btr training
Better Than Reality is a start-up that creates VR training modules for businesses in industries such as Mining, Oil + Gas, Transport, and Defence. The main experience used a Meta Quest 3 with a PCVR program created in Unreal.
My main responsibilities as Lead Programmer involved managing the development of these modules, all the way from pre-production to deployment. I ran client demonstrations, established the CI/CD pipeline using Perforce, and also created developer tools to help my fellow programmers.
Studio:
Year:
Better Than Reality
2025-2026
Conjured Using:
UNREAL
META QUEST
CLICKUP
I was first contacted to audit the current standing of the software and systems. The foundation was in a solid place, but needed some restructuring in order to fulfil what was needed for their clients. That's when I was brought on to help build up the programming team.
One of the first improvements that we made was to the interaction system. Every interaction simply required you to touch the component, which was a waste of the Meta Quest's hand tracking capability. We created a new interaction system that allowed the user to grab levers, push buttons, and perform other gestures to more deeply engage with the learning materials.
With that system in place, I was then able to expand on it. I created a data-driven vehicle system, which stored all the information related to the vehicle in a central location (e.g. Ignition Key Position, Fuel Level). Using the new interaction system, we could create a sandbox environment where a user can openly play with a vehicles levers and buttons with real-time feedback.
On the side of art integration, I worked with the Lead Artist to create a pipeline to quickly design different humans to populate the environments. We first created a shared skeleton and base body mesh, which allowed us to reuse animations. We took photos of our staff, and projected their faces (mine included) onto a custom head mesh that could attach to the bone hierarchy and inherit animations. Additionally, we could attach additional meshes (e.g. hard hats, safety glasses). We could leverage all of this to create a large amount of variants with a minimal amount of base assets.
