Ari Tarr

I taught this course as VR lead instructor for the University of Leeds and the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in 2021. The subject was spatial storytelling and interactive narrative design, taught to students making work for headsets rather than for screens. I had lectured at the Centre for Immersive Technologies at Leeds in 2019 on the history of immersive technology, and this program developed that material into a taught course.

I taught this session at NYU Tisch in 2022 as a guest instructor in immersive and interactive VR performance and design. The class worked on how a performer holds a scene when the audience can move through it, look away from it, and stand inside the set. It was taught in person, with the students in headsets in the room.

I was adjunct lecturer in immersive theater for spatial technology at York University in 2022, teaching spatial storytelling and interactive narrative design. The course was built around audience interaction and real-time iteration from user feedback, so the students tested a piece with an audience and changed it in the same session.

The AIonos production was made during the VR theater intensive I taught at York University in 2022, which worked on spatial storytelling and interactive narrative design for performers working live in headsets.

I was immersive storytelling lead mentor for the Performance + XR IBPOC Fellowship in 2022 and again in 2023. The fellowship put IBPOC artists into a VR production pipeline, and I mentored them from first concept through to a finished piece built in Unity, with the first year's work presented publicly.

OnBoardXR is a virtual 3D theater festival, and I worked on its third season as an immersive narrative designer, building WebXR performance that an audience joins from a browser with nothing to install.

I was community manager and QA analyst at Flipside XR, an XR content creation platform. I ran performance-based QA on avatar rigging and gameplay UX, and I wrote the tutorials explaining how a performer's emotion becomes inverse-kinematics motion and viseme blendshapes on the avatar. My work there also included running the QESTR contest for the community.

I was CEO and co-founder of Raktor from 2014 to 2018, where we built mixed reality software for livestream and interactive content. I directed the long-term development of the product and set the engineering, design and QA roadmaps that carried it across iterative releases.

I made Your Body, Your Avatar as immersive designer and artist in residence at Active Replica, where I designed and hosted live VR events from 2020. The piece works through what it means to inhabit an avatar body in a shared WebXR space that an audience enters straight from a browser. I ran the live sessions and fed the interaction-flow feedback back into the platform.

At Agile Lens I lead motion and facial capture QA for a pipeline that drives MetaHuman avatars in Unreal Engine from Rokoko and Xsens suits, the Live Link Face app and the Quest Pro. The work is structured evaluation of whether a captured performance still reads as expressive once it is on the avatar.

I was immersive designer, lead host and UI consultant at Adventure Lab from 2019, on a hybrid platform that ran VR, film, theater and game formats inside one product. I built the VR interface and authored the interactive scripting for live encounters between players and non-player characters, and I trained the immersive actors who performed those encounters. This recording is from the hosted live format.

I was creative producer and immersive designer at River Studios from 2017 to 2018, coordinating schedules, deliverables and post workflows for 360 video and spatial media productions. The Hypercube XR was one of the spatial media pieces produced there.

I was lead performer, writer and assistant director with the Vau de Vire Society from 2016 to 2019, creating audience-driven beats and coordinating mixed-media cues for large-scale immersive productions. The Soiled Dove was one of those productions, presented at the Raindance Film Festival.

Mr. Town is an augmented reality application I built at Raktor, where I was CEO and co-founder from 2014 to 2018. It was made in Unity and placed interactive mixed reality content into a real location, so the content sat in the street rather than on a screen.

Seikuken was a live VR event I designed and hosted at Active Replica, where I was immersive designer and artist in residence. It ran in WebXR so an audience could enter from a browser without installing anything, and I led both the live sessions and the world design.

From 2008, I designed and directed touring theatre and festival-scale installations across New Eccentrics, Fou Fou Ha and the Vau de Vire Society, combining analog staging with projected interactive environments driven by TouchDesigner. My MFA thesis at the University of Montana extended that work, using a fine-tuned SDXL checkpoint and a real-time SDXL-Turbo LoRA to drive a TouchDesigner installation.

The Edwardian mixed reality installation was a location-based experience I built at Raktor, where I was CEO and co-founder from 2014 to 2018. It was made in Unity and laid a mixed reality layer over a physical set, so an audience moved through both at the same time.

Off Rail is an interactive XR experience I wrote and directed at Raptor XR Studio, where I was creative director and interactive narrative designer. It put AI non-player characters and live actors into the same scene to find out where each one held up, and I trained iterations of llama2:7b with QLoRA using PEFT through Axolotl on feedback from both the players and the NPCs. The Raptor XR work was presented at international film festivals.

OnBoardXR is a virtual 3D theater festival, and I worked on its third season as an immersive narrative designer, building WebXR performance that an audience joins from a browser with nothing to install.

I was game environment designer and technical lead at Thera VR from 2018 to 2019, building clinician-guided software for therapy. I translated behavioral goals into structured interaction cues and interface, and built the environment logic and aesthetics for empathic design in sessions run with live therapists. This recording shows the VRChat-based version of that work, built in Unity.

This is from the Thera VR promotional montage, covering the therapeutic VR environments I designed as technical lead between 2018 and 2019. I built the same kind of clinician-guided spatial environment as an immersive system designer at High Fidelity, where I made creator tools for immersive narrative and used world building as a load QA test for server-scale performance. Both were spaces a therapist and a patient could occupy together.