Career story
Avatar prototypes in Unity
How contractor work on Project PAI turned avatar systems, real-time graphics, and blockchain product ideas into Unity demos that people could actually see and understand.
Highlights
- Collaborated as a contractor on technical demos and prototype experiences for ObEN and Project PAI.
- Worked in the overlap between avatar systems, real-time graphics, and blockchain product ideas.
- Built Unity experiences for investor-facing and event-facing storytelling.
- Learned how to make ambitious platform concepts feel concrete before the full product exists.
Related links
When the product is still becoming real
After the hidden object Unity work, I started getting pulled into stranger and more ambitious real-time projects. One of the exciting ones was Project PAI by ObEN, led by Nikhil Jain. The idea sat in a very 2018 kind of frontier: personal AI avatars, real-time character experiences, identity, and blockchain.
ObEN was working on the idea of a Personal AI, a digital avatar that could represent a person with their look, voice, and behavior. The broader Project PAI ecosystem connected that avatar vision with blockchain concepts around identity and ownership. It was not a small pitch. It was the kind of product story that needed to be experienced, not only explained on slides.
My role in the overlap
I collaborated as a contractor on technical demos and prototype experiences for investor-facing and event-facing work. Unity was a natural fit because the demos needed a real-time stage: characters, animation, camera movement, UI states, interaction, device builds, and enough visual polish to make the concept land quickly.
My job was not to build the whole platform. It was to help turn pieces of the vision into working experiences. That is a different craft. You take something abstract, find the part people need to understand first, and build a demo that makes the idea feel less theoretical.
Prototype as product storytelling
Investor-facing prototypes have their own rules. They need to be stable, clear, and paced well. The experience has to survive someone watching over your shoulder, someone pressing the wrong thing, or someone asking, "but what happens if..." during the moment that is supposed to feel effortless.
Event-facing prototypes add even more pressure. The demo has to reset quickly, communicate without a long explanation, and hide the messy scaffolding that always exists behind a prototype. When it works, the audience does not see the hacks. They see the product possibility.
The technical texture
The work lived in the intersection of avatar presentation and real-time interaction. In Unity terms that meant building scenes that could support animated characters, controlled flows, polished UI moments, predictable camera framing, and the kind of "happy path" robustness a live demo needs.
The blockchain side was more about product language and experience design than low-level chain engineering for me. The important question was how ownership, identity, and a personal avatar could feel like a product instead of a diagram. A good prototype gives people a handle on that question.
What it changed
Project PAI taught me a lot about building at the edge of a product vision. Sometimes the job is not to optimize an existing workflow or ship a known game loop. Sometimes the job is to make an early idea believable enough that the next conversation can happen.
That work also made me better at translating between technical possibility and business storytelling. Real-time graphics, avatars, AI identity, blockchain, events, investors: those worlds do not naturally speak the same language. A working Unity demo can become the shared language in the middle.