ARIES
(Applied Research in Immersive Experiences and Simulations)
ARIES is a research program at the Virginia Tech library where students get to work with peers, faculty, industry partners, and researchers to create games, simulations, and VR/AR experiences, taking advantage of modern digital creation tools. ARIES gives us access to cutting edge programs and creation processes, such as Unreal Engine 5, 3D scanning, an Opti-Track Motion Capture system, and various 3D modeling programs, such as Blender, Maya, Substance Painter, and ZBrush.
ARIES Projects
Construction Safety
The Construction Safety project is ongoing and started in the Fall of 2024. The goal of this project is to create an immersive experience with various safety training scenarios. The current scenario measures the user’s attention to important objects or potential hazards and scores them.
The project uses the Epic Games City Sample demo technology for the NPC pedestrian and vehicle AI as well as city assets. All construction vehicles are modeled from scratch, or altered from asset packs, textured, and animated by me.
Along with simulating the NPCs and scripting the interaction between the road paver and dump truck, I’ve also started the process of integrating an eye-tracking system that measures whether the user is looking at desired objects.
This project will be used as a teaching tool in the Virginia Tech School of Construction to emphasize the importance of paying attention and being aware of your surroundings while on the job site.
Power Station
The power station project was a semester-long project during the Spring of 2024. The goal was to create a digital double in Unreal Engine that could communicate with a pre-exhisting back-end simulation.
For this project, I was part of the 3D Artist team. My job was to create high-fidelity 3D models from reference images and 3D scans we captured from our on-site visit. I was also responsible for creating in-game systems, such as the functionality for the control box, and implementing the 3D models into the environment.
During this project, I learned how to create custom Unreal Engine Blueprints nodes, with the goal of communicating with a program outside of the engine.
Soccer Simulator
This is a demo reel showcasing features of the soccer simulator, such as the soccer ball tracking and randomness in the different play possibilities.
The Soccer Simulator was a summer-long project in 2023. The goal was to use the Opti-Track motion capture system and Unreal Engine to create basic Soccer systems that could be adapted for later sports projects.
The simulation used basic motion capture technology to track a soccer ball, which was then placed in the Unreal Engine environment. I created a system in which the ball swaps between the real-life tracked soccer ball and a physics-based simulated ball when the real soccer ball leaves a predefined play space. This was to account for the small size of our motion capture room compared to an actual soccer field.
This project also incorporated MetaHumans for the NPCs which used a standard state machine system to control their animations.
All aspects of this project were scripted using Unreal Engine Blueprints, and we used GitHub Desktop for revision control.
This project was meant to be a test and building block for future sports simulation projects. Ideally, this project could be easily adapted into a research tool that measures athletes’ performance pre and post injury.