Jason A. Ortiz
C.S. Educator & XR Developer
EarthXR is a passion project of members of the Virtual and Augmented Reality Lab (VARLab) at the University of Central Florida. Starting in Summer 2023, I served as Scrum Master and led 6-10 members through biweekly sprints to recreate Google Earth VR for our vDen, a CAVE VR System.
Developed with Unity, Cesium for Unity, Google Maps 3D Tiles, and free 3D assets, we created a successful proof-of-concept in just a few weeks. In Summer 2024, I personally added the Place Searching and Street View features experiences enabled by the Google Maps REST API, save/delete bookmark functionality, and a live Airplane Digital Twin feature.
EarthXR is designed to work both in the vDen and on a stereoscopic table system.
OMIC was a hackathon-like event that required pitching an idea on Friday to convince others to join your team, honing and validating the idea, and presenting on Sunday how the proposal would best suit the Magic's business needs. 3D Magic Moments was my idea, but with a team of 7, we achieved 2nd place!
The core concept behind 3D Magic Moments is to make viewing player highlights more engaging, fun, and controllable by fans. I created the demo above a couple months after the event using Needle Engine, Move AI motion-captured athletes, and Blender to add visual details to the players and soccer ball. Imagine how fun it would feel to be immersed within the most amazing plays straight from the game!
In a 48-hour internal VARLab game jam, my team of three built a racing game for our vDen, a CAVE VR system. We used Unity, a Logitech Steering Wheel/Pedals kit, and the Unity XR Interaction Toolkit. I implemented the car-building experience and configured the game to run in our system.
Our game won the category for "Best Gameplay!"
Workspace VR is a social and collaborative telework VR application for remote teams. It enables ad hoc, social, collaborative, and productive individual work and teamwork via virtual avatars, workspaces, and integration with user computers. Designed for Meta Quest devices, users can feel like they are working together with others without constraints in Workspace VR. In essence, Workspace VR simulates working in a collaborative office environment.
The application was built with Unity, Ubiq, FMETP, and the Oculus Interaction SDK. Some of the key features include:
Explorable virtual environment with claimable virtual desks
Full-hand tracking
Unconstrained locomotion via hands or controllers
Simple and intuitive computer duplication and control into the VR environment
Simple and intuitive computer screen sharing
Mixed reality view of the user’s real desk
Customizable user avatars
Simple and intuitive “room” join system
Voice chat support
As a member of the VARLab, I coordinated the recreation of classic demos first demonstrated on the CAVE at SIGGRAPH 1993.
For my demo, I expanded upon the original by adding a modern twist: adding Blockade Labs generative AI skyboxes at runtime. Users could load preexisting skyboxes or create their own. I built the skybox integration workflow myself with Unity and some external shaders.
At the conclusion of my summer internship at Argonne National Laboratory, I presented a workflow using Houdini, USD scripts, and Unity to animate massive scientific data visualizations in VR headsets.
An 8-bit like hedge maze with turns, dead ends, an obstacle, a chainsaw, and a fun prize made for the Oculus Quest 2.
Learning goals were to understand designing controller interactions. Design goal was to add fun surprises beyond the assignment expectations.
This project was developed for a VR assignment for NYU's professional XR dev certificate.
Flying a spaceship in VR with HOTAS controls.
Learning goal was to implement hand-based physical controls.
This project was developed for a VR assignment for NYU's professional XR dev certificate.
An AR trailer for the movie Office Space enabled via Vuforia Image Tracking.
This project was developed for a VR assignment for NYU's professional XR dev certificate.
During my time as a backend Software Engineer on the Microsoft Power BI Telemetry team, we developed an incident service notification service for Power BI admin's to be alerted in real-time about incidents impacting their services.
I implemented the Cosmos DB Azure client and integration into Service Fabric.
See more here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/support/service-interruption-notifications