Two decades of Stanford VR research, locked to a tethered lab headset. I led the port that brought it to standalone Quest, putting it in reach of millions instead of the 15,000 who could visit in person.
For nearly two decades, Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab was a pilgrimage: every Friday at 4pm, the first 24 people in line got a tour. Over the years, 15,000+ visitors made the trip. The experience that captured all of it, Virtual Becomes Reality, was desktop VR: it needed a VR-capable PC and a tethered headset like the Valve Index or HTC Vive. That gated two decades of behavioral science to people who could fly to Stanford or afford a PC-VR rig.
Meanwhile, standalone Quest headsets had crossed 20 million. The opportunity was obvious; the port was not. Moving a high-fidelity desktop experience (volumetric video, complex 3D environments, 360° cinematography) onto a mobile processor is a port many teams attempt and abandon.
A naive port chokes a mobile GPU. The unlock was treating this as a performance re-architecture, not a resolution cut: migrate the whole render pipeline to one built for mobile, rebuild scene management around the memory Quest actually has, and make every interaction work controller-free, so the science is accessible the moment someone puts the headset on.
Accessibility was part of the port, not an afterthought: first-time-in-VR onboarding questions, one-handed (“Left only / Right only”) modes, full hand tracking, and seated support.
I led the Quest port end to end: the core systems architecture (scene-management rewrite, Unity Timeline narrative system), the interaction layer (Meta hand tracking across every scene), and the performance work that made it possible (the URP migration, draw-call reduction, and texture optimization that hold 72Hz+ on a mobile chip). I also onboarded and mentored the developers who joined for the second half of the port, and set the architecture that let scenes be built in parallel.
Built at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab with Victor Chen and Ana Nguyen (porting) and Na Young Son (spatialized audio), advised by Prof. Jeremy Bailenson (VHIL founding director). The original desktop experience was developed by a larger VHIL team.
The temptation in a port is to shrink everything until it runs. The lesson was the opposite: what mattered wasn’t subtraction, it was re-architecture: a render pipeline built for mobile, a scene system built for the memory you actually have, interactions built for the hands people actually bring. And the part I care about most isn’t the framerate: two decades of research that used to require a plane ticket now installs on a headset people already own. Performance was the means; access was the point.