Diego Montoya

An abandoned office building in Berlin's former west, taken over by artists. Its rooms were turned into works of art, digitized before the building was demolished. After a long wait, TheHaus found the perfect place to come back to life: the Metaverse in the form of NFTs. Each room of the collection is available as an AR and VR experience, accessible when purchasing the token.

My role in the project was the development of the VR viewer and AR models, as well as participating in the design of the system architecture and blockchain integration.

Spacetime is a research project consisting of a VR special relativity simulation for the Oculus Quest, where the light-speed c is much lower than usual. Space contracts, time dilates, and light shows a Doppler effect according to your movements.

I led the overall concept, design, and development. The main goal of the experience is to allow for a more intuitive and natural understanding of how space, time, and light behave when an observer approaches the speed of light.

With the VR solution, customers can get an extremely realistic experience of their individually configured car, down to the last detail. The VR experience explains Audi technologies intuitively and offers customers the opportunity to immerse themselves virtually in extraordinary moments from the world of the four rings.

My work was to research the best way to explore the car in VR, being able to walk around it in an intuitive, realistic manner. A series of prototypes were developed and user tested to determine how the target audience interacted with the locomotion schemes.

A platform that allows the creation of interactive 360 experiences without code. Create a VR experience with a drag-n-drop tool. Import your 360 and traditional images, video, and audio to build marketing displays, training scenarios, real estate tours, gamified cultural documentaries, and more.

I was the CTO and co-founder, taking over companywide responsibilities for all innovation, development, and IT tasks.

A research project to explore the first realistic simu­la­tion of a real window to enable passen­gers to look outside Elon Musk’s window­less Hyper­loop capsule. I led technical efforts to develop and integrate the necessary technology to emulate the virtual windows.

An NFT collection of 212 real-life skull sculptures turned into 3D models with photogrammetry. I am in charge of the process digitization, which comprises photographic setup and method, 3D reconstruction, 3D optimization, materials and textures, as well as preparation and optimization for AR on iOS and Android.

Each sculpture is very unique so the process had to be very robust but scalable at the same time. The full 3D creation pipeline included photography mechanization and automation, reconstruction scripts for RealityCapture (command line, Python), and Photoshop scripts.

• Information about the project: retzompantli.art/
• NFT collection: foundation.app/collection/rtz

SuperWorld is a virtual world in augmented reality (AR), digitally mapped over Earth. Every plot of virtual real estate in SuperWorld is a non-fungible token (NFT) that corresponds to real-world space and lets users buy and sell properties, and monetize activity on their land.

As part of my role as a software engineer, I was in charge of researching and prototyping new AR technologies for their app, as well as being part of the development team of the production AR app. I evaluated different AR technologies to decide whether or not they should be integrated as part of the production app, was one of the two engineers in charge of rebuilding the app with an improved, more maintainable architecture, ported the UI into a more performant and extensible system, and worked on CI/CD automation.

An internal 3D modeling and animation tool. I developed a Unity module so artists can test their 3D models and animations in a drag-and-drop fashion. Instead of having to ask an engineer and spending hours (with a turnaround of days) to be able to test a new model, artists can take the tool, drop their models, and see them in action in the game context in minutes. Also, with a couple of clicks, they can try the game on their augmented reality devices.

The result is very short iteration cycles in the creative team while letting the engineering team concentrate on development tasks.

The tool uses its core codebase and sticks to its engineering principles. Consequently, maintenance is minimal, and artists see their models just as they would look in the game.