Eddie Offermann · Big Blue Ceiling
Big Blue Ceiling
Research-grade tools for film, XR and AI.
The future is messy, and I build the tech that helps us make sense of it. Big Blue Ceiling is where that happens: prototypes and production tools across AI, XR, visual effects and optics.
FeaturedBig Top
FeaturedBigBluePipeline
Featured
-
Founder and architect
BigBlueBam and the B-Suite
BigBlueBam is our open-source, self-hostable suite of nineteen work apps, from project management and chat to CRM, invoicing and telemetry, all sharing one login, one permission model and an MCP surface of more than 800 tools for AI agents.
-
Founder; AI lead across every model; lead for front-end and back-end engineering
Frndo
A voice-first AI companion for iPhone. You talk face to face with an animated toon avatar that lip-syncs to its own voice, shows expression and body language, and remembers what you share.
-
Founder and architect
Convo
Convo is our web app for generating synthetic conversations between a person with a life and an AI friend who is openly an AI. It plans each one from a seed, filters it in three layers, lets reviewers read and fix it, and exports chat-format JSONL.
-
Founder and architect
B2C Payments
B2C Payments is our reusable framework for charging for software. Subscriptions, invoicing, one-time purchases, prepaid wallets and capped usage billing all run through one API, one double-entry ledger and template-driven billing screens that take on each app's look.
-
Full-stack hardware prototyper and xR software architect
MRiot Vision Pro Module
MRiot pairs advanced depth sensors and neural compute hardware with a platform that adds intelligent computer vision to "dumb" software, so bodies, hands and movement can control experiences without touching anything. The Vision Pro Module is its sensing hardware.
-
Co-developer
HoloFlect
An augmented reality headset designed to be upgraded, configured and repaired like a workstation, with swappable displays, processors and spatial sensors across tiers from self-contained to PC-tethered.
Founder and architect
BigBlueBam and the B-Suite
BigBlueBam is our open-source, self-hostable suite of nineteen work apps, from project management and chat to CRM, invoicing and telemetry, all sharing one login, one permission model and an MCP surface of more than 800 tools for AI agents.
Founder; AI lead across every model; lead for front-end and back-end engineering
Frndo
A voice-first AI companion for iPhone. You talk face to face with an animated toon avatar that lip-syncs to its own voice, shows expression and body language, and remembers what you share.
Founder and architect
Convo
Convo is our web app for generating synthetic conversations between a person with a life and an AI friend who is openly an AI. It plans each one from a seed, filters it in three layers, lets reviewers read and fix it, and exports chat-format JSONL.
Founder and architect
B2C Payments
B2C Payments is our reusable framework for charging for software. Subscriptions, invoicing, one-time purchases, prepaid wallets and capped usage billing all run through one API, one double-entry ledger and template-driven billing screens that take on each app's look.
Full-stack hardware prototyper and xR software architect
MRiot Vision Pro Module
MRiot pairs advanced depth sensors and neural compute hardware with a platform that adds intelligent computer vision to "dumb" software, so bodies, hands and movement can control experiences without touching anything. The Vision Pro Module is its sensing hardware.
Co-developer
HoloFlect
An augmented reality headset designed to be upgraded, configured and repaired like a workstation, with swappable displays, processors and spatial sensors across tiers from self-contained to PC-tethered.
Creator
Aesopic
A local-first writing platform that helps authors develop ambitious long-form fiction. A nine-stage pipeline expands a concept into a book series, characters, story arcs, chapters, page summaries and draft prose for the author to revise.
Creator
AI Storybook
An AuRA example that takes real news stories and retells them as children's stories, then voices, animates and publishes them, to show how one research pipeline can adapt content for very different audiences.
Concept and development
AR Portals
Augmented reality portals you walk through, from the real world into a virtual space, including a portal to Egypt.
Concept and development
AR Scuba
An augmented reality demo that takes an underwater 360 video and performs it as a mixed reality hologram, a globe of ocean floating above a printed target on a desk.
