Lucas Martinic
XR creative technologist & developer, based in Berlin, from Chile.
About me
XR creative technologist & developer
Hi, I'm a programmer, musician and creator, and most of what I make sits where code, sound and shared experiences meet. From building little games for my sisters when I was 9, to touring the world with my band Trementina, to becoming a VR engineer, the same itch keeps showing up: I want to make things people can step into together.
That itch took a turn in 2015. I was on tour, tried VR for the first time (Tilt Brush, painting in 3D, standing inside my own brushstrokes) and the feeling of being somewhere with someone else, in a space that didn't really exist, never left me. So I moved to Berlin, studied, and ended up teaching and mentoring at XR Bootcamp. Since then I've worked with start-ups here and abroad, mostly around XR, education, and lately, art.
I'm self-taught, and I tend to notice where the tools just don't exist yet. Instead of waiting around, I build them. A few of mine live on the Unity Asset Store and have caught on with people who are just getting started. Every missing tool feels like an invitation to prototype something.
In 2022 I was lead developer on artist Chloé Lee's VR piece Temporal World: her concept, my job to make it real (it premiered at SXSW 2023 and has toured since), and in 2024 I spoke on XR and AI at GITEX Global in Dubai. That same year I built my XR Colorpicker at Stockholm's XR Hack, an eye-dropper for the real world: point a Logitech MX Stylus at any object and pull its colour out to paint with. It won two awards at the jam and got written up by Creative Bloq.
Working with Chloé grew into Present Futures, the Berlin spatial-computing studio we co-founded: she drives the artistic concepts, I lead the development that turns them into something you can walk into. That's how we built our award-winning installations Reflections of Little Red Dot and Inter(mediate) Spaces, which play with what it means to share a space that's part real, part rendered.
And I keep finding my way back to music. Inkphony, our mixed-reality music app, lets you compose and perform inside an immersive space. My two worlds in one. It won XRCC 2025 and the Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition ($100K). Games, music, teaching, art: I keep circling the same question: how do you make something lots of people can enjoy together?
Present Futures
My company
Present Futures is a Berlin-based, award-winning immersive media and software studio I co-founded in 2023 with artist and filmmaker Chloé Lee.
Chloé leads the artistic concepts and I lead the development that brings them to life: XR art, ethical AI tools, and community-driven archival work that lives at the intersection of technology and human connection.
Projects & Work
Things I’ve built
100 Prototypes is my ongoing series of Mixed Reality experiments on the Meta Quest 3: each one a single "what if," built to feel a new kind of interaction. Swipe through a few:
100 Prototypes: Mixed Reality interaction experiments (Meta Quest 3)
- 1. What if time was in your hands?: Time, held in your hands: an hourglass you grab, tilt, and press to wind the world forward or rewind it back. How it works: Continuous buffering of the physics simulation's transform/rigidbody state, played back in reverse when the hourglass is inverted. Time direction and scale are mapped to the hourglass's tracked orientation and button input. Fracture/shatter handled with Unity physics.
- 2. What if your hands became the controllers?: Your fingers become legs. Two of them puppeteer a little character that walks and turns across your real table. How it works: Finger bones from Quest hand tracking are mapped directly onto the puppet's leg bones, and the puppet is an active ragdoll, so a walking motion of the fingers physically drives the character to walk. A tuned external force is injected when the walking motion is detected to make locomotion feel easy and natural, and a separate turning gesture is recognized to rotate the character. Depth is enabled so the puppet blends into the real world and is correctly occluded by your hands and furniture. On-device hand tracking; no controllers.
- 3. What if we could finally track our feet?: Your feet, finally in the game, enough to kick a ball at a goal. Quest 3 has no native foot tracking, so this is a deliberate hardware hack. How it works: Two Touch controllers strapped to the feet act as external trackers, feeding real foot position/velocity into the ball's physics for believable kicks. A windowed "goal" portal is composited into the passthrough scene.
