A variety of mediums with years of experience
I am a software engineer currently maintaining two developer projects; that being BoltAThread and Handyapp. Handyapp is an AI-driven home repair platform based in the United Kingdom, while BoltAThread is a companion tool for social media platform, Threads. It’s designed to enhance the UX of the platform. On the side, I enjoy writing and talking about philosophy, mental health, technology and all things life. Enhancing humanity technologically has been a cornerstone passion of mine for as long as I can remember. At the end of the day, it is all about how we can have an easier, stress-free life. Technology is the gateway to that convenient life. More time back in our day, to do what we truly love
I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Cincinnati with a master’s degree in information technology and a bachelor’s degree in communication design and computer science. In school, my main academic interests were human-computer interaction, digital transformation, and iOS Development. One of the highlights of my university experience was getting the opportunity to participate at the 1819 Innovation Accelerator. I was the product manager for Yummr, an AR food menu platform, in the fall of 2022.
Throughout high school and college I worked on many side projects which can be found below. The most prominent of these projects was Nebula, a physical tool that aids in turning physical objects into digital twins, which I theorized in 2022, during grad school.
Past employer experiences, I have worked directly with the Government, specifically the Intelligence Community, on UI upgrades to software maintenance on Nuclear Submarines. Have worked in a variety of startups ranging in healthcare to construction. All under the guise of innovative software projects. If you’d like to chat, my availability can be found on my calendar.
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Inspired by my Master’s capstone on designing a photogrammetry platform for business owners, Nebula is a hardware-focused lightbox designed for creating digital twins with ease. It features collapsible side walls, a built-in turntable, and great storage for accessories. The Nebula Lightbox has controls on the side and remote controls for further customization via the iPhone remote app.
Pre-flight helicopter inspections can benefit from the use of modern AR and IoT technologies. In this simulation, the pilot simply points the iPad at the helicopter, and the app shows the steps for performing and capturing inspection data. Leveraging a physical CAD model of the Blackhawk helicopter, ILW developed an inspection checklist application to be used by a pilot to perform a pre-flight inspection. This tool captures data using an iPad and AR software, which can write back to and pull data from IoT software (bi-directional). This experience was for the US Army. This was built on Vuforia Studio to allow pilots to view the experience. Data was being pulled using ThingWorx to simulate APU levels on the gas tank reading to ensure levels are in satisfactory range for pilot. Created animations utilizing Creo Illustrate.
An iOS app that I built from the bottom up to aid productivity for construction workers. It was inspired by the traditional layout for iOS and features “mini-apps” or modules within the app itself. This demo raised $1M+ in funding. Snakey features include:
Yummr is a combination of Yum + Mixed Reality. The mission is to bring joy to everyone’s day by creating an immersive and fun AR experience. By visualizing food in augmented reality, we are one step closer to enhancing our senses with technology – with the one thing that unites us all, FOOD.
Yummr is a mobile platform built on a photogrammetry pipeline to turn food dishes into 3D models to allow customers to see before they eat.
As a person who loves food and is indecisive on what to eat, I tend to find myself pulling up the app, Yelp, to help with the deciding factor on what meal item to pick. Often, the photos taken are from weird angles, terrible lighting, some are half-eaten dishes, and are just hard to find. I would like to be able to easily find what a menu item looks like 1 to 1 from the exact dish.
What started through months and months of research on figuring out a solution to this problem, resulted in utilizing the domain I have expertise in – that being augmented reality. I decided to create an augmented reality app that allows you to view 3D food models.
I experimented with 3D modeling software and worked towards creating a working prototype that allowed one to view a simple one-page menu of AR items. After receiving numerous market validation from restaurants, I wanted to take it one step further to do multiple restaurants with AR items. So I created sample data and did just that – created a layout. The challenge that came next – was creating authentic 3D data. So, I did what any individual would do and gave up on the idea as it was too hard to do. Just kidding— I went full gung-ho and threw myself into learning Python, Bash, Swift, and other languages to get this concept of a 3D model made with ease.
I ended up perfecting it. I created a methodology for users to be able to turn images and videos into 3D models with simple ease all within my app. The process of start to finish for the data was the biggest challenge. That process ended up inspiring my Masters Thesis on building 3D models to enhance the customer experience for businesses. The entirety of the 3D capture methodology was revamped within the paper.
The idea for Yummr was around people who love food and just want to know what they are getting before they decide on what it is they want. I expanded this concept further and leveraged the prototype I had built to recruit an amazing team of engineers to flesh this out.
From there, we ended up being invited to the 1819 Accelerator to pitch our business and was awarded $5000 to invest back into the business.
Some background context – I am an entrepreneur with 8+ years of experience in the realm of starting projects from idea to completion. I decided to take this concept and put a twist on it. Have a project-based focus rather business-based focus. This allowed us to have fun and give the culture to the people of the company – allowing people in Yummr to choose their destiny in food.
Restaurant owners open restaurants because they love food and cooking. It is extremely difficult to have a successful restaurant due to the fact that margins are thin and most close within the first two years. While they are the masters of their craft, they are not always IT professionals. That is where we come in: Our goal is to help them with technology and take that concern off their… plate.
At our core, we have a scanner that allows restaurant owners to create 3D models by taking photos, with their smartphone, at every angle. Our app will bring photogrammetry to the masses with our easy to use scanner.
Photogrammetry is the process of stitching photos together to create a 3D model that can be viewed/interacted with in multiple ways. The file type that IOS uses is .usdz and websites use .glb
The main way is by using their smartphone’s camera to place the object on a surface in front of them ( augmented reality). Another way is by viewing the model on their phone’s screen. Unlike a still photo, the user can spin or zoom into the object. Lastly, through virtual reality and loading our food assets into a virtual world like Oculus Rift.
We are going to collect a large database of hyper realistic food models. The quality of the food models is key because we are competing with HD photos and fake food in commercials. It is a complicated process to go from the inputs of photos to life like models. It requires preprocessing and editing the input photos of the different components of the 3D model. It is a time consuming task so we plan to automate the pipeline from start to finish and use machine learning for the photoshopping. The last step is touching up the final model in post processing.
Note: A 3d model is composed of the mesh map, which gives it shape. And a texture map that overlays onto the mesh map.
Since we have a large database of information and models. Other companies can use our API to load the assets into their app or even in a VR game they are making. Imagine our assets on the popular apps like Uber Eats, DoorDash, or even Instagram!
Yummr was graciously invited to be a participant in the 1819 Accelerator Cohort. This turned the project into a business and propelled us further. We solidified our Problem, Solution, Market Validation, Market Size as well as what’s to come next. Watch video below to see the inner workings