Interactive AR graphics for Sunbird Images app
Spring, 2021
The people behind Germany’s largest bird reference app, Vogelwelt, needed an an AR graphics feature for sliding hundreds of super-accurate 3D models of birds around real space. After researching the best architecture for the client’s needs, I built the interactive experience with a combination the Unity game platform + the Vuforia engine for supporting older phones + C# programming, all compiling into C++ to work in tandem with an Android app. Much of the code involved touch gestures, photo roll integration and making sure the birds landed on high-quality surfaces identified by SLAM. (The iOS version is pictured; you can probably tell from the notch.)
Android apps for NatureGuides
Mid-2018 – Jan. 2021
I maintained and and modernised a suite of Android nature software. Mainly I was the sole responsible developer for the Android version of the Collins Bird Guide. One of the Play Store’s top paid apps, CBG re-imagines the popular reference book. Aiming at the serious birder, it combines granular search tools with maps, videos and facts served in 28 languages, working from a large and continually evolving taxonomic database.
During my tenure I rewrote a quarter of the code in Kotlin, brought old design patterns into the ViewModel era and improved search engine performance.
I also worked on:
- Birds of the Middle East, the first Arabic-language bird field guide. (I built this.)
- BirdGuides.com‘s social media app for sharing location-based sightings across the UK. (I ported it to Android from iOS.)
Madagascar octopus app for Blue Ventures
2017
For a wildlife monitoring project, I designed and built a React Native app for use on the beaches of Madagascar by octopus fishers. When they returned from the sea, the fishers would report their hauls to an app user, who would collect data about what they had brought back. The challenge was to design something we could rely on to send data to the cloud in a low-bandwidth environment.