Imagineering XR Development

During my time at Walt Disney Imagineering, I had the opportunity to contribute to several exciting XR development projects, and a few of those features were recently showcased in an episode of We Call It Imagineering. My team worked with the Samsung Galaxy XR headset to develop custom tools for WDI project teams. The UI panel shown in the images below was one of my projects and is now used as the default interface for WDI AR scenes - I designed it so users can add tabs, content, and new interactions while maintaining usability and a cohesive WDI visual identity. And if you look closely, you might even spot the Easter egg the WDI Software Pipeline team added as a surprise for me in the documentary... they are truly the best! For the last two weeks of my internship, my team let me choose my own problem to solve. Several Show Set Designers had asked over the summer about running lighting tests and sun studies in XR, so I built a tool that lets teams place virtual lights into a real-world scene and see how light and shadow interact with the space. It combines the headset's scene mesh with its depth sensing to simulate sunlight and spotlights -adjustable in color, beam angle, and intensity - across both real objects and 3D models placed into the scene, so AR objects cast shadows onto real surfaces, AR lights illuminate real objects, and real geometry casts shadows back onto the AR models. Getting there took a fully geometric approach (no ML inference involved): using the normal vectors of the headset's floor plane to classify walls, complex objects, and dual-surface objects like tables and chairs, then applying a second, category-specific set of calculations to build smooth, accurate "light topography" maps of the scene. A few creative directors saw it in my final presentation and requested it, so my team is continuing to build on it after my internship ended. Unfortunately, this tool is not pictured here due to NDAs, but I am always happy to connect via call, video chat, or email to discuss XR technologies further.