COMMERCE X HOLOGRAM

AN ARCHITECTURAL WALK-THROUGH HOLOGRAM AND REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF COMMERCE, PERSONALIZED SHOPPING AND PAYMENTS

Project Role: Lead Software Developer / Creative Technologist

Technologies: Unity, C#, Looking Glass, Stable Diffusion, Blender, many late nights

We created an immersive “shopping center of the future” to reimagine the future of commerce for a global payments and financial services company. As the lead (and only) software developer on this project, I worked with architects, designers, and strategists to build this experience from the ground-up, beginning with user research interviews, prototyping, final builds, and installation.

I created a holographic walk-through of a futuristic architectural model on a Looking Glass display to showcase the power of payments. This was displayed for interaction with thousands of customers at the F1 2023 Miami Grand Prix, alongside wearable payments prototypes. Later, the hologram was displayed at several other commerce events, and I also converted it into a playable 2D video, online 3D Looking Glass quilt, and integrated it’s scenes with Stable Diffusion depth mapping to imagine branding the walk-through for future marketing with the client’s own commerce clients.

Constraints and Challenges
Since the Looking Glass is a fairly new technology, and had never been used to build and show a fly-through before, I had to design, build, and optimize around several difficult constraints, including a fixed camera position, limited field of view, integrating a two-dimensional UX layer, creating believable cinematic transitions, manipulating 3D objects in Blender, and prototyping natural user interactions. The majority of the team and the Looking Glass itself were on the East Coast, so I had to build and test from a distance during part of the program as well, which proved difficult due to the visual differences between the Unity development preview and the in-person Looking Glass. Throughout the process, I continually consulted with the client to get feedback, and the team to match and exceed designers’ expectations.