A screen, a show, and twenty invisible boxes
Pressing play finally gives you a lit stage instead of an empty room, one very silly bug stood in the way, and the back wall now plays video.
Jonathan Chien
UX engineer at Google DeepMind. I work on how people control robots.
Teleoperation interfaces, the infrastructure behind them, and the data collection that turns operator sessions into training data. Before robotics: AR and VR at Google and in automotive research, and games before that.
Current side project: VJ Simulator, a VR rhythm game where you control the entire DJ set.
Recent writing
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One room, many shows
The chart editor stopped trying to be two tools at once, notes learned to drive colour and brightness instead of just movement, and the room finally became a real place that both the editor and the game load the same way.
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Real songs, a real rig, and an editor inside the game
Charts stopped being hardcoded and started coming out of actual mp3s, the three hero lights became a twenty-light stage rig — and the big one, there's now a chart editor that runs inside the game itself.
Selected projects
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Robot Teleoperation Interfaces
Google DeepMind
Control surfaces for driving real robot hardware, and the systems that record those sessions as training data — two audiences with genuinely different requirements.
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UX Research Simulation
Automotive research institute
VR simulation for vehicle design research, with runtime tooling to capture the metrics that make a study possible rather than just a good demo.
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Tango — Augmented Reality Platform
Google
Sample code and demos shipped with the Tango Unity SDK, covering mesh occlusion and ground detection.
Elsewhere
The fastest way to reach me is email.