Concept and development
ARHero
An augmented reality tabletop game based on the d20 system that runs broadly on Android, not just on Tango or ARCore devices. Most phones from several years back work.
Concept and development
Augmented Clothing
Concepts for augmenting items of clothing, explored as a broad platform rather than a single effect, starting with hats. Runs on ordinary Android and iOS devices with no special sensors.
Founder and architect
AuRA
AuRA (Autonomous Research Assistant), formerly IntellectCascade, monitors sources, researches what it finds, analyzes it with LLMs and delivers written, audio or video briefs to the channels people already use.
Creator
AuRA Avatar Generator
A Gradio tool built on LTX-Video that generates photorealistic presenter avatars and short avatar videos from attributes like age, hairstyle, clothing and setting, made to feed lip-synced briefings in AuRA.
Inventor and lead researcher
Computational Optics
A method for recovering hyperspectral image data from the ordinary image sensors in phones and other consumer devices, built on lab characterization of each sensor and a learned mapping from RAW pixels to spectra. A provisional patent application covers it.
Design and engineering
DriveSpeedTest
A Windows drive profiler that measures the real device with the OS cache bypassed, reads the negotiated USB link speed and SMART health, grades the vendor's marketing claims, and ranks the likely bottleneck. FastAPI and React, shipped as a single exe.
Hardware prototyping, software architecture and engineering
Enhanced Presence
A series of telepresence prototypes, from a first static volume capture on a holographic display to realtime volumetric streaming with custom dual-sensor rigs, transparent displays and glasses-free 3D.
Designer and builder
Handheld AR Controller
A prototype handheld controller for AR headsets. A 3D-printed grip holds a printed image target that the headset camera can track, and a small Bluetooth gamepad clips onto the handle for buttons.
Creative direction, technical direction, software architecture, team management
Immersive Work at Mirada
A run of immersive projects at Mirada, Guillermo del Toro's studio, where I led creative and technical direction. They include mobile AR promos, a second-screen mixed reality app, an interactive video wall, Netflix's animated Hollywood lobby and two large projection AR explorations.
Developer
iOS LiDAR Scanner
A modular Unity framework that captures colored point clouds with an iPhone or iPad LiDAR sensor, cleans them, organizes them in an adaptive octree and reconstructs meshes at three levels of detail, from a voxel preview to a smooth marching-cubes surface.
Founder and CTO
ISO-5 Optical Cleanroom
An ISO Class 5 (Class 100) optical cleanroom we built for our hyperspectral imaging research, where commodity camera sensors are characterized one narrow band of light at a time so measurement-grade spectral data can be recovered from them.
Audio and video hardware selection and prototyping, demonstration
Life-Size 4K Telepresence
A life-size, ultra-low-latency 4K audio and video link run over a quarter mile or more, built to measure how scale, eye contact and spatial audio affect the feeling of being together.
Creator
LLMRabbi
A local-first web app that reads ePub and PDF books in chunks and has a local LLM generate conversations grounded in each passage, producing training data that teaches a fine-tuned model to reason from a book's perspective.
Concept and development
MagicWatch
An AR proof of concept that reads context from printed Context Glyphs and presents the results of live database queries as graphics around the user, including media streamed into a virtual display. It runs on ordinary Android and iOS devices.
Developer
Mirada360 for Unity
A Unity asset I built at Mirada that treats 360 video as layers rather than a single sphere. It was shown in the keynote at Unity's VR/AR summit in Los Angeles, then at Unite conferences in Asia and at Microsoft Build.
Hardware prototyping, enclosure, lens calibration, disparity-mapping algorithm, demonstration and report
Mixed-FOV Depth Sensing
A hardware and software study measuring what happens when two depth sensors with very different fields of view work together. It included a custom enclosure, a lens calibration stack and a custom disparity-mapping algorithm.
Creative direction, software architecture, engineering
Mobile AR Film Promo
A mobile augmented reality racing game promoting an animated feature's home-video release, built at Mirada. The relative position and orientation of the phone steer and accelerate the car.
