Russell Alleen-Willems


Virtual Reality Developer

Portfolio


Virtual Reality

VR Design Articles


About


I'm Russell Alleen-Willems,

a Virtual Reality developer based in Seattle. I'm currently building web, mobile, and desktop VR applications that emphasize a sense of place and context, whether they are for architecture, gaming, or scientific visualization. My passion is using technology to shape how we communicate, learn about, and experience our world.

Skills:

VR Development, Front-End Web Development, Mobile / Desktop Database Development, User Experience Research, Web Analytics

Languages and Frameworks:

C#, R, HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Bootstrap

Tools:

Android Studio, Unity, Visual Studio, Blender, Git, Adobe Creative Suite, FileMaker Pro / Go, Google Analytics

Contact Me



Apartment Tour



For this project, I designed a mobile VR tour of a modern apartment with high-performance lighting, custom materials, and animation using Unity.

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VR in Archaeology Museum




This mobile VR application (Google Cardboard) leads users through museum exhibits featuring interactive 3D models and 360° videos and highlighting how archaeologists collect data digitally and then use everything from mobile databases and GPS devices to LiDAR scanning and photogrammetry to visualize and share archaeological data with the world.

I built this VR Museum application using Unity and the Google VR SDK for users to explore how archaeologists and museum are using virtual reality and real-world data capture technology. The experience is completely built from scratch using VR locomotion, interactivity, and appropriate scale of objects.

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VR Puzzler



In this Google Cardboard game, players explore a dark dungeon and solve the magic puzzle to prove their worth as a wizard!

I iterated, documented, and wrote a postmortem for this well-designed and user-tested mobile VR application which asks users to solve a familiar simon-says-like puzzle while in an immersive "dungeon" environment.

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ColorBlind VR



ColorBlind VR lets users experience colorblindness as they attempt to complete a collection mini-game and educates players on the prevalence of "Red-Green" colorblindness.

I developed this mobile VR game as part of Udacity's VR NanoDegree Teamworks 2 GameJam in 2017. I organized and led the team, drafted the game concept in collaboration with my teammates, created the park sign model using Blender, created the initial prototype, and wrote the game manager scripts that progressed users through the different stages of the experience.

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Poggio Civitate VR Data Viewer



This VR project is an interactive visualization of the Poggio Civitate artifact data parsed from OpenContext's JSON API and won first prize in the Open Context and Carleton University Prize for Archaeological Visualization.

Artifacts are "buried" underneath the ground according to the provenience data. With the HTC Vive VR headset, users move around the environment by using the pressing the controller trackpad, aiming where they wish to go, and releasing the trackpad to teleport to the targeted location. Users can excavate these artifacts by moving the Vive controller up and down over the ground surface.

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Rube Goldberg VR Challenge


Through four challenging levels, the player must place objects and build their contraption to guide the ball towards its target!

For this project, I built a Rube Goldberg puzzle for users using the SteamVR API in Unity. I used Physics to provide more realism to the puzzles and VR locomotion to provide the user with freedom of movement to solve the puzzle.

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