Living far away from campus I felt the need for a solution to the 30-45 minute walk to campus. Already plagued with an over-saturated high-cost housing market, Berkeley's geography promotes a world where affluent students are more likely to attend class. This is due to increased access to cars or housing in close proximity to campus.

Carol Christ, Berkeley's Chancellor, organized an AMA on Reddit to try to connect with students. We (myself and two housemates) submitted our (extremely long and detailed) proposal as a Reddit comment to gain attention. "Carol" (definitely her Secretary in hindsight) shot us down immediately.

See Reddit Post Here

As an exercise in persistence, we scheduled office hours with the Chancellor and presented our proposal in powerpoint form over a 30 minute meeting. She loved it and immediately scheduled us for an hour-long meeting with the Vice Chancellor of Transportation. The next meeting also went well and we were asked if we had any interest in joining campus planning committee (a non-student consulting committee for the University) which we turned down due to our other academic obligations.

As part of achieving the Eagle Rank, I had the opportunity to complete an Eagle Scout project. A friend of mine runs a non-profit horse ranch that offers free services to those with disabilities as a way to give back to the community. To help them more efficiently offer their services, I built a fully furnished and plumbed handicap bathroom on the ranch. This included installing a 200 gallon septic tank, dealing with all the piping, and building the wooden structure itself. Another major part of this project was raising the $5000 needed for materials and leading others in the 500+ man-hour endeavour. I'm incredibly grateful for all the volunteers that offered their time to the project and I'm proud of the final result.

Invited to share my experiences in the board game world on Board Game Barrage, a top board game podcast. Definitely a fun experience sharing my insight on a hobby I love so much.

I've had the opportunity during my undergraduate studies to contribute to research projects and present work at conferences. The link below will take you to my Google Scholar profile and the following text shows the research work I contributed to.

Google Scholar

Jesse Patterson, Jiwoong Han, Tom Cheng, Paxtan Laker, David McPherson, Joseph Menke, Allen Yang. "Improving Usability, Efficiency, and Safety of UAV Path Planning through a Virtual Reality Interface" 18 Apr. 2019. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.08593.pdf

Jesse Patterson, Jiwoong Han, Tom Cheng, Paxtan Laker, David McPherson, Joseph Menke, Allen Yang. "Improving Usability, Efficiency, and Safety of UAV Path Planning through a Virtual Reality Interface" Poster Presentation; ACM Spatial User Interaction, 19 Oct. 2019.

Paxtan Laker, Jacob Austin. "Enhancing Augmented Reality Applications with Real-Time GPS Geo-Localization for Location-Specific Data Visualization" Invited Speaker; AGU Conference, 29 Jul. 2019

Jacob Austin, Paxtan Laker. "Exploring GPU Acceleration for Rapid Visualization and Analysis of NASA Earth Science Data" Poster Presentation; AGU Conference, 24 Jul. 2019

The current workflow for natural gas distribution systems monitoring can be significantly improved. The vast majority of utility companies ask their workers to do manual GPS localization. The user pattern generally follows as such -> use GPS receiver to check current coordinate, use map to check desired coordinate, move towards desired coordinate, use gas detection equipment to check for leaks, and finally, input data for the single completed coordinate. The goal of my project was to use “AR” to correct for localization inefficiencies and to significantly speed up surveying. The result is an Android and iOS AR app that takes in GPS coordinates from the utility company’s database and visualizes the underground pipelines for the gas surveyors. The app removes all of the complicated processes from localization and allows the surveyors to focus on leak detection. On startup, the app connects to the surveyor’s GPS receiver, detects local positioning, and then points the user towards the closest section of the pipeline. Once close, the user can see the pipeline visualized above ground. The user can also tap any section of the pipeline to mark it for further inspection instead of needing to manually input suspicious coordinates.

My personal extrapolation of Tetris into VR. I wanted to challenge myself to complete a full VR game in Unity, and this is the result. You can clear blocks from either horizontal or vertical planes, and all hold, drop, and difficulty functionality is present. Performance mode is also available for slower computers at the cost of visual fidelity. Designed for Vive Pro, but works with Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets and Oculus Go.

The 'Immersive Semi-Autonomous Aerial Command Systems' project is a research project dedicated to exploring the most intuitive and efficient UAV control systems. More specifically, I worked as a Unity developer creating the main VR interface to test our hypothesis that the increased spatial awareness of VR would make drones safer and easier to control. This project has spanned over 3 years and I worked about 15 hours a week as a Unity developer, undergraduate researcher, and author of the ISAACS research paper.

The ISAACS Radiation Visualization project was born from Kai Vetter's lab at LBL reaching out to research scientist Allen Yang in the Augmented Cognition Lab asking for help visualizing UAV-collected radiation data from Fukushima. As a veteran of the original ISAACS project, Allen asked me to spearhead this new project. The majority of my work on this project was leading negotiations between labs to come up with a satisfying goal. My personal goal was to develop my project management skills, and with the differing desires of both labs, the meeting negotiations allowed me to do this often. Near the end of the semester we were also able to create small prototype radiation viz MVPs using pointcloud manipulation in Unity. Shortly after the goal negotiations were completed, I passed the project on to one of my coworkers in order to focus on the development of the ISAACS research paper.

In an effort to extend the reach of the VR DeCal and graduate student VR Development course I had taught the previous two semesters, I petitioned to make the VR Education Branch, a branch in VR@Berkeley that hosts all education-purposed teams. As the first branch in VR@Berkeley, we have fostered a large community of people and teams devoted to spreading our passion for VR. Our current teams under the education branch include: DeCal Team (5 people), Workshops Team (4 people), Modules Team (4 people), VR Textbook Team (4 people), Research Team (4 people). I actively lead meetings between these teams to facilitate resources between VR@Berkeley and these VR Education Branch teams as the VR Education Branch Lead. As VR Education Branch Lead, I am also one of four executives making decisions for VR@Berkeley, the nation's largest undergraduate VR club with around 150 active club members.

In an attempt to expand my skillset, I decided to use AR Foundation (a Unity API designed to be compatible w/ both ARCore and ARKit) to port my VR Tetris game into AR. It was a challenging prospect and taught me a lot about the limits and capabilities of AR.

The final project of an iOS App Development class was to team up in groups of 4 and create an app to submit in a public competition. The competition consisted of about 50 other apps, and we won "Most Innovative" out of 3 total winners. In college, I lived in a house with 10 people and splitting the bill when we went group grocery shopping (and we wanted to share some items) was a painful experience. "Check-Mate" is an app designed to help you seamlessly keep track of bills and items. It automatically sends an email and text message to everyone involved in your bill with how much they owe and what they purchased.

The purpose of the STAC High Altitude Balloon team is to create inexpensive and accessible ways for companies and organizations to test their experiments in low-gravity, high-altitude environments. I joined the STAC High Altitude Balloon team as a project engineer in both hardware and software engineering. I designed a custom PCB in KiCad to standardize and increase success rate of HAB launches by modularizing component functionality. I developed software to track and communicate with the HAB payload up to 100k feet. I assisted in creating hypotheses to pair with our experiments to test the effects of high-altitude, low-gravity environments.

In frustration with time-delay associated with the current measurement app that all iPhones come preloaded with, I wanted to make my own measurement app. It's a fairly simple and convenient app that leans on ARCore heavily and allows you to measure between any two points without any delay. The cost of removing the delay comes with loss of accuracy if measuring too quickly.

Created a Google Maps Web Clone to practice algorithms (A* search algorithm) and dataset integration (OpenStreetMap data set). Designed the rastering system to allow for scrolling on the web page and real-time updates to route selection.

The autonomous robot project was designed to teach the dynamics of combined software and hardware design. The chassis mic circuit was made completely from scratch from basic components - no Arduino modules. The code was written in C and uses K-means to determine speech commands in real time. The speech commands are fed to the car, which is then combined with PCA closed-loop auto-straightening algorithms to drive the car in the desired direction.

Created a local multiplayer game in Java that creates procedurally generated pseudo-random maps. The goal of the game is for player 1 to "tag" player 2 within map boundaries. The main goal of the project was to better my Java skills and learn the ropes of procedural generation. The game also features save-states, a main menu, and other options within the UI.

Created a Scheme interpreter in Python. The goal of the project was to create an interpreter that had all the functionality of the web interpreter in the picture and linked below. I learned the intricacies of Python and mastered the syntax of Scheme. Unfortunately the GitHub is forced to be private because it's a class project; shoot me an email if you have any specific questions!