Concept and development
Mobile VR Shooter
A mobile VR shooter where a recognition target on a ping-pong-paddle-sized "fan" gives a Cardboard-style headset positional tracking of a handheld controller. Rotating the paddle about 90 degrees fires the gun.
Concept and development
Mobile XR R&D
Big Blue Ceiling's mobile XR research, on commodity Android and iOS devices and the Google Project Tango developer kit. Database-driven AR, tracked avatars, spatial games, portals, holograms and phone VR controllers.
Interface design and development
MRiot: Appliance Control
An augmented reality interface exploration on Microsoft HoloLens. Radial menus hover in the room next to the smart bulbs they control, and an air-tap on a color changes the real light.
Technology coordination, pipeline architecture, team management
Netflix Hollywood Headquarters Lobby
A large-scale immersive installation that animates continuously across the lobby of Netflix's Hollywood headquarters, on two LED walls that together run 80 feet long and 12 feet tall. I coordinated the technology and designed the content pipeline behind it.
Creator
NewsPod AI
An AuRA application that monitors news sources, researches stories on its own, then records, edits and uploads finished video episodes to YouTube without human intervention.
Hardware selection and prototyping, full software stack, networking, realtime robotics control
North Star Stereoscopic Telepresence
Head tracking drives a high-speed motion-control camera rig, and fiber networking delivers stereo 4K video to a stereoscopic display with less than one frame of latency, all to preview telepresence decades ahead of its time.
Design and engineering
OrcVis
OrcVis lets dozens of Claude Code sessions on different machines and repos talk to each other directly, and gives the person running them a live graph of every conversation that they can read, join, mute or pause.
Designer and builder
Phone-Based AR Headset
The first HoloFlect prototype, an entry-level augmented reality headset that paired a Samsung Galaxy S6 with a Leap Motion controller for hand tracking, in a 3D-printed frame.
Software architecture, hardware prototyping team, software engineering, demonstration
Projection AR Tabletop Gaming
A hardware and software prototype for interactive projection AR. It covers calibration, laser light-plane touch detection, tabletop surface interaction and telepresence.
Design and engineering
PyTorch Utilities
TorchVersionSpecifier finds the torch, torchvision and torchaudio versions that match a given Python and CUDA install. TorchModelAnalyzer reports what is actually inside a .pth checkpoint as structured JSON.
Specification author and experiment designer
QIE Studio
Two projects in one repo. A self-hosted Qwen-Image studio for generation and instruction-based editing, and an experiment in autonomous development where we wrote the specification and an AI agent built, tested and documented the app on its own.
Creative direction, technology selection, software architecture, team management
SILVR
A content discovery and distribution platform built at Mirada from the ground up for virtual and augmented reality. It detects the content on the main screen automatically and delivers matching second-screen, AR and VR experiences.
Concept and development
Tango Car Show
A Google Project Tango app that places cars to scale in an unprepared, natural environment, with realistic lighting and reflections, for branding, configuration and marketing.
Creator
The Augmented Tarot
Big Blue Ceiling's first mixed-reality app, for iOS and Android. It recognizes Rider-Waite tarot cards and overlays each card's traditional meaning, with animated effects for the Major Arcana.
AR design, software architecture, story
The Blue Vale
A multiplayer tabletop RPG that plays out in augmented reality on the table in front of you, with a combat card system and a compatibility layer that ran it across ARKit, Tango, HoloLens, Epson Moverio and ordinary phones with a printed game mat.
Creative direction, technology selection, software and hardware architecture, team management
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Interactive 180 Wall
An Amazon Prime For Your Consideration project that took Emmy voters in Los Angeles onto the New York stages of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, using 3D scans of the original stages, custom software and pedestal interaction.
Concept and development
The Town
TangoTown, a spatial game that started on Google Tango at a Tango developers workshop in San Francisco and grew into tabletop-style gameplay with a distinctive extended reality interface. It also runs on Android and iOS without Tango sensors.
Design and engineering
ToolForge
A PyQt6 desktop app that registers local Python utilities with their Conda environments, launches and monitors them with live logs, and exposes every tool to AI agents through an MCP server that reads each tool's command-line arguments automatically.