- 4. What if we could identify any object around us in space?: Your space, annotated: everything around you recognized and labeled where it sits. How it works: Passthrough frames are captured on-device via the official Quest Passthrough Camera Access API and sent to the cloud, where Microsoft's Florence-2 performs zero-shot (open-vocabulary) object detection, localizing and returning bounding boxes for arbitrary objects without per-class training, alongside Gemini Flash Image for recognition. Boxes are reprojected into 3D space and anchored as world-locked labels.
- 5. What if your headset was a portable recording studio?: A recording studio that lives in your room: capture real sounds onto tapes you leave floating in space. A glimpse of what DAWs could become in MR. How it works: An external microphone plugged into the headset captures real-world audio, which is recorded into spatially-anchored virtual cassette objects; each tape plays back as a spatialized loop placed in the room. The recorder and cassette UI are rendered over passthrough, pointing toward how digital audio workstations could move into mixed reality.
- 6. What if you had an infinite tabletop skatepark?: An endless skatepark on your desk, ridden with your fingers. How it works: A physically-driven skateboard was built so the deck genuinely interacts with the ramps and obstacles: rolling, launching, and landing via physics rather than canned animation. One hand drives the fingerboard while a gesture with the other hand triggers flip tricks (kickflips and the like). The real desk surface is detected via scene understanding so virtual skatepark pieces sit correctly on it, placeable/snappable on the desk plane.
- 7. What if your touch could grow life?: A touch that brings the room to life: vines growing from wherever you reach. How it works: Using scene understanding, colliders are placed on all the surfaces/bodies the headset detects in the room. When the tracked hands touch any of these colliders, that contact point seeds procedural vine growth (spline/L-system style) that climbs along the real geometry. Combines hand tracking with Quest scene data.
- 8. What if you could extract the color from real objects around you?: An eyedropper for reality: pull a color straight off a real object and paint with it in the air. How it works: Reads passthrough pixels using an early display-capture hack (trev3d/QuestDisplayAccessDemo). This predated Meta's official camera API. The average of the pixel colors around the pen's tip sets the active draw color, which then feeds a 3D stroke/ribbon renderer. This is the project that won at Stockholm's XR Hack and was written up by Creative Bloq.
- 9. What if framing the shot means taking the photo?: Your hands are the camera: frame the shot and that’s the shutter. How it works: A continuation of the camera-access work from #8, using the same display-capture hack (trev3d/QuestDisplayAccessDemo), but where #8 sampled a small cluster of pixels, this plays with sampling a whole region. Hand tracking detects the framing gesture and computes the framed rectangle; the passthrough frame is cropped to that region and spawned as a world-anchored photo print.
- 10. What if having your files in a VR headset was as simple as sending a text?: Your files, one message away: send them to yourself and they show up around you. How it works: A "listener" watches the headset's WhatsApp downloads folder; when a new file lands there, the Unity app receives a C# file-system event and loads it into the appropriate XR viewer. So "sending a text" is literally messaging the file to yourself in WhatsApp, no custom transfer infrastructure needed.
- 11. What if you could rewind what you see?: A rewind button for your own eyes: scrub back through what you just saw. How it works: Passthrough frames are captured via the official Quest Passthrough Camera Access API into a rolling ring buffer; a scrub control plays the buffered feed backward/forward in time.
- 12. What if you could just grab sounds from your surroundings?: Every object around you is an instrument: pull its sound and compose with it. (This one grew into Inkphony.) How it works: Builds further on the zero-shot object detection from #4, this time as a continuous, asynchronous background detection loop. It uses Meta's Passthrough Camera Access SDK (PCA, v81), leaning on its time-stamped, stereo camera access, to reproject each screen capture and its recognized bounding boxes back into the world at the correct location. The hard problem was aligning recognition results to the world despite head movement and cloud latency: solved by storing the depth frame alongside each camera capture and its PCA timestamp, then aligning once the cloud result returns, so boxes land on the right real object even though detection finished moments later. Recognition runs through the Gemini API, and ElevenLabs synthesizes a sound representing each detected object. An advanced filtering/cleaning pass keeps detections from cluttering the play space; the resulting sounds become notes on a spatial staff that's sequenced for playback. Interaction is hand-tracked: pinch to extract a sound, tap to place notes, scrub to erase.
