About – The Long Story of Lucy the Developer

Currently

HIDE AND SEEK DIGITAL

React, Javascript, Typescript, HTML, CSS, Modular SCSS, PnPjs, Office UI Fabric, Git, bitbucket, Jira

EPIC UNREAL MEGAGRANT RESEARCH WITH LUCY BRYANT UTS 2022

Hololens 2, Unreal 4.27, Blueprints, Metahumans, Multiplayer, Azure Spatial Anchors, MRTK

This year I was lucky enough to receive an Epic Megagrant to undertake a research project with Lucy Bryant of the UTS Speech Pathology Department, using Unreal and the Hololens 2 to develop an experience for patients. We are investigating how the Hololens could be used to engage patients with Epic’s Metahumans to observe and learn physical traits of human emotions

We are developing it as a multiplayer experience so that the therapists can be in the environment with the patient to help engage and guide them through the learnings.

You can see updates on my Unreal discoveries in my Blog and mini tutorials that I write up for my Tech Dev Blog

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ERKO ATHLETICS 2022

WordPress, PHP 7.4, MySQL 8.0, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Visual Studio Code, Photoshop 2020

I’ve been teaching athletics to the students of Erskineville Public School for six years now. I’m an accredited Athletics Australia coach and after growing up at the track with my dad, who was also a coach, and my brother who was an international high jumper.

I love coaching athletes and find it an extremely rewarding role and I find a great privilege in being allowed to join the youngsters as they start out their sporting lives.

You can find out more about it if you click on the Athletics tab at the top of the page and if sign ups are currently open you can see the booking system that I built myself in php and MySQL for parents to register their Interest in the course. (See image to right)

It collects the parents and athlete’s details, submits it to a database, emails me a notification that a form has been received, calculates the total number received and returns a confirmation and receipt number to the user.

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IN MY SPARE TIME 2022

Javascript, HTML 5, CSS, React, Visual Studio Code, Photoshop 2020

Because I don’t have enough things to learn, I’ve started investigating CSS and responsive coding as well as bundling it up into a React App. There’s nothing more frustrating than a website that breaks when you view it on your phone. WordPress sites are brilliant with the way they respond so perfectly, but what if I have a website that’s built with CSS. How do I make that work?

I decided to teach myself with a project called Too Much Noise which I designed myself (can you tell I was an 80’s child!). There are only 3 pages active at the moment, Home, Books and a subsection of books titled What we’re reading, but I’m hoping to keep working on it in my spare time. To view it you will need U: Lucy P: thomson

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Prior Work

PAT CRONIN FOUNDATION 2021

WordPress 6.0, Content Collation, Content Tracking, Content Management, Communication with External Technical Teams, Theme: Generate Press Plugins : Generate Press Blocks, WooCommerce, CodeSnippets, Contact Form 7 Zoho, WPForms, Zoho CRM Lead Magnet, Yoast SEO, Tickera

In 2021 I was lucky enough to work with the talented Brent Tunney to develop a stunning new website for the Pat Cronin Foundation, a charitable organisation that “provides an optimistic voice and empowering approach to awareness, education and research—working with schools, clubs, community groups and young people to End the Coward Punch.”

I was employed to bring Brent’s design and vision for the website to life using the WordPress platform plus a multitude of plugins, hand coded CSS and PHP. As well as an abundance of resources and information, the Pat Cronin Foundation site contains an events system, ecommerce platform, speakers booking system, news and blog sections and a regular monthly donation opt in.

As well as developing the site I integrated a leads system with the internal office Zoho systems for seamless tracking and maintaining of leads that come from the website.

Additionally I developed an interface for their online shop that can load it into their existing mobile app and direct users to easily complete their purchases.

I worked with the server side development teams to develop and run testing sessions on a staging server ensuring it was in perfect shape before having it dropped to the live site.

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Other AR/VR

INTERPLAY 2020

Hololens 2, Unity, C#, MRTK, Hand Gestures, Gaze Tracking, Voice Control, Xbox Controller input

Previous to my current research project I was again working with Lucy Bryant in the UTS Speech Pathology Department on a Hololens app for teens. We were trying to determine the viability of the headset for therapies in this age group.

I designed all the game play, user experience, look and feel and interactive elements and then used Unity to develop the app and we employed all input types to see which were the most reliable and easy to use for patients. These included gaze tracking and hand gestures, an Xbox controller and speech input.

We included six difference experiences to incorporate challenges with nouns and verbs as in the video above and prepositions as in the video of Animal Farm below.