Concept, software architecture and engineering, demonstration
Touch Telepresence
An exploration of the narrative and emotional impact of touching remotely. Two projectors with laser light-plane detection turn any flat surface into a shared touch surface, streamed over RTC.
Hardware specification, software architecture and engineering, demonstration
Transparent Volumetric Display
A portrait, desktop-scale transparent display of a kind not sold commercially, showing a volumetric stream that shifts perspective with the viewer's face for a convincing 3D effect on a 2D screen.
Concept and development
Virtual Eddie
Mixed reality demos that use recognition targets for large-scale positional tracking. A game-style avatar shares the room with you, as a stand-in for a virtual assistant, product guide or trainer. Runs on Android and iOS with no special sensors.
Hardware selection and rig build, software architecture, engineering, demonstration
Volumetric Streaming over RTC
A custom dual-sensor capture rig and software stack that merges, aligns and color-corrects volumetric data, then encodes it to stream between remote devices over ordinary networks.
Film and visual effects
44 feature film credits
Big Blue Ceiling grew out of a career in feature film visual effects and pipeline architecture, on shows like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Pacific Rim, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Captain America: The First Avenger and many more. Research that understands production is what we do.
All work 72
-
BigBlueBam and the B-Suite
A work suite where AI agents work alongside people, with the same permissions.
-
Frndo
An AI companion for iPhone with a face and a voice.
-
Convo
Synthetic friend-to-friend conversations for training chat models, planned, checked and reviewed before export.
-
B2C Payments
A reusable billing framework for subscriptions, invoicing, prepaid credits and usage billing, dropped into any app.
-
MRiot Vision Pro Module
Friendly hardware and software that give entertainment an understanding of people.
-
HoloFlect
A modular, upgradeable AR headset platform built for enterprise.
-
Aesopic
AI-assisted long-form fiction, structured from series concept down to the page.
-
AI Storybook
News stories, autonomously retold for children.
-
AquariOS
One platform for AR and VR apps, running several at once, on whatever headset or phone you have.
-
AR Portals
Step through a doorway from the real world into a virtual one.
-
AR Scuba
An underwater 360 video performed as a hologram.
-
ARHero
Augmented reality tabletop gaming on everyday Android phones.
-
Augmented Clothing
Clothing as a platform for augmented reality, starting with hats.
-
AuRA
Our Autonomous Research Assistant: it keeps researching, analyzing and reporting between prompts.
-
AuRA Avatar Generator
Customizable, photorealistic presenters for AI-generated video briefings.
-
B2C Webmail
A lightweight HTML email sender for Gmail, with three interchangeable UIs and a CLI.
-
b2cFastCopy
A Windows bulk copier that uses RAM as a shock absorber between fast and slow drives.
-
b2cNetworkMonitor
A self-hosted dashboard that tracks an office connection's latency and bandwidth over time.
-
B2CQuantizer
Batch quantization of Mistral models from a browser, on a rented GPU.
-
Big Top
Traditional 3D content creation, rebuilt with AI inside the tools.
-
BigBluePipeline
A VFX studio pipeline, rebuilt as the artist-side front end for Big Top.
-
CameraSmartPlate
A camera plate that knows where it is, for tracking, virtual production and NeRF capture.
-
Cardforia and SecureVR
Unity building blocks for phone-based AR and VR.
-
Computational Optics
Hyperspectral images from the ordinary camera in a phone.
-
Depth2STL and Obj2GLB
Two small open-source tools for getting 3D data where it needs to go.
-
DisplaySystemTray
One-click display modes and saved monitor layouts from the Windows tray.
-
DriveSpeedTest
An honest external-SSD benchmark that says whether the drive, cable or port is the bottleneck.
-
Enhanced Presence
A run of prototypes chasing the feeling of being in the room with someone far away.
-
Glasses-Free 3D Telepresence
Volumetric calls on a 45-inch autostereoscopic display, no glasses required.