- 13. What if we could tear down reality?: Reach out and tear reality open. How it works: Coming soon…
Lately I've been chasing a problem I kept hitting myself: reporting as a developer. Building alongside AI agents across several projects at once, it's easy to lose the thread of what you actually did, and then you still have to report it, to your team, your clients, and the public. I'm building two products to fix that. mydev.cat is a pixel cat that lives on your desktop and logs your work as you code, local-first and yours forever, then turns it into the reports you owe people: standups and sprint summaries for your team, work reports for clients, and changelogs and build-in-public updates for everyone else. Its companion mydev.day is one diary for everything you ship: a hosted timeline fed by your AI agents (via an MCP server), your GitHub commits, and screenshots and clips, private by default and publishable when you want.
Present Futures is the Berlin spatial-computing studio I co-founded with artist Chloé Lee: art at the intersection of technology, built on the belief that technology should serve human connection. It grew out of Temporal World (2023), Chloé's generative haptic VR piece where visitors wearing a custom haptic jacket explore shifting landscapes at varying temporal speeds. I was lead VR developer; it premiered at SXSW 2023 and was nominated for Best XR Experience at the European XR Awards. Then came Reflections of Little Red Dot (2025), a mixed-reality installation where a custom-built slide projector triggers virtual scenes blending past and future Singapore: winner of the SXSW XR Experience Jury Prize, Venice Immersive's Bisato d'Oro and the Geneva International Film Festival's Reflet d'Or. Our latest, Inter(mediate) Spaces (2026, ongoing), pairs two participants to explore a global archive of reflections on community and memory, then collaborate with AI systems to generate a shared environment: an official selection at SXSW 2026, shown at Goethe-Institut Montreal and Onassis ONX Studio in New York.
Teaching runs alongside building. At XR Bootcamp I was master trainer of the Foundations bootcamp, mentoring developers, designers and founders from around the world through their first VR and mixed-reality projects, and lead developer on an XR research project with FFHS University in Switzerland. Watching someone ship their first immersive prototype never gets old. It's the same energy I bring to the bootcamps and workshops I run back in Chile.
I also publish XR multiplayer and networking templates on the Unity Asset Store, used by developers who are just getting started. Earlier stops: Chatterbug, building VR for language learning.
Articles, Mentions & Talks
Press, coverage & speaking
A shelf of places my work has shown up.
- May 19, 2026 · 80 Level: “This XR setup turns reality into something you can tear down,” on my mixed-reality prototype that lets you rip the real room apart like tearable material.
- May 18, 2026 · The Ghost Howls: “The genius Lucas Martinic has created another mindblowing MR demo.”
- Mar 25, 2025 · The Ghost Howls: my “reliving the memories” prototype, highlighted among the best experiments with Quest camera access.
- Sep 16, 2024 · The Ghost Howls: “a very cool thing during the XR Hack in Stockholm”: the stylus colour-picker project.
- Sep 11, 2024 · Creative Bloq: “Ingenious XR colour app is an exciting glimpse into the future of digital art,” on my mixed-reality real-world colour picker built with the Logitech MX stylus.
- Sep 10, 2024 · 80 Level: “…at first glance, may look like pure magic”: extracting colours from real-world objects in VR and painting with them.
Talks: speaking about XR, AI and spatial computing.
- Spatial Shift Sessions — XR & Society · Berlin, Jun 26, 2026: a talk on my mixed-reality prototypes and how the spatial computing that makes immersion seamless also makes “your world legible to a machine.”
- Global AI Bootcamp · Berlin, 2025: speaker.
- GITEX Global · Dubai: “How to Speak With Your Eyes,” a prototype to give a voice back to someone who can no longer speak.
- Unity Meetup Berlin: co-organizer and host of the city’s Unity & XR developer meetup.
Workshops: teaching people to build with XR and AI.
- GITEX EUROPE · Berlin, May 21-23, 2026: co-led a workshop on building multi-agent AI systems with Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Foundry (with Zaid Zaim). My part: using the Realtime API and voice-driven tool calling to edit a live Unity runtime scene, hands-free.
