Marvel’s What If...? An Immersive Story is an Emmy-winning,  roughly 45-minute immersive experience designed for the Apple Vision Pro. As the lead gameplay engineer on the project, my responsibilities spanned every stage of development, from prototyping through to final implementation.

To power our gameplay interactions, I implemented a system that could rapidly recognize multi-step gestures and trigger corresponding effects. This required developing a custom plugin to bridge Objective-C native iOS ARKit data (hand and scene tracking) to our headless C++ Unreal Engine backend. Our gameplay systems used this plugin to control powers in the game and pipe those visuals through our RealityKit based rendering system. To streamline development across the studio, I also ensured the plugin supported Meta Quest headsets, enabling UX designers without access to Vision Pro hardware to iterate seamlessly.

This pipeline successfully led to the creation of eight unique gesture mechanics and associated gameplay. Throughout the development process, I guided a cross-functional team of engineers and designers in building upon the system and collaborated closely with writers and VFX artists to integrate powers into the narrative. Based on their feedback, I also developed custom C++ Unreal Engine Blueprint tools that significantly accelerated designer and VFX workflows.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory is a dynamic VR and AR experience. I contributed to the project by working on the AR race flow and the VR puzzle mechanics. Throughout my work on the project, I collaborated with both VFX artists and level designers. All of my development on this project was done in C++ for Unreal Engine.

ILM has a long history of pushing the boundaries of visual effects technology. As part of this legacy, we are currently exploring how AI can be used to make our pipelines faster and more efficient. I'm contributing to this research by helping to make new tools available for artists and storytellers. My work in this area is focused on improving VFX and generating pre-visualization assets. My contributions to these efforts have been in Python, ComfyUI, and C++.

For the Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run interactive upgrade at Disney Parks, I delivered mission-critical updates to the extensive Unreal Engine version, gameplay, and UI overhaul required to support thousands of daily riders and interface seamlessly with physical motion hardware. Within this broader project, I had full ownership of the weapons targeting and projectile system, engineering a high-performance architecture capable of rapidly filtering and prioritizing hundreds of fast-moving targets in real time. To streamline production and maximize efficiency for the team, I genericized the core combat logic into reusable Blueprint modules, enabling the same standardized architecture to be deployed across all enemy ships and turrets throughout the attraction.