2023 Silver Davey Award & National Sports Press Recognition
Awarded the Silver Davey Award for Creative Innovation in World-Building Design. Featured nationally by Fox News and USA Today High School Sports for connecting high school athletics with interactive metaverse technology.
Tulsa Union’s Tuttle Stadium is a social metaverse sports stadium created by the VAST Lab and hosted live on Spatial.io. As lead developer, I engineered the gameplay systems, multi-user minigames, network synchronization, and dynamic lighting pipelines.
National Press & Community Impact
- Fox News Feature — Union HS partners with University of Texas, combines football and the metaverse
- USA Today High School Sports — National coverage on school spirit, student athlete engagement, and community gathering spaces
Environment Lighting & Real-Time Time-of-Day
The stadium environment (modeled by Chris Gauthier) features a hybrid lighting architecture: baked occlusion maps for complex stadium seating, faked volumetric light shafts using geometry cones, and dynamic directional lights synchronized to actual Tulsa, Oklahoma real-time sunset/sunrise intervals.
Networked Minigame Logic
To maximize accessibility across web browsers, game mechanics were architected with state machines managing automated match lifecycles, networked score replication, and dynamic LED jumbotron high scoreboards.
Academic Publications
Peer-reviewed symposium and journal publications covering this work
Advancing the facilitation of social interaction and community engagement among American football enthusiasts through immersive metaverse platform
Immersive web-accessible metaverse platforms offer distributed sports fan bases shared spatial experiences beyond conventional broadcast television. We analyze the architectural pipeline, WebGL optimization, and interactive affordances of a virtual high school football stadium, evaluating user engagement, social presence, and community cohesion among distributed supporters.
Press & Media Recognition
Articles, video features, and media coverage celebrating this project