“D3-O9”
Conversational AI Character

Senior Conversational Designer
Walt Disney Imagineering, Research & Development

D3-O9 is an AI-powered conversational character, featured inside guest cabins as part of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. Guests can videocall D3 at any time and talk with her using natural, conversational language — and she will respond to what they say, react to events taking place across the ship, and remember prior encounters. D3 changes and evolves based upon how a guest interacts with her, allowing each passenger to build their own unique relationship and storyline with the character.

As part of our conversational design team, I developed D3’s personality and backstory, honed conversational discourse mechanics to engage guests, and devised numerous storylines, scenarios, and reactive emotional states to bring her to life. As the “logistics droid” of the ship, D3 needed to integrate with the larger Starcruiser narrative, but also offer new opportunities for exploration and play — whether guests choose to help the heroic Resistance, align themselves with the evil First Order, or become a member of the shadowy underworld.

The ambition was not to create a themed conversational assistant, but to approach D3-O9 like she was a skilled improvisational performer playing the role of a Star Wars droid, with all of the humor and heart one would expect. She also represents the first public implementation of Disney’s new platform for building intelligent and interactive AI-driven characters. Developing that suite of tools and technologies in conjunction with our larger team allowed us to build a character that seamlessly lives alongside the live performers in Galactic Starcruiser.

Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge
VR Gaming Experience

Writer
ILMxLAB / Lucasfilm

Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge is a virtual reality adventure designed for the Meta Quest family of headsets. The project extends the world of Batuu and Black Spire Outpost – the setting for Disney’s immersive lands Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge – by letter players discover unexplored areas of the planet, and get swept up into a new series of adventures involving the nefarious Guavian Death Gang and the First Order.

I worked with director Jose Perez III, the Lucasfilm Story Group, and other writers to devise an experiential narrative that combined exciting immersive gameplay, classic characters like C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2, and new additions to the Star Wars canon like the pirate leader Tara Rashin (Debra Wilson) and quirky Azumel bartender Seezelslak (SNL’s Bobby Moynihan).

Most exciting was Temple of Darkness, a standalone story within Tales that allowed guests to take on the role of a young padawan who confronts her own fears by adventuring alongside Jedi Master Yoda himself (voiced by the legendary Frank Oz). The project was an exciting step forward in ILMxLAB’s vision for interconnected, interactive storytelling that stretches across mediums – and an opportunity to combine my own history in immersive theater and film to create a new kind of experience.

Theatre Macabre
Immersive Theater Production

Writer & Second-Unit Director
Los Angeles, California

A large-scale immersive theater production, inspired by the legendary Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, staged in downtown Los Angeles with a cast of over 40 actors.

With Theatre Macabre, the goal was to combine the kind of open sandbox environment seen in shows like Sleep No More — where audiences can simply explore, or bear witness to a story unfolding around them — with ten different branching narrative tracks that allowed more active participants to become the leads in their own individualized subplots. 

Would a guest uncover the mysterious crimes taking place in the theater? Would they help one of the performers escape? Would they learn the secret of the mysterious figure haunting the balcony? The actions they took determined their own experience, in what No Proscenium called “a high wire act of narrative layering and participant agency”.

In addition to writing on the project, I directed multiple sequences, one-on-ones, and personalized interactions, and created custom props for use in the show and its alternate reality game mythology.

Camp Maine: A Night On The Town
Site-Specific Gaming Experience

Writer
Norway, Maine

Camp Maine: A Night on the Town was a site-specific, interactive gaming experience created in collaboration with Celebration Barn that took place across twelve different locations in downtown Norway, Maine. Within the story, guests came together to commemorate the passing of a beloved community figure, only to soon find themselves racing across the town — alongside a group of colorful characters — to uncover a mystery.

The project combined gameplay mechanics, live-action roleplaying, and interactive performance techniques to bring the story and characters to life. But we also designed the production to encourage even the most casual participants to jump in and play with gusto. The project attracted audiences of all ages, with the clues and mysteries leading to an exciting climax thanks to the local Norway Fire Department.