Featured Work

LiquidStack VR

A VR showcase of datacenter CDU cooling products, with exploded views of CAD models and specific detail callouts. What began as a quick turnaround for one product has turned into a showcase of multiple products, and has been instrumental to their sales team.

Quick Time

Plus Design approached me to develop the initial product, with a very short timeline - 5 weeks from start to delivery, for use at the next trade show. My role covered a lot of ground: Plus would hand off Figma design files and untextured models, and I would handle the rest. All Unity development, scene setup, animation, texturing, and deliver an APK for distribution.

The project was very much starting from zero, and my work began with defining the project foundations. Quest 3 headsets, device management through ManageXR, Unity for the engine.

CAD Pipelines

Performance was as usual the first concern. Plus had only a CAD file with thousands of individual parts, and no experiencing converting from parametric models to the surface-based models used in game engines. We spent a lot of back and forth discussing best practices, target poly counts, and specific areas where meshes could be reduced or simplified.

The initial project delivered on time, looked better than our target goals, ran smoothly, and impressed visitors and vendors alike. LiquidStack quickly followed up to expand the project.

Further Development

We added a second product, and I rebuilt the underlying structure for displaying views and content. Moving to a tree-based information structure allowed me to declare a single target state, and have the system animate smoothly into the correct state. This structure made it easy to add on a system for rendered videos - I define the series of views to show, camera positions, and viming based on voiceover length, and can render out a video of the VR product for use on websites, non-VR booths, and more.

This system also lent itself to easy integration with a multi-user capabilities, so sales teams can guide showcases to multiple users, both in VR or from a tablet screen. We then revised the first product based on their final designs, improved fidelity, and bundled everything into a single hub app that can be expanded upon later.

Portability

The key problem the Liquidstack team faced was cost. Transporting large steel pump units weighing thousands of pounds was expensive and cumbersome. Converting to a VR application allowed their sales teams to throw a couple headsets in a carryon, or even ship them direct to potential customers. With the amount saved on shipping costs, the app paid for itself, and sales teams were able to reach more customers globally.

Standalone VR

Building for Quest 3 was the right balance of ease of use, due to no tethers, and high fidelity. It was a joy getting their products looking great in a standalone headset, and Unity as a foundation made getting good performance easy.