Career story
AR safety lessons in the real world
How Arility used augmented reality to teach child safety in classrooms and outdoor learning environments, and what it took to keep content, features, and 10-20 connected iPads running smoothly.
Highlights
- Worked on Arility, an award-winning AR safety education app used in classrooms and experiential learning environments.
- Added and optimized new AR lesson content built around curriculum-linked safety scenarios.
- Added product features in collaboration with the backend team, including flows around reporting and classroom activity state.
- Debugged network connectivity for outdoor classroom sessions running across roughly 10-20 iPads.
Project links
A project I still feel proud of
Arility is one of those projects that still feels special to me. It was an augmented reality learning app designed to help children learn safety through interactive scenarios, curriculum-linked lessons, and teacher reporting. Instead of explaining risk only through worksheets or videos, Arility put animated situations into the classroom through tablets.
The idea was simple in the best way: let students see a risky situation, make choices, answer questions, and experience the safer outcome in an environment where the consequences are virtual. That is exactly the kind of place where AR makes sense. It can make abstract safety lessons feel present without putting kids in actual danger.
Built for classrooms, not just demos
Arility was built for classrooms, home learning, and experiential learning centres. Teachers could run safety activities, students could join on their own iPads or Android tablets, and the session could produce report cards linked to curriculum outcomes. It was not just an AR toy. It needed to fit into how educators actually teach.
That changed the engineering mindset. A single-device AR demo can get away with a lot. A classroom app cannot. You have a teacher managing the flow, a group of children holding devices, network conditions that are not always friendly, and a lesson plan that still needs to land even if the physical environment is noisy.
My part of the work
I worked on adding and optimizing new content, which meant taking AR lesson material and making it run well on the target devices. In Unity and C#, that usually becomes a mix of scene organization, asset budgets, animation timing, memory pressure, loading behavior, and making sure the experience still feels smooth when the tablet is not the newest one in the room.
I also added new features in collaboration with the backend team. Arility had more going on than local AR rendering: teachers, activities, student sessions, reports, optional class photos, and content that had to move between the app and server-side systems at the right moments. The app experience only felt simple because a lot of state had to line up behind it.
The outdoor iPad problem
One of the most practical challenges was network connectivity. The app was often run in outdoor classroom environments with roughly 10-20 iPads active at the same time. That is a very different world from testing one device at a desk with perfect Wi-Fi.
I spent time doing and debugging connectivity work: sessions joining, devices staying in sync, activity state moving reliably, reports getting through, and edge cases where one tablet had different timing from the rest of the group. In classroom software, reliability is a feature. If the network gets weird, the teacher still needs the lesson to continue.
AR that had to be measurable
The project used Unity and C# with Vuforia and ARCore. Vuforia made sense for marker-based classroom experiences, while ARCore helped bring device tracking capability into the mobile AR stack. The technical goal was not just to make something appear on a marker. It was to make the AR experience teachable, repeatable, and measurable.
That reporting piece mattered. Arility could turn student answers and lesson outcomes into something teachers could use after the session. That made the product feel more complete: engagement during the lesson, evidence after it, and a practical reason for schools to keep using it.
Why it stuck with me
Arility received numerous innovation awards and was featured on national TV, which was great to see. But the part that stayed with me was more grounded: real kids, real teachers, real tablets, real lessons, real constraints.
It was a reminder that interactive software can be more than entertainment or spectacle. Done well, it can help people understand something important sooner, remember it longer, and give educators better tools to see what actually landed.