Hi, I'm Laurence, a Metaverse Developer at the Virtual Engineering Centre.

Meta Liverpool

Meta Liverpool is a large-scale, immersive Digital Twin experience of the city of Liverpool, built in Unreal Engine 5. As the Lead Unreal Developer, I've been responsible for driving the project's technical development and maintaining its overall technical direction. This role has involved close collaboration with a multidisciplinary team, including data scientists and external partners, to deliver a high-fidelity, real-time virtual environment.

My contributions span across the full development pipeline, including:

• Building and maintaining core framework systems
• Programming in C++ and Blueprints
• Creating particle effects and visual polish
• Optimising performance for large-scale environments
• Integrating and working with data-driven systems

St George's Hall

St George's is a small-scale, immersive Digital Twin of the main hall inside St George's Hall in Liverpool, built using Unreal Engine 5. As the Lead Unreal Developer, I've been responsible for overseeing the project's technical implementation and functionality. The core focus of this project is maintaining high visual fidelity while ensuring the user interface remains intuitive and the functionality stays simple yet effective to provide a seamless interactive experience.

My contributions:

• Building UI
• Sublevelling
• Programming in Blueprints
• Optimising performance
• Video rendering

VR Demo (Passthrough)

This VR demo was developed for a small-to-medium-sized enterprise (SME) that required a high-fidelity coffee shop environment. The objective was to explore the impact of environmental context on taste perception, specifically whether coffee tastes better in a cafe setting due to ambient smells, compared to drinking it at home.

The experience was designed for virtual reality with passthrough, allowing users to see their real hands, pick up a physical cup, and drink coffee within the virtual cafe. The application was intended for use at the company's facility, where external scents (like the aroma of coffee) could be introduced during the VR session. Users would try the coffee once without scent enhancement, and then again with ambient smells, to test whether the immersive environment improved the perceived flavour.

Note: due to hardware limitations, passthrough visuals cannot be recorded. In the original demo video, the passthrough area was represented by a black circle to indicate where the real-world view would appear during actual VR use.

My contributions:

• VR development
• Optimising performance
• Programming in Blueprints
• Metahumans
• Animation
• Level design
• Lighting