.As a staff UX Engineer at Niantic Labs, my role ranged from rapid prototyping for AR Gameplay features using Niantic's ARDK through co-ordinating UXD, UXR, and UXE efforts on shipping customer facing products : either in our games, as samples for developers to follow, or developing tooling for using Niantic's VPS system
Niantic's VPS system allows for digital content to be placed against pre-scanned areas in the world. To improve the developer experience when creating a scene, I lead the design of a remote authoring solution that allowed developers to place content using familiar Unity authoring patterns.
As a UX Engineer on the Immserve Arts team within Google's AR/VR division, I developed applications that showcased what was possible with Google's AR technology.
A three.js powered webview embedded in the native Google IO application, Signpost delivered AR orientation to I/O attendees.
Otis is an iOS app designed to help people find and rate their favorite professionals. Instead of leaving a review for a tattoo parlor, you're leaving a review for the actual person who does the work. This makes it easier for independent contractors to carry their valuable reputation with them.
Karma collects, compiles, and analyzes a user's feedback from multiple supported sites and uses it to create a reputation score - a Karma Score. A Karma Score makes it easier for a user to identify with whom they want to transact and vice versa.
A particular challenge with Karma was how to collect data on behalf of a user from sites that don't have publicly available APIs. I knew that asking a user for their username / password was a huge security gamble, so we instead built a browser extension that automatically detected when a user was logged in to a supported site, and was capable of grabbing publicly available user data as long as the user gave the extension permission.
A turn based photo sharing game modeled after Draw Something, Pictoplay encourages you to look for interesting things in the world around you.
Players took turns sending each other words. In response, a player would have to take a picture that best matched the word they were sent.
Divining Rod is a prototype iPhone app that makes virtual Geocaching as exciting as physical Geocaching.
The game starts with players in "far" mode, where a compass points them in the direction they need to go to find a virtual geocache. I deliberately chose a compass instead of a map, to enhance the adventure aspect of the game.
Once players get within ten meters of the cache, the game switches to "close" mode. Players are presented with an outline of an object that they need to line up through their phone's camera. It's not enough to just get near where the virtual cache was created, they need to recreate exactly the perspective the creator had in order to unlock the cache.
Super Proof is an iPhone fitness game that allows your friends who don't want to get off the couch to play with you. Players can set virtual geo-caches for each other, which can only be picked up by using Super Proof to track your fitness activity while passing by the location of a cache.
An Alternate Reality Game built to market Disney's Tron: Legacy, Flynn Lives had over five million players all over the world racing to find hidden caches in the real world, decrypting clues all around the web, and ultimately visiting a recreation of Flynn's Arcade.
