Experience
Unity VR Development
Freelancer : Lead Developer : 2015 - Current
2019: I was hired by VRPatients to UI/UX both the back end and front end of their innovative product that trains EMTs and nurses through virtual reality. See more in my portfolio and at http://VRPatients.com
2018: I was contracted by Method Studios to come in as a UI/UX designer for the creation of a new app for MagicLeap and the NBA.Read more about this project here: https://www.magicleap.com/news/product-updates/nba-app-launch
2017: I built two Mobile VR Games for iOS and Android: Robot Resurrection and The Guardian: Killing Zone - On these two projects I did the music and sound design, the level design, I did all of the assets for both the enemies and the environments, and about half of the code. I did almost all of the code for Robot Resurrection, but just the enemy behavior for The Guardian. I concepted and developed the color coded weapon system and game-play in Robot Resurrection as well. I did both of these projects as a remote developer for Genie Games over the course of about six to seven months.
From September of 2015 thru March of 2016 I was the senior dev on VR data visualization app for the Air Force that used an Oculus DK2. It leverages several map services and combines them with data from the MIDB into a robust tool for military analysts.
In the summer of 2015 I worked on a prototype using the Oculus Gear VR that was for automotive imaging company Evox Images. This was my first VR project and it took a lot of reading and experimentation to have a working understanding of VR terms of how to prevent motion sickness, how to setup the camera rigs, how the SDKs work. I've learned the good, the bad, and the exciting things that this twist on digital media has brought to the market place.
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Unity AR & MR Development
Freelancer : Lead Developer : 2015 - Current
The Mindshow Mixed Reality Commercial: There’s nothing like bootstrapping a new technology and new paradigms of creating content. The guys at Visionary VR were building a cartoon creation game/app that allowed users to build and dress sets, fill them with puppets, and then animate those puppets using a a Vive headset and wands. The true magic of their approach though was the user “possessed” the puppets as a means of animating them. Once “possessed” the puppet became affixed to the user mimicking the user’s speech and movements. In this way the user could act out each character’s parts or hand the Vive off to other people in the room so they could act out other characters one by one. The end result is a fantastic experience and they wanted to capture that in a commercial similar to the one Google made for Tilt Brush, another Vive app. What’s special about the commercial Google made is shows the user in context of the actual VR experience that the user is experiencing without any post production FX. This means that the director of photography shooting the live actor can also see the live VR through the camera! We are talking revolutionary, super exciting stuff here! Visionary VR hired me to create a system and the accompanying tools for Visionary VR to shoot footage just like Google’s inside their own office. To achieve this I planned out and built a green screen facility, camera rigs, and custom software tools that extended Valve’s Vive VR developer tools. The tools that I built made it possible to efficiently manipulate the VR app from outside while another user is in it, manipulate a virtual camera that tracks with our real world camera, and then to capture a live 4K feed while also compositing it on the fly so the DP and director can see the VR and the real world matted together live while they are shooting. Not only did I build the tools but I was working on set through the entire production. I recorded every shot you see here, and there's only post production on one shot! See the commercial for Mindshow here.
During the first half of 2015 I built two Android apps for Google's new initiative Project Tango. Google had set out to make new phones and tablets that excelled at AR and they wanted to launch the device with a suite of apps tailor made for this new platform. So Google contacted Left Field Labs, who is one of Google's primary agencies of record, who then brought me in as a contractor.This was really cool stuff... it's kinda like making iPhone apps six months before the Apple App Store went online. Bleeding edge at it's finest. The API for project Tango wasn't even finished yet. I would receive new builds of the API every week. This meant that my code was forced to change on a weekly basis to reflect the updates in the API. Fortunately Google was very helpful and I was put in direct contact with engineers on their side to help me should the need arise.
The first of the two apps I built for Tango is an app called Space Sketcher. This was a precursor to Google's Tilt Brush, an app that allows you to paint/sculpt in real physical space. it got glowing write-ups in hundreds of tech blogs, most notably Gizmodo. In this app the user can draw/sculpt in physical space. Here is the Space Sketchr write up in Gizmodo.
The second is a game called Cowpocalype which was prominently featured at GDC that year. In this game the player is interacting with a planet in physical space. The planet hovers in the room that the user is in and the user must move around the physical space while blasting aliens as they fly around the planet trying to abduct the cute lil cows. It's a very cool experience and an interesting look at what the future holds in interactive. This is a piece I am very proud of., find out more here on the Cowpocalypse Official Website.
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Unity 3D Development
Freelancer : Lead Developer : 2010 - 2014
This period consisted of Unity 3D development of mobile games in C# delivered on the iOS and Android platforms. Game titles I've worked on include: Curious George, Animal Planet, Snow White & the Huntsman, Flavor Monsters, Glave Gunner, Sin City, and Monsterology. During this time I consulted for Black Ops Entertainment, Sabertooth Interactive, Silicon Beach Media, M2, and Bemis Balkind. As a member of larger teams I developed the tools and art pipeline for several of these projects. I built a new multiplane 3D comics engine for Glave Gunner and Sin City. All of these projects were Agile, with most of them being managed through Jira although we also used Basecamp. Most of the projects were housed in SVN repositories and one project in GIT. I was a lead dev on all of these projects and also had some hand in the look and feel, designing most of the UI in all of these titles.
