XR and Technical Design : Brendan Tipney

Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro : Unity, C#, Shader Graph

Asset 15

Asset 15 started life as a volumetric video story. For the Quest 3 and Vision Pro version we kept the captures and the story, and almost nothing else. I redesigned it from the ground up as a full environment AR game that plays out in your actual room, controlled entirely with hand tracking and gestures.

Mixed RealityHand Tracking Game DesignShaders

Role. Main game designer and technical designer on the project.
Code. Wrote most of the gameplay code in Unity and C#, with one other developer.
Shaders. Built every custom shader in the game with Shader Graph.
Team. Turned designs into plans the team could build from, and helped run the project.

01 : Menu

Levels on the ceiling

Levels hang from nodes mounted on your ceiling. You reach up and pull one down to play it.

02 : Mode one

Logic gate puzzle

Move OR, AND, and NOR nodes around the room in 3D, connecting and breaking links until the circuit works.

03 : Mode two

Assembly puzzle

Pieces of a volumetric capture are spread around your space. Find them and put the person back together.

Mockup of the Asset 15 ceiling menu, with level nodes hanging from a disc on the ceiling — Early mockup of the ceiling menu

The finished menu, pulling a level down

Rebuilding a volumetric capture

Looking Glass and Leap Motion : Unity, C#

Touchable Hologram

A trade show demo that put a volumetric capture inside a Looking Glass holographic display and handed control to whoever walked up. With a Leap Motion under the display, visitors could rotate, zoom, and pan the hologram with their bare hands.

Looking GlassLeap MotionGesture Input

Web AR : 8th Wall

AR Cards

Printed cards we handed out at trade shows. Point a phone at one and a volumetric character plays back standing on the card, and stays locked to it as you move the card around. Nothing to install: it runs in the phone's browser.

8th WallImage TrackingVolumetric Video

Web AR prototype

AR Shopping

A prototype store page. Click a piece of clothing and a volumetric model wearing it appears in AR, placed and tracked in the shopper's own room, so you see a real person moving in the outfit instead of a flat product photo.

Web ARPrototypeE-commerce

Trade shows : about ten shipped

Demo Reel

Most of my time as a Technical Designer went into demos for trade shows, about ten of them across Tilt Five, Quest 3, Vision Pro, Looking Glass, and phones. Each one had to show off volumetric video to people walking up to a booth.

Spatial UI with a volumetric presenter

A capture inside a miniature scene

Volumetric playback in mobile web AR

Creator tools : HoloSuite and the Unity HoloSuite Player

Both Sides of the Tool

HoloSuite is Arcturus's software for editing volumetric video. For two years as Product Specialist I was the person creators called when something didn't work: over 100 customers, including enterprise accounts, editing captures and deploying them in Unity and Unreal. I wrote the docs and tutorials, ran onboarding and training, and worked the booth at AWE.

Later I helped develop HoloSuite and the Unity HoloSuite Player plugin, with a focus on fast, intuitive UI and controls. Hearing exactly where creators get stuck, then getting to fix it, is my favorite loop in this work.

Listen

Hear exactly where a creator got stuck.

Own it

Take the problem and narrow in fast.

Shape

Change the UI and controls so it goes away.

Teach

Write docs that work the first time.

Tools UXUnity PluginDocumentationTraining

2021 : Blender to Looking Glass

Before Arcturus

I was already making holograms before I joined. This was my first round of content for the Looking Glass: fluid simulations and abstract shorts built in Blender, then exported to the display's quilt format for true 3D playback.

From the PsyPhi archive →