WIN Reality is a VR training system for baseball focusing on hitters facing realistic pitchers and receiving pitches based on real game data. While I was there it was based primarily on the Oculus Quest 2 platform. The team was always extremely small but with consistent rapid updates required for a live product that needed to evolve in tangible large steps.

Upon joining I focusing mostly on technical design implementing new features such as calibrating the virtual bat, improving UI, and polishing up existing game modes. By the end I had shifted into the Creative Director role providing direction and planning for the VR Application Team and mentoring new technical designers while still acting as an individual contributor. I was involved in almost every aspect of the VR client from a hands on implementation level to a technical and creative direction level.

The feature that really stands out the most though, was coming up with a solution for translating the motion of the Oculus controller attached to a real bat during real swings into a real time result in-game for determining whether the hitter made contact with the ball or not, and how effective of a hit the swing was. The Oculus controller relies primarily on cameras to track movement, but when swinging a baseball bat the majority of the swing is complete before the cameras can detect the controller. This forced me to rely almost entirely on very lossy accelerometer data in order to come up with a solution to approximate whether a swing happened, whether the swing was partial or not, whether the swing was high or low, how powerful the swing was, whether it was swinging downward or upward, etc. Coming up with a solution for this required a mixture of more traditional game designer “does it FEEL right even if it’s not technically true” skills along with some challenging math and data management skills exceeding any systems I had worked on prior. I had no existing examples anywhere in the VR space demonstrating success to refer to.

By the time I left the swing detection was about as accurate as could be with the limited sensors for the Oculus, and was able to handle both little league kids with slow sloppy swings up to professional players with the fastest swings possible. Most importantly, it was just plain fun to pop on the headset, grab a bat, choose a pitcher, and swing for the fences.