Maritime Exhibit

VR Designer - Unreal Engine, Virtual Reality

January 2026 - May 2026

This museum exhibit was developed in Unreal Engine by 6 developers in the span of 5 months. To celebrate USA's 250th anniversary, view the bottom of Lake Champlain to see a diving spot that has only been experienced my experienced divers.. until now. With the use of Virtual Reality, dive down into the waters and see the Revolutionary war gunboat Spitfire by accompanying Fifi, your ROV companion who teaches you about the sunken ship, and the environmental factors of being sunken down for so long.

Immediately when starting this project I had two main questions for our stakeholders:

1) Do we want to focus more on entertainment or educational use?

2) With our age range being the public, do we want to care more about accessibility or accuracy with the writing level?

These questions were vital for me to learn about how we want to strike a balance that keeps our game fun for all audiences, while still being engaging and hold educational value. We learned that we held the same priorities of making accessibility and entertainment along with education being our main priority. Using this information, I had one big idea for the best way to educate while keeping it fun!

Maritime Spitfire Storyboard

Meet Fifi, our ROV or Remotely Operated Vehicle. Fifi is a real robot that the museum used to scan the sunken ship to create the 3D model that we used, so Fifi felt like the best fit to work as a narrator for our experience, a personable cute companion to make the dark spookish seas not feel scary! With this start I wrote all of the dialogue for Fifi, making sure to work with our stakeholders critiques to strike a balance between keeping an accurate educational experience while making it easy for any audience to understand.

Some of the work I found most rewarding on this internship were the opportunities I got to start and take advantage of. From introducing my own opportunities by connecting the museum with Champlain's Extra Life event to allow them to see real time testing in a public space, further connect with the stakeholders on the project, and work as a way to advertise their new exhibit. Towards the end and even after our internship, we got to take time to be interviewed to share our experience, and even appear on local news talking about our impact on the community!

Gaming a Shipwreck: Student-Designed Interactive VR Exhibit Opens at Maritime Museum - Champlain CollegeSix game students developed a VR game for the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, featuring sunken ship Spitfire.

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