Chris Brady

UC Sim

Professional Unity Development
Since September 2021

I work as a Unity Generalist at University of Cincinnati's Center for Simulations & Virtual Environments Research.

At UC Sim we work primarily in Unity and mostly on AR/VR applications. The projects I've worked on have been diverse in purpose, including areas such as industrial training, immersive storytelling, visualization, and research.

As a small studio, our roles are less specific, so I've had the opportunity to work different aspects of game development, focusing largely on technical design and programming.

Tri-State Trails Newport VR Experience

Urban Infrastructure VR Visualization

Working with the organization Tri-State Trails for feedback, I acted as the sole developer on this project, pitching the original design and realizing it within Unity over the course of 2 months.

The simulation itself is a VR visualization of proposed changes to the city of Newport, KY in order to better accomodate bicyclists and pedestrians. As such, it presents the player with a before/after of the area surrounding the intersection of Saratoga St. and 3rd St.

I modeled out the scene using a combination of modular assets, buildboarding, and self-created building models made using the RealtimeCSG package for Unity. The environment was accurately recreated using Google Streetview and my own personal knowledge of Newport. I added basic animation of vehicles along a scripted timeline handled by my own code.

When the project was complete, we brought it to the Midwest Sustainability Summit to present at a booth, presenting the simulation on a Vive Focus 3 standalone headset.

Altafiber VR Experience

VR Historical Tour

Working with Altafiber directly, I led development on a ~4 minute VR experience made for visitors to Altafiber's headquarters in Cincinnati.

The experience featured 3 vignettes of the company's history, all assembled by myself with original modelling, sourced models, sourced and edited audio, and original scripting/programming.

Both UI and environmental interactions are handled via handtracking as the user does not use traditional VR controllers. The experience runs directly on a Meta Quest 3

I performed most of the in-editor work on this project, and handled the majority of the creative decision making and problem solving after the original script was produced by other team members.

P&G Digital Accelerator AR Event

Augmented Reality Marketing Experience

Working with UC and P&G, we produced an augmented reality experience for the rebranding of their Digital Accelerator lab at the 1819 Innovation Hub in Cincinnati.

I was involved in gathering site data, designing the layout of the experience, implementing visuals, and debugging.

I was present on-site the day of the event to assist in running the experience for attendees.

Learn more about the event here

Driving Simulator Demo

VR Driving Chassis Simulation

This project was a non-billable project that UC Sim uses to demonstrate our tools and development abilities to potential clients. It is a three minute long driving sandbox complete with traffic simulation.

My involvement in the project was in creating the city level for which people would drive through, using modular city art assets. The level is built to be imageable and leave an impression on players of a real place. There are a number of landmarks and meaningful connecting paths, all dense enough to be experienced in the limited time of the simulation.

In addition, I spent time scripting the traffic simulation using a third-party Unity package. This involved me defining usable routes for vehicles and scripting intersections.

Hope After Hate

Immersive VR Storytelling

HAH is a VR experience that tells the story of holocaust survivor Moniek Lipszyc. Players follow Moniek through scenes of his life that capture the tragedy of hate and bigotry, with the intention of inspiring players against hate in our modern world.

The simulation is mostly linear, but since each scene is a recreation of a real-world space, there is room for exploration. Each space is full 3D video viewers that show players what each location looks like today.

I was originally brought on for QA, but had the opportunity to redesign one of the levels in order to increase player engagement and direction.

CAP Research Framework

Human Behavioral Research

This project is not a standalone playable experience, and instead is a set of tools we developed for the Center of Cognition and Perception lab to allow non-developers to create VR experiments to study human behavior.

A primary feature of this framework are our "behaviors" which create provide test subjects with asymmetric information. In example, two subjects might have to cooperate on a task involving grabbable objects, but each might be seeing different objects, which affects their coordination.

My part in this project was largely in programming the tools, but I was also involved in creating demo experiments to ease our clients into the tools.

Medicaid Care Experience Simulation

Immersive Desktop Storytelling

MCarES is a trio of empathy-building simulations that tell the stories of troubled individuals as they seek health care, made to be played by health care providers.

I primarily worked on the Homeless Adult simulation, but also assisted in the Transgender Care and Transition From Pediatric to Adult Care simulations.

The application was developed in Unity for non-gamers, and as such is optimized for lower hardware, built for WebGL, and features streamlined design.

My work was primarily with sequencing linear levels and bug fixing.

Improv

VRChat Art Demonstration

This project involved the implementation of an motion-captured improv performance into a VRChat level.

I worked on this project as the only Unity developer, working with a 3D artist. My work involved porting the original level to VRChat SDK 3.0, implementing assets, and creating tools for the animation to be viewed in-game.