-
Handheld AR Controller
A 3D-printed grip that carries a tracking image and a Bluetooth gamepad.
-
Immersive Projection AR
A large, music-centered space you explore through projection-mapped AR.
-
Immersive Work at Mirada
Mobile AR, mixed reality apps and large-scale interactive installations.
-
iOS LiDAR Scanner
3D scanning and surface reconstruction on LiDAR-equipped iPhones and iPads.
-
ISO-5 Optical Cleanroom
A cleanroom lab built to turn phone cameras into spectral instruments.
-
Life-Size 4K Telepresence
What do scale and latency alone do for the sense of presence?
-
LLMRabbi
Turning books into conversational training data, so a model reasons from a text instead of reciting it.
-
MagicWatch
Augmented reality that turns context cues into live database views.
-
Mirada360 for Unity
A layered approach to 360 video in Unity.
-
Mixed-FOV Depth Sensing
Pairing an ultrawide depth sensor with a narrow one for detail where it matters.
-
Mobile AR Film Promo
A home-video promotion you steer by moving your phone.
-
Mobile VR Shooter
A tracked handheld controller for phone VR, made from a printed paddle.
-
Mobile XR R&D
A run of augmented, mixed and extended reality experiments on everyday phones.
-
MRiot: Appliance Control
Look at a lamp, tap the air, and change its color.
-
MusicLoRA
Fine-tuning an LLM to write song lyrics with a lyricist's range.
-
Netflix Hollywood Headquarters Lobby
A large, continuously animated, immersive lobby.
-
NewsPod AI
A news video podcast that researches, records and publishes itself.
-
North Star Stereoscopic Telepresence
A preview of a fully 3D, ultra-HD video call with realtime perspective shift.
-
OpenVoice for Unity
Cloned, emotionally varied voices synthesized on the device, in Unity.
-
OrcVis
A message bus and live map for many Claude Code sessions working as peers.
-
Phone-Based AR Headset
The first HoloFlect prototype, built from a phone and a hand tracker.
-
PiperTTS for Unity
On-device neural text-to-speech for Unity on Windows, macOS and iOS.
-
Projection AR Tabletop Gaming
Augmented reality projected onto an ordinary table, with touch.
-
PyTorch Utilities
Two small tools for the everyday friction of working with PyTorch.
-
QIE Studio
An image generation and editing studio, built by an AI agent working unattended from our specification.
-
Realtime Mocap Camera for Games
A camera operator on a mocap stage, shooting footage inside a live game.
-
RidiculousRenamer
A batch file renamer with a preview you can edit, image thumbnails and undo.
-
ShellGenie
A command shell that turns plain English into commands, with a local LLM.
-
SILVR
A phone app that knows what you're watching and opens AR and VR content around it.
-
Steerable Projection AR
Fully interactive, game-centered AR projected across a large space.
-
Tango Car Show
Full-size virtual cars in the real world, with realistic lighting and reflections.
-
The Augmented Tarot
Point a phone at a tarot card and watch it come alive.
-
The Blue Vale
A d20-style tabletop roleplaying game played in augmented reality, on almost any device.
-
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Interactive 180 Wall
An interactive panoramic walkthrough of a show's New York stages, in Los Angeles.
-
The Town
Spatial tabletop gameplay with an extended reality interface.
-
ToolForge
A desktop launcher for local Python tools that AI agents can drive over MCP.
-
Touch Telepresence
Conveying the sense of touch across a video call.
-
Transparent Volumetric Display
A see-through, desktop-sized display that shows a remote person with realtime parallax.
-
Variable-Baseline Depth Sensing
What happens to depth estimation when the cameras are very far apart?
-
Virtual Eddie
A life-size mixed reality avatar, placed and tracked with recognition targets.
-
Volumetric Streaming over RTC
Realtime 3D capture of a person, merged from two sensors and streamed over the internet.
-
Whisper.Sentis
Whisper speech-to-text running inside Unity on the Sentis inference engine.
-
xR Ecosystem
A modular, device-agnostic programming interface for mixed reality.