Meta Reality Labs | UC Berkeley | ex Rockstar Games
Yihong Xu is a Systems Programmer and Game Developer, a Game Designer and Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He focuses on creating immersive experiences and optimizing Human-Computer Interactions through games and interactive media. He is also a huge strategy and simulation game enjoyer!
Created VR powered wheelchair training simulator “WheelUp” with Unreal Engine 5 and OpenXR. We utilize user participatory design to develop novel interfaces for diverse bodies and advocate for their needs. Initial technical paper published at IEEE COG 2023.
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Created a VR wheelchair training simulator in Unreal Engine 5 with diverse bodies in mind for physical therapy and rehabilitation
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Achieved Photorealistic VR Rendering by utilizing Global Illumination and Virtualized Geometry with outsourced graphics
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Simulated wheelchair with Chaos Physics, considering different wheel composition, weight distribution, and motor torque curve
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Reduced 80% of motion sickness occurrence by optimized refresh rate, render latency, and quality, designed hardware rotator
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Collected, visualized, and analyzed participant playtest data with the help of LLMs, developed with participatory design principles
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Published first-author technical paper on IEEE Conference on Games, conducted testings with wheelchair-bound participants
Systems & Engine Lead in team working on NVIDIA open-source research game “FPSci”. We research, develop, play-test, and evaluate to explore the effects of network latency and compensation techniques like Time Warp on player experience and performance in First Person Shooter games. Academic paper is being published.
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Networked Nvidia’s C++ single player FPS game “FPSci” to support industry standard Server-Authoritative Multiplayer
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Designed and implemented client-server structure to allow latency compensation techniques like Time Warp and Prediction
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Conducted 30-min testings with 50 testers to record gameplay data under various network and optimization configurations
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Improving player performance by 38%, based on conducting various evaluations of the effects of mitigation techniques
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Wrote first-author technical paper submitted to Nvidia and WPI, and second-author paper submitted to ACM CHI (under review)