PhD thesis submitted 2026 · open to postdoctoral and industry roles
I am an XR researcher at TUS Midlands Midwest. For four years I was embedded with Boston Scientific in Ireland, building the authoring workflows that let mechanical design engineers create their own immersive equipment design reviews, and running the studies that test whether those workflows are actually learned and kept.
Now: finishing the doctorate and looking for postdoctoral research positions and industry partnerships in XR for regulated manufacturing. Get in touch
CAD geometry translated into a walkable XR scene
Funded, Hosted and Partnered By
Doctoral research co-funded by Boston Scientific Galway with the SFI Confirm Centre for Smart Manufacturing in years one and two, and with the Research Ireland ADAPT Centre in years three and four.
01 — The Record
Every study ran inside a live medical device plant, under research ethics approval, with engineers who had a day job. None of it used student participants.
More than twelve template versions were produced across four years. Every Unity, XRI, Meta SDK or Link update broke something, so each release was rebuilt rather than patched. The four listed are the versions that reached the partner as supported offerings.
Cork acquired the same XR laptop, Unity Industry licences and templates on its own budget, then a different use case emerged there: line and footprint layout planning rather than equipment design review.
02 — The Work
Build
Containerised Unity templates and versioned instruction sets that take a mechanical engineer from a SolidWorks assembly to a walkable design review without code. The instructions carry as much of the capability as the software does.
Evidence
Mixed method designs built around practising engineers: focus groups, instrumented in situ sessions, step-wise task load and usability measures, critical incident analysis, and a Delphi round to agree what the results mean.
Transfer
Training sessions, power user pathways, site to site replication and adoption guidance, so the capability keeps working after the research project closes.
03 — Selected Work
From the first proof of concept to a replication at a second plant. Equipment designs, internal project names and commercial terms are withheld throughout.
Case 01
A no-code CAD to VR design review workflow: a full facility assembly imported and walkable in under eight minutes, and an ITAG Excellence Award for the partner that nominated the project.
Case 02
A three-phase study of VR process transformation: 31 stakeholders recruited, 28 completing every phase, published as a full paper at ACM IMX 2025.
Case 03
Supervised to unsupervised co-creation: the capstone study, which made the authoring workflow itself the thing being measured.
Case 04
Replication at a second site: the same protocol run in Cork with the use case left unnamed, so the site's own demand could surface.
Case 05
Mixed reality at full scale: co-created templates that put a 160 million triangle layout into the cleanroom it was being planned for.
Case 06
Build versus buy: a structured comparison of commercial XR design review platforms against the in-house route, written for a procurement decision.
05 — Working Together
If you are assembling a proposal on industrial XR, digital twins or human factors in regulated environments, or you have a manufacturing process that people keep trying to fix with a headset, I am worth a conversation.
Athlone, Ireland, with regular travel to partner sites in Galway and Cork.
Medical device and regulated manufacturing, equipment design engineering, XR human factors.
Mixed methods, reflexive thematic analysis, critical incident technique, Delphi, SIM-TLX, SUS.
Unity, C#, OpenXR, XR Interaction Toolkit, Meta XR SDK, CAD to mesh translation, SolidWorks pipelines.