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Codename Games / Atari
Freelance : Lead Developer : 2010 - 2011
I was the lead on a Facebook game for Atari inspired by Atari's Classic game Outlaw. This game was an action/collecting game with a wild west theme. I was the lead developer on this project, managing the artists creating the assets, over seeing a junior SQL/PHP developer, and responsible for all of the IA on the project. The game featured one on one realtime duels between remote players. Multiplayer functionality was built on top of Smart Fox Server 2. In addition to writing all of the AS3 code for this project I also wrote all of the sever side Java code for the multiplayer portion of the game.
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Experience Sites / Banner Ads
Freelancer : Lead Developer : 2010
I built a site for the Burning Man performance group Cirque Berzerk while also spending about a month on a 2D/3D avatar system for Car Town the Facebook game. I also built sites for several midsized agencies during this year: Hooky, Sabertooth, and The Famous Group. These included a banner ad campaign and site for Blue Cross, banner ads for OfficeMax, Sony PS3, EA's Army of 2 and Mass Effect 2, a game and experience site for a joint Energizer/Dreamworks advertising push. I've also done several augmented reality demos that were used for pitches to prospective clients like Hershey's and Chase. I managed the development aspect of all of these projects from start to finish, planning and wireframing the sites, writing code, and managing junior developers and designers.
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Start Up / Product Development: MagNet
Staff : Lead Developer : 2008 – 2009
At MagNet I was the lead developer on a Flash powered viral ecommerce project. We built a service from the ground up that allowed artists to upload and manage all of their content and merch via an AJAX powered portal. The artist was then able to sell direct to consumer via an elegantly designed Flash widget that displayed the content in a real time 3D browser. This product was used as a part of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and was also used by several performing artists including Seal. The entire flash widget was built in a combination of Flash and Flex and written entirely in AS3 using the PaperVision3D open source library. Along with being their lead Flash developer, I was also heavily involved in the planning, researching, and prototyping of the product. I did much of the companies recruiting, interviewing, and hiring of developers, designers, and 3D modelers. This was a startup I really believed in. I worked 7 days a week, kept a tooth brush at the office, and was fully committed to it’s success. I really thought we were going to change the world and it was an exhilarating / bittersweet experience. The company ran out of money after the stock market crashed in '08 and and closed it's doors shortly after.
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Game Development : Yahoo! Games
Staff : Lead Developer : 2006 - 2008
I built small games for various Yahoo! verticals as their senior Flash and FLEX developer. Mostly Flash trivia games and banner ad games. The primary goal for Yahoo!’s in house game development was to use games as a means of leveraging all the content and data that falls under the Yahoo! umbrella. People took a lot of pride in their work and there was a rad vibe there. Corporate restructuring closed down the Santa Monica offices and I declined the relocation to Sunnyvale.
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Experience Sites : Blitz
Staff : Lead Developer : 2005 - 2006
I worked on projects for: Epson, Honda, Microsoft, GE, and NBC|Universal. I was the lead developer on the projects for MSFT, Honda, and Epson. My work on Epson won 1 FWA Site of the Day award and was selected as an honoree for the 2007 Webby’s. This is also the period of time in which I was doing a fair amount of lecturing on PaperVision3D at various Flash events around the country.
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Experience Sites : Warner Brothers Online
Staff : Lead Developer : 2004 - 2005
I worked on three major projects for Warner Brothers Online. I built the entire site for a new film opening in October called Infamous for Warner Independent Pictures (WIP); I implemented the multimedia page and player for The Science of Sleep (another WIP site); I built several components along with all the print functionality for Toonify.com's new "Toonify" engine. I also worked on several smaller sites projects including a site for Batman Lego's, and the Beer Fest movie site.
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Web Applications & Experience Sites
Freelancer : Flash Developer : 2004
I developed the Flash front end for a very large on demand streaming video system. During this time I also wrote the AuctionHelper app for AuctionLynxx. This was a widget app that was embedded into Ebay sales pages that exposed buyers to other items that the vendor was selling. I also developed the Flash front end for several large CMS driven web sites for: The Grateful Dead, Voss, Nokia, J D Power & Assoc. My primary role in all of these projects was coding in ActionScript 2.0, though it sometimes required that I create or modify code in PHP.
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J. Bullock & Associates : 2000 – 2004
Staff : Director of Interactive Media : 2004
I worked with the sales and management team to develop a new Interactive Media branch of J. Bullock & Associates (JBA). I built several touch screen Kiosk applications in Flash that were deployed in Kaufman and Broad sales offices around the country.
Staff : Photoshop Illustrator / Flash Developer / 3D Tools Developer : 2002 - 2003
I began building RevisionWare 2, the first version had become an integral part of JBA’s revision process, but it couldn’t handle the volume of users and projects that they needed. So over the next 5 months while still doing illustration work I designed and coded the new version with the help of a Java developer who built the server side code on an Apache server running Tomcat 4. RevisionWare won the award for Best Flash Application taht year at Flash Forward NY 2004. I also developed tools, templates, and material libraries to streamline the production process. Tools I wrote such as The CapOMatic, and the RoofMaster 5000 dramatically reduced the time it took to do repetitive modeling tasks while producing much higher quality models. J Bullock & Associates continues to use these tools to this day (Yes, even in 2018!).
Staff : Photoshop Artist / 3D Modeler : 2000 - 2001
Initially I was doing renderings of residential homes, using scanned line drawings, and a library of colors and pre made .jpg patterns, which were then transformed into perspective. In addition to that I also wrote several small Flash driven applications for them, including RevisionWare 1.
