44 Days at Sea

For the opening of the new WA Museum Boola Bardip, Frame Labs partnered with the museum to create 44 Days at Sea, a tablet-based interactive exhibit for the Connections gallery. The experience follows the journey of the vessel Bremen, which sailed into Geraldton in 2013. It was designed to be approachable for a wide audience, with a guided flow that works well in a gallery setting.

A key part of the look and feel came from 3D artwork created in VR using Tilt Brush by WA artist Justin Randall. My role was to take those expressive VR-built assets and make them run smoothly on Microsoft Surface Pro hardware while keeping the visual style intact. I also built the real-time rendering work that tied it together, including a custom ocean shader to sell the scale and mood of the voyage.

On the technical side, I handled the interactive app development end-to-end: building the scene logic and user interactions, implementing a network synchronisation system so the installation behaved consistently across devices, packaging the project as a UWP application, and deploying it onto two Surface Pro tablets for the exhibit. The project also needed multi-language support, so content and UI were structured to accommodate localisation cleanly.

My work on the project included:

• Optimising Tilt Brush VR art for real-time performance on Surface Pro

• Developing the custom ocean shader and real-time visual effects

• Building the exhibit's interactivity and guided flow

• Implementing network sync for consistent multi-device behaviour

• Packaging as a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app and deploying to the installation tablets

• Supporting multi-language content and UI where required