And just in case you’re still interested, this is a game to encourage patients to practice the correct order of words in a sentence

INTERPLAY ON THE IPAD 2020

Unity, C#, Xcode, Photoshop

I also created an iPad version of Interplay, which presented many design challenges translating the 3D space into a responsive 2D environment. We no longer had depth to play with, so many adjustments had to be made to layout and positioning to allow useful gameplay. All voice and gaze control was reprogramed to respond to user input instead.

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UTS PROMOTIONAL AR MULTIPLATFORM APP 2019 – 2020

AR, Multiplatform IOS and Android, Unity, C#, Spatial Mapping, FBX integration, Animated Shaders, Video, Sound Effects, Xcode, UTS Design Guideline Adherence

In 2019 I worked with UTS to develop a multiplatform AR experience showcasing aspects of their UTS 2027 Vision. Unfortunately COVID hit when we were close to completion and it was put on hold. I had to follow very strict design guidelines to ensure complete adherence to the UTS brand. All work I completed was reviewed and approved by the UTS head of design.

Using Unity, I combined a variety of text, video and graphical elements to lead the user through a series of responsive, animated vignettes all timed to trigger and reflect the soundscape created by Jason Boyd. This combined low poly abstract representations of iconic UTS buildings, revealed through animated materials, with environmental sounds and traffic.

We initially researched the use of physical cards to track and initiate content modules but eventually settled on a more elegant and easy to distribute self contained app that scanned the environment and tracked content to an appropriate surface.

As it has not been released I am unable to show any video of it here but I can bring a sample to a meeting.

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SPORT SCIENCE 2019

Multiplatform Mac and PC, Unity, C#, 360 Video, Insta360 ONE, Premier, Ffmpeg

Again with UTS but this time the Sport Science department who wanted an online task for students to complete which helps them to practice responses in stressful situations, for example with the head coach of a team.

I used an Insta360 One camera to capture the coach’s performance in the room then projected that on to a sphere in Unity to give the immersive experience.

It’s a bit like choose your own adventure so the answer you give will determine the next question you are presented with., until you either placate the coach or he throws you out of his office. The students then reflect on their approach and choices.

I had to make this available to both PC and Mac users and since it was online, we had to accommodate for variations in connection speeds, especially since some students might complete it overseas. I ended up choosing ffmpeg as the video compressor so that we could include all the video’s in the module’s initial download.

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IOS Development 2010 – 2015

Xcode, Cocos, Apple Store Connect Management and Deployment, Photoshop, Garageband

I have created a number of IOS applications for both myself and UTS. As well as the one listed above, I translated Interplay into an iPad app which is currently used in research.

As a sole developer I have released 7 apps of my own, although the low financial benefits of the apps has not allowed me the time to keep releasing updates and they have, as such been removed from the App Store.

My apps included interactive story books, musical looping apps and path finding node connection puzzlers.

From left to right, A Fine Musician, Loop Tunes, The Little Book of Suspects, Diode, Escape From Tokeru

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Web Development in London 2003 – 2009

DIGITAL OUTLOOK

Team Management, Training, Overseeing Contractors and Freelancers, Bidding, Project Planning, Communication with External Technical Teams, Flash AS2, AS3, Javascript, HTML, CSS, XML, Game Development, Multilingual Template Creation, Testing, Debugging

I was the Technical Lead for this award winning digital agency. Digital Outlook produced websites, games, online advertising and digital strategy for major entertainment clients including Disney, XBox and Chorion (Noddy, Mr Men, Olivia).

For every major Disney release I created high end template websites and games with Adobe Flash and AS2/AS3 that were rolled out across Europe. These templates were coded with the ability to populate with content using any language. This gave us the advantage that should an edit be required, only 1 set of files needed to be changed for it to filter through the 12 difference regions.

Watch this video for a taste of the work we created at Digital Outlook.

Here are just a smattering of the clients I worked with

MOOK

Prototyping, Flash AS2, AS3, Javascript, HTML, CSS, XML, Game Development, Communication with External Technical Teams, Testing, Debugging

Our major monthly project at Mook was The Sunday Times The Month CD which I helped to develop. We received a Bafta nomination for it. You can see a good collection of views from the interactive CD on this website

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Web Development in Sydney 1998 – 2003

LEO BURNETT

HTML, DHTML, Javascript, PHP, ASP, Flash AS1, AS2, XML

I started my web develop career at iLeo which was the digital department of Leo Burnetts in Sydney. We were a team of 5 hired to create an online presence on this new and popular platform called The Internet for Arnott’s Biscuits. We were young and clever and very pleased that payment came part in the form of boxes of biscuits from Arnott’s each month.

Internet speeds were slow on dial up connections and optimisation was at the heart of our programming style. I used DHTML and Javascript to animate responses to user input. Reusable CSS and include header, footer and navigation files. 50KB was about the limit for an initial load, so we had to work out many tricks to provide the best user experience.

Our major clients were…

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