Category: VR

Categories
3D Architecture Distributed Teams eCommerce Frontend Innovation Management Performance Engineering VR

New VR UX For Nurseries

(3/19-10/20)

Challenge

Ship new, web-based, VR-powered, eCom experience as requirements changed.

Action

Act 1 : 3/19-5/19

While on my trip to India in April 2019, I formed a Tiger team of one of my best Lead Engineers, a project manager, and two junior engineers, coaching them to see the similarity between what was the business was asking for and current existing components of the system (PLP, PDP, NUX, and Checkout,) setting a plan in motion towards delivering an MVP for the 6/26/19 deadline.

They went heads-down and we successfully shipped v1 (following) on 5/29/20.

ecom landing page

Business priorities shifted and the project was moth-balled, leading to Act 2.

Act 2 : 8/19-10/19

Having shifted focus to more product-based eCom (see Act 1,) the business decided to leverage existing shop-the-room modeling infrastructure in a more user-friendly, web-based purchase flow.

While the original plan was to have them spin up a completely new POC with a new checkout flow, I intervened and met with the remote Technical Project Manager and Architect, providing guidance around the existing monolith marketplace system, knowing it could serve as enough of a “buy” to meet requirements so as not to have to “build” a custom solution.

Shipped v1 in Oct 2019:

Landing Page

Room Detail Page

I saved $40K in redo work after guiding the non-primary, remote, web team around component re-use while then shipping web-based, VR-powered shop-the-room.

Act 3 : 3/20-10/20

Under tight deadline, coached the Pakistani team to iterate and improve perceived and actual load times using CSS Sprites, caching via HTTP headers, use of a spinner, and gzipping in order to get a usable UI to market sooner:

Landing Page

Drilling down, a user looking to design a nursery can swap out items (made possible by a compositing technique with Three.js and photo spheres)

Room Page

Lastly, recognizing future strategic value-add within corporate partnerships, guided the team to decouple the frontend as a Single Page App for iframe embedding after having decreased page load times, introduced progressive enhancement / graceful degradation, and led the SPA strategy.

Results

New VR-powered site finally launched in Feb 2021.

Categories
Budgeting Collaboration Roadmapping VR

3D Cost Modeling

(7/20-7/20)

Challenge

To scale v2 of our shop-the-room experience, the business turned to me to understand how our process would grow cost-wise.

Action

The interim CEO asked me to determine costs as we considered beefing up our rendering pipeline by orders of magnitude.

Applying a KISS paradigm, I threw together an inital back-of-napkin estimate. That was good enough, but then the interim CEO needed a deeper level of understanding, so I worked with my Pakistani Technical Project Manager to build out a more comprehensive version of the model, taking parameters into account like the following:

  • Scale Factor
  • Model Throughput Per Week
  • Aspirational Efficency Factor
  • Cost Per Model
  • Number of Modelers Needed
  • Model Category

Results

  • Delivered cost model iteratively for a 3D modeling pipeline to support shop-the-room.
Categories
Architecture AWS EC2 VR

Cutting Cloud Costs

(Decorist : 3/19-3/19)

Challenge

Given trends in 2018, AWS budget was projected to increase 92%.

Action

  • Worked with full-stack engineer on web team to tweak EC2 configs.
  • Iteratively introducing Reserved Instances to add to cost savings.
  • Worked with VR team to optimize the rendering pipeline.

As part of the VR work, we found that EC2 instances were running unneccessarily 24/7 so we adapted processes to more efficiently utilize those resources.

Results

  • Reduced AWS MoM spend by 40%.

 

Categories
3D Collaboration Process Troubleshooting VR

Salvaged PR Opportunity

(Decorist : 3/19-3/19)

Challenge

Marketing opportunity showcasing company’s proprietary shop-the-room modeling was four months behind and at-risk after key in-house designer departed and PR client was losing patience.

Action

I took ownership of project management, working with new designer and remote Pakistani VR engineering team, introducing a lightweight process (spreadsheet-based and daily 15m check-ins) in order to get backlog of shop-the-room models modeled and bundled into our VR (Unity-based) design app.

Results