials in relation to shrinking transistor gates
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Cellular neural networks (CNN) for Physics modeling
