Earthlight: Neutral Bouyancy Laboratory is a story about a female astronaut training for an upcoming mission using a new AR-capable spacesuit. The experience was designed in collaboration with NASA to be very similar to the way astronauts undergo training in real life.

On this project I was both a technical consultant and VFX artist. I made the water and caustics shaders and post processes and also worked with the artists throughout the project to identify bottlenecks and sources of performance loss as well as educate the artists about techniques required to achieve good performance in VR.

To meet performance requirements the water and caustic shaders had to be combined and run under 6-8ms per frame so that there was enough time left over for rendering the rest of the scene. Additionally the water fog was both distance and depth based (to simulate the increase in pressure). To date this is the most accurate portrayal of an underwater scene in VR.

Additionally during this project I developed a tool to help analyse and compare performance issues within a UE4 project across multiple frames after the fact and produce reports that could be provided to artists working on the project to narrow down and highlight technical issues that were causing framerate drops.

Earthlight: Neutral Bouyancy Laboratory was never released to the public, although a fully playable build was completed.