- XR Bootcamp of the Los Ríos Region · Valdivia, Chile, 2024: the region’s first; I was lead instructor for 37 participants across 8 teams building social-impact XR prototypes, run by Universidad Santo Tomás (START program).
- Vibecoding Workshop: “De la Idea a la App en 3 Horas” · Valdivia, Chile: a three-hour idea-to-app intensive.
Awards & Hackathons
Trophy shelf
Award-winning XR creative. The trophy shelf, newest first:
- Dec 2025 · 🏆 Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition: Best Lifestyle Experience, 1st place ($100K) for Inkphony, a mixed-reality music app where everything around you becomes an instrument to play and learn composition (with Tejas Shroff & Nadja Pirchheim).
- Jun 2025 · 🏆 XRCC (XR Creator Con) 2025: two first-place prizes (including the Mixed Reality Track) for Inkphony, the mixed-reality music app built with hand-tracking and real-world object detection.
- Jan 2025 · 🏆 MIT Reality Hack, Founders Lab: 2nd place for XR Cupid, a Quest 3 dating coach whose AI mentors read your eye contact, posture and body language and give real-time feedback.
- Sep 2024 · 🏆 XR Hack Stockholm: a double win (Meta’s Best Utility & Design + Logitech’s Best Use of the Stylus) for an MR colour picker: touch any real object with the Logitech MX stylus to grab its colour and draw with it.
- 2021 · 🏆 Hololight XR Hackathon: 1st place for a Mixed Reality for Cultural Heritage project, using HoloLens to make the monuments of Palmyra (the UNESCO World Heritage site in Syria damaged by ISIS) a tangible experience again.
- 2020 · 🏆 BVG / Jelbi Public Transport Hackathon: RELBI AR, an AR navigation tool that uses landmark scanning to guide you when GPS fails in the city.
- 2018 · 🏆 Desafío LATAM Hackshow: Infection, an immersive, real-time 3D horror/mystery experience built in Unity.
Music
Trementina & beyond
Before code, there was music. I toured the world playing bass in Trementina, and it was on the road, between shows, that I tried VR for the first time and changed course.
Music still shapes how I think about rhythm, structure, and building experiences people share.
It also led me to build Garage Heroes (early 2026), a mobile game where you put together your own band and write real songs with the help of AI. Get it on Google Play.
- 🎮 Garage Heroes: build a band, make real songs with AI.
- 🎧 Trementina on Spotify
- ☁️ SoundCloud: music experiments and weird covers.
Hardware & Making
Soldering bench
Arduino, soldering iron, a drawer of components. I like making physical things that blink, move, and occasionally work, including custom wearable and haptic interfaces for immersive installations.
My favourite build so far is the custom projector for Reflections of Little Red Dot (Present Futures, dir. Chloé Lee). I rebuilt a real retro slide projector into a tangible controller: you grab a physical slide, push it into the carriage, and that single, familiar gesture cues the matching chapter of the holographic archive inside the headset. Making an old mechanical object drive a mixed-reality scene meant marrying the hardware (sensing, wiring, and the projector's own mechanism) to the real-time experience running on the Quest.
Hobbies
Off the clock
Skateboarding, making music, soldering things together, and a rotating cast of other obsessions.
I skated obsessively as a teenager: enough to land nollie tre flips, switch inward heelflips and caballerial flips consistently. These days the board mostly lives on the wall, but I still pick it up from time to time to roll around and pop a few kickflips.
Chile
Where I’m from
I'm from Chile, that impossibly long ribbon of a country pinned between the Andes and the Pacific. I grew up and started out as a developer in Santiago, building VR/AR training experiences and games for a Chilean audience before heading to Berlin.
Berlin
Where I am now
These days I'm based in Berlin, where I moved after discovering VR on tour. It's where I trained and mentored at XR Bootcamp, co-founded Present Futures, and where I organize the Unity Meetup Berlin.
Contact
Say hi
The best way to reach me: