Hello travelers,

Unsaddle your horses, put away your talking parrot, and head over to the canteen, for you’ve made it to my website!

I’m a developer of interactive media entering my fourth year at UChicago, and I’m planning on using this site to showcase my projects. Project(s), you might ask? Surely I don’t have multiple projects! Oh ho, but that’s where you’re wrong, kind visitor, for I am indeed working on 3 (three) projects! These are them:

• Library of the Ancients is a VR sandbox for interacting with books and other media in a way that mimics the best the real world can provide while making those interactions more accessible—and more magical—than they would be in real life. I pitched this project to my school’s Game Design Club, and I’m now working on it in Blender and Unreal Engine with a group of five of my classmates! We think the project has a lot of potential, and are excited to continue developing it into its second year.
• Thermal Illusions is a research project that uses neurochemistry to push the boundaries of sensory engagement in VR, under the leadership of Asst. Professor Pedro Lopes and doctoral student Jas Brooks in the Human-Computer Integration Lab at UChicago. I’m charged with VR scene creation for the project—using Unity 3D to build a fantasy-tinged blacksmithing scene that showcases the chemically-induced illusions of heat and cold that Lopes and Brooks have figured out how to engineer. I also attended SIGGRAPH with the lab this summer, where they won the Laval Prize for their project “Demonstrating preemptive reaction: accelerating human reaction using electrical muscle stimulation without compromising agency.”
• Meet the Voxels is the a new animated sitcom coming to Nickelodeon, produced in real-time using video game technology! As an intern at Nick’s Entertainment Lab, I’ve participated behind the scenes on an innovative pipeline at the forefront of the booming virtual production industry. I’ve had the opportunity at the company to learn from talented industry artists and engineers, and to work hands on with Unreal Engine and Maya.

I plan to share updates here about these projects, especially the first two (since the third is pretty NDA’d beyond what I’ve already said). I hope to demonstrate my ability to develop experiences with industry-standard game engines, and, even more so, to use those skills to bolster your own projects! If I seem like a promising candidate for a job or project you have, please reach out to me: steinberg@uchicago.edu.