Skip to content

Work

ALLRESEARCHPRACTICEEXPLORATIONS

21 projects

The Thoughts

  1. explaining thingsJUL 2026How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?
  2. adjacency is not accessJUN 2026A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.
  3. buildings that respondJUN 2026Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.
  4. experiences are dataMAY 2026You learned what a room does to you by being in rooms. Nobody sat you down with a dataset.
  5. comfort as dataMAY 2026You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.
  6. when the tool scores peopleAPR 2026I build things that give a room a score. The obvious next question, and the one I would ask me, is what happens the day somebody uses that score to decide who gets the room.
  7. latent spaceAPR 2026Machine learning borrowed the word space from us, and I would like to check what it did with it.
  8. drawing as interfaceMAR 2026For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.
  9. behavior information modelingJAN 2026For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.
  10. heritage meets new techDEC 2025The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.
  11. neuroaestheticsDEC 2025Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?
  12. evolutionary searchNOV 2025Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.
  13. physics solversNOV 2025A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.
  14. computationOCT 2025Computation is not the same as using a computer, and separating the two took me longer than I would like to admit.
  15. what an llm actually isSEP 2025A large language model is a machine that guesses the next word. That is not me being kind to you, that is the whole thing.
  16. generative aiDEC 2023Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.
  17. extended realitySEP 2022I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.
  18. connecting the dotsJUN 2020When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.

XR for Education

Can AR and VR change how we learn? 

TYPEExplorationsTEAMLAU XR LAB · RESEARCH ASSISTANT · 2021-23STACKMAYA · 3DS MAX · UNITY · OCULUS
1 / 4

WHAT

Research assistant work at the LAU XR Lab, turning chemistry into something you can stand inside. We researched the reactions themselves to model them accurately, animated them in 3ds Max and Maya, and shipped them two ways: as AR lessons a phone summons through QR codes, seven reaction models in the set, and as VR experiences built in Unity for Oculus headsets. I also contributed to the lab’s research papers and documentation on XR in education.

WHY

Two questions drove the whole experiment. Chemistry students do not always have the best visualization skills, so how do you teach them something crucial and deeply technical in a visual way? And how do you turn a subject that reads as boring and technical into something immersive you can interact with?

HOW

  1. Research each reaction until the chemistry is right, then model and animate it in 3ds Max and Maya.
  2. Publish the animations as AR lessons behind QR codes, so the molecule appears in the room through a phone camera.
  3. Import the models into Unity and build the VR versions for Oculus headsets, interactive and walkable.

WHAT CAME OF IT

It stayed honestly experimental: the students we tested with were visibly more engaged, but the research never went deeper than those trials. I graduated and left the team, and the XR thread in my work starts here.