Tag: VR

You Don’t Need to Know Surgery to Build a Surgery Trainer

How real builders work with experts in fields they’ll never master — and why that’s the whole point.

A confession to start with

Let me tell you about a thing that happens to almost every builder I’ve ever met, including me.

You get an idea. A good one. The kind of idea that makes you sit up a little straighter in your chair, open Claude in a new browser tab and start sketching on the back of a receipt. And then, about ninety seconds in, a little voice shows up and says:

“Who do you think you are? You don’t know anything about that.”

And the idea dies right there, on the back of the receipt, because the voice sounds reasonable. You don’t know anything about medicine. You don’t know anything about aerospace. You don’t know anything about education theory or marine biology or whatever the idea was touching. So clearly you have no business building anything near it. Right?

Wrong. And I want to spend the next few minutes showing you exactly why — using one of the coolest examples I know.

Continue reading You Don’t Need to Know Surgery to Build a Surgery Trainer

Virtual Reality AI Character Prototype

I created my AI virtual assistant named “Guie” over 10 years ago to help me with debugging code on large programming projects. She has been invaluable to me over these years while researching and developing applications for a wide variety of devices from Desktop PCs to mobile. I am very excited to announce that she is now available in XR to assist me with VR and AR application development.

I am proud to present this project as a demonstration of my skills in all aspects of the multimedia production process in addition to creating VR experiences. I hope you will agree that this turned out to be a great prototype!

Sample of my storyboard.

Following the best practices for multimedia development, I started by creating the storyboards and design documents. This critical step must not be skipped, even when developing a small project by yourself.

XR Rig Input Manager

Next I engineered a Virtual Reality Interaction Rig that will allow me to build and debug the project using VR devices.

AI Art representation of me working in my multimedia studios.

I tapped into my 20+ years of multimedia production skills to create the graphics used in the scene, as well as recording and producing the audio script.

Once all of the multimedia elements were in place, I began the process of bringing the project to life in Unity. Controlling and animating a 3D character is a fun and challenging task!

The final step was engineering the APK package for installation on the VR device. There are a complex set of configurations that must be correctly assembled in order for the package to be allowed into the secure OS that powers the VR headsets. Feel free to reach out to me if you would like a copy of the prototype.