Experience
Projects
"I am an experienced Unity and Unreal Engine developer who specialises in learning and virtual reality. My core skills are; creating VR and AR applications for enterprise, teaching core programming and soft skills, growing and leading the projects and teams. Dealing with clients regularly, I demonstrate XR solutions with a passion for the industry that is second to none. I have led the development of projects for high profile companies across the oil and gas sector, bringing complex digital twin CAD into VR. I liase with teams across the UK to identify client needs and ensure the right value added for VR. I am a regular member of the global XR community and have presented projects and solutions to technology centre leads. Outside of XR, I previously taught and supported apprenticeship programmes, delivering a wide variety of technical and soft skills. I have experience presenting to both clients and senior leadership, as well as presenting on stage at the learning expo in London. I have developed in Unity for over 7 years and used Unity as a full time XR developer for 2 years. I currently use Unreal Engine and have been doing so for 5 years, over two of those years have been used to create an incredibly dense VR application. I have designed, architected and developed VR and AR applications with a focus on business and enterprise. I am experienced in working with leadership, leading a team, working in SCRUM and review processes to ensure high quality applications sooner. I also consistently use AWS, Jenkins, git and JIRA in my software development stack. In my spare time I work on my own games and I have published one android app to the Play Store. "
I lead a team of artists and developers to create VR training applications, primarily for the oil and gas sector. Because of my teaching background, I excelled at embedding learning into the VR applications. Our largest project was 3 digital twins with an ever evolving CAD. I built a Jenkins pipeline to integrate with Unreal Engine and process CAD using internally developed tools. I work very closely with the learning team and involved in the product strategy in the games based learning space. I develop using C++ behind blueprints in Unreal Engine and ensure all of the team apply optimisation standards across all projects.
As a capability lead, my core role is to facilitate growth within the XR community. This involves leading projects, training staff and engaging in outreach projects. My biggest achievementsin this role were; creating the content for and teaching Accenture’s first XR training course, creating Accenture’s first XR DevOps build pipeline and hosting an event celebrating XR in Newcastle. In the first year I built the team of 4 core members and a wider community of 30 resources with XR skills at various levels. By year two I had already completed around 8 AR and VR projects.
This is the role that developed my passion for XR. I taught games development using MonoGame (XNA), Unity and Unreal as well as modelling and animation across Blender, Maya and 3DS Max. I was responsible for reporting on the games curriculum, creating course and module guides and improving retention and achievement.
We were given an incredible challenge. To take 3 sets of complex CAD and make it run in VR. In addition to this, the CAD would need to change regularly and the digital twin would need to adapt. To do this, I created a Jenkins pipeline to break the CAD into digestable chunks and (using a mix of internally created and built in tools) generated static meshes, imported them into levels and lightbaked the scene and finally uploading them to the project. In addition, I also created learning material via flythroughs as well as exploring the entire vessel in VR. It also won a Digital Innovation Award (more).
This project required a lot of research. We were asked to create a generic walkthrough of the battery production process and visualise this in VR. The challenge was verifying that the 3D assets were accurrate enough to represent the learning content. My role was to coordinate the production of this and ensure it was delivered on time to the client.
Using real time photogrammetry in AR using 6D.ai, an Oculus Quest to view the photogrammetry in VR and a Node.js server to bridge it all together, this was a challenging project to overcome. One user would scan an environment where a 3D mesh would be created and shared to the cloud and downloaded to an Oculus Rift in real-time. It will be presented in Germany for an XR competition.
This is a fully interactive cross-platform VR application, training a user on how to operate heavy machinery in a safe environment while still giving the sense of vertigo. The goal was to have a one -to-one experience of a virtual Cherry Picker to the real thing. Key features were; multiplayer, asynchronous multiplayer, high-end graphics and cross-platform.
This Oculus Go app uses voice recognition to analyse your voice and give feedback on your presentation skills. It provides analytics on your performance so you can identify your weaknesses and how to improve them in a 360 environment. This was the launch point for the Immersive Learning platform across Accenture Global.
This was an interactive way to showcase the benefits of a Liquid Studio, using a collection of animations for Liquid Studios AR presentation, with the same source code used in the Tech Vision.
I lead the development of two learning scenarios. In both, the user must put on their protective equipment and complete a series of actions that lead into branching paths. There are multiple fail states that are all related to maintaining a turbine. VR was instrumental to this scenario because we wanted the user to really empathise with the impact of something going wrong. Lean on teachimng background.
This was a learning tool that an instructor would use in a classroom. They would debrief the learners by clicking and moving characters around the helideck, indicating where they should stand if the helicopter landed incorrectly and how they should react. There were additional requirements to add characters and camera angles. I also successfully had it running it in a browser using Pixel Streaming.
This was an interesting challenge because I created a new scenario all built on an existing project. However, it was developed using Unity games development methodologies in Unreal Engine and went through a substantial migration process, replacing code and blueprints with better organised and optimised code.
- Unreal Engine Development
- Unity Development
- Project Management
- Version Control
- DevOps
- Teaching and Learning
BA (HONS) MEDIA PRODUCTION (FILM AND NEW MEDIA) 2:1 (2012)
This is where I developed my first AR app. It was a video advert for a student film I was working on for my
dissertation that would scan an image and overlay it with the content.
FDA TEACHING AND LEARNING MERIT (2015)
I focused a lot of my studies on how gamification can be applied to learning in the classroom. I would fill my
slides with activities where learners would gain a bronze, silver or gold achievement based on the mush, should
and could approach to achieving pass, merit and distinction.