Unity works closely with many technology partners around the world who choose Unity for their immersive XR applications and projects. Below is an interview with James Roosevelt, Director of Technology at Trigger XR. Trigger XR is an experienced XR developer and agency. For more than 15 years, they’ve been trusted by some of the biggest companies and IPs to strategize, build, and run cutting-edge AR, VR, and immersive solutions across mobile and Head-mounted Display (HMD). Trigger XR pushes the limits of emerging technologies in service of stories that brands want to tell and people want to hear.
James oversees project development, with a special focus on their Unity-based work, as well as the development of their internal technology stack.
Q: James, can you tell us a bit more about Trigger XR and what kind of projects you’ve worked on over the years?
Trigger XR has over 8 years of HMD experience, completed over 350+ XR projects and led more than 350,000 hours of XR development with clients such as Disney, LEGO, Coca-Cola, the NBA, Nike, Mercedes AMG Petronas F1, Starbucks, Verizon, and Molson Coors, along with premium entertainment IP including Spider-Man, Star Wars, Avengers, Avatar, Jurassic World and more.
We also do early development work with companies like Unity, Apple, Niantic, Qualcomm, Roblox, Snap, Meta, Adobe, and Google. We offer advisory, creative and development in-house with expertise at every stage of XR production, from R&D and prototyping to scalable mobile and HMD development, including live ops and maintenance.
Trigger XR has numerous awards from Clios, Shortys, Auggies and Webbys and was recognized as one of the fastest growing companies by Inc. Magazine. As a minority owned business and a member of the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC), we collaborate with a diverse slate of clients and partners who represent inclusive values.
Q: Let’s talk more about one of your customers, Diageo, who recently released their Made with Unity application on Apple Vision Pro. What led Trigger and Diageo to build this new experience?
Diageo wanted to build on Apple Vision Pro to showcase the rich legacy, craft, and culture of Don Julio tequila in an immersive, engaging way. This initiative aligns with Diageo's Breakthrough Innovation strategy, offering tequila fans a unique, interactive experience that brings the authenticity of Don Julio to life from the comfort of their homes. If you’re a tequila enthusiast and over 21, with Apple Vision Pro you can enjoy fun activities like cutting agave in this innovative virtual environment.
Q: How did the process of building out the experience go? What were some barriers you ran into and how did you overcome them?
Venturing head first into a new platform undoubtedly brings challenges and friction points, but also opportunities for growth and learning. That was no doubt the case for us as we partnered with Diageo to build an immersive brand experience for their product – Tequila Don Julio. We set out to tell the story of the history and production process of one of their flagship brands on an exciting new platform. Along the way we encountered and were able to overcome a lot of difficulties in the development of this project, both from a technology perspective as well as a process and operational perspective. Starting with the tech, we immediately found that we needed a better understanding of what was actually happening on Apple Vision Pro at the native level. In past projects, we had built our fair share of custom plugins and bridges into Unity from the native side, but for Tequila Don Julio we found that we needed to do this at a much deeper level than before. We explored Reality Kit, Reality Composer, a lot more Xcode, as well as several other native tools to grasp the way our content would ultimately be displayed on the device. This understanding really helped inform us how we should approach the build out of our content from the Unity side.
At the time of the project's development, updates and rollouts to the Unity PolySpatial packages were also moving very quickly. We’d often check for feature support of something one day and then find out that a week later, something like Spatial video is suddenly supported. This prompted several changes to the way that we operated as a team.
It meant that internally, there was a much greater need for knowledge sharing as our developers, or anyone for that matter, found or discovered key updates. It meant we also had to be better about setting expectations up front. With many features unsupported or only partially supported, we had to be clear with our creative team and 3D team about what we could achieve, even though we had done things like post processing, or complex particle systems a lot in the past.
Also at this time, we were doing our best to share our understanding of the hardware itself to a larger team that couldn’t each have their own headset for testing the experience. We were able to work through this with a much higher frequency of shared video recordings of the experience, more team huddles, and even ports to Meta Quest 3 to allow for some of our team to test and review content.
Overall what this came down to was quicker methods of sharing information and visual reference. It meant setting expectations as a team up front, being vigilant of a rapidly changing platform, and using our collective experience to find creative solutions to the barriers we faced.
Q: Why Unity for this project with Diageo, James?
Using Unity was a no brainer for us. We’ve been using Unity for about as long as Trigger has been making AR experiences, and we knew that eventually there would be a chance that this project would live somewhere beyond Apple Vision Pro. For that reason, we knew that we had to stick with Unity versus going the route of native development.
Unity enabled us to tell the story of Tequila Don Julio in an authentic and accurate way. We did this by transporting the user to the fields of Jalisco Mexico, where they’re immersed in the production process of several types of tequila. It allowed us to find parts of this production process that could become interactive, where we might have the user cut the leaves from an agave plant or age a barrel of a tequila to see the results. And it allowed us to do all this with the systems and packages that we had already grown familiar with in past HMD and AR work built with Unity.
We also ended up investing a large amount of time into the implementation of several lighting and material scenarios because the device’s image-based lighting was something we were ultimately unsure of. We saw instances where, depending on the user’s real-world lighting, our models were far too bright or too dark. And obviously, we never want to display our content in a way that would make it look bad or unrealistic. As potential solutions, we looked into everything from having lighting completely baked into textures, to using real time lighting and leveraging the image-based lighting coming from the OS. Ultimately, our happy medium was controlling all of the lighting from within Unity–we called this the “unlit-lit approach”–and we did this in tandem with a baked shadow solution for our 3D content.
What made this all possible, beyond the hard work and passion of our team, was getting involved in every way that we could. Whether it was the Unity discussion forums, or the Polyspatial documentation pages, we monitored all of these daily because so much crucial information was getting shared there. It’s worth noting that Unity has been great at supporting their forums and discussions pages in the past, but the interaction and support that we saw from the Unity PolySpatial team in the discussions pages was next level. They were incredibly involved in any post that got submitted and helped us on several occasions.
Q: In retrospect, what were some key takeaways for Trigger XR on this project?
Looking back at the development of this project, it was really the perfect opportunity to build our understanding of this new platform and this new hardware. It gave us no choice, for better or worse, but to get into the weeds and stand on the literal edge of the technology. The information we brought back internally and circulated amongst our team now enables us to build more and improve existing Apple Vision Pro experiences. It taught us how we needed to operate if we wanted to be amongst the wild west early adopters of new technology.
Q: What benefits did you see from using Unity?
Given the challenges that we faced up front, these key learnings, changes in our approach, and overall collaboration really allowed us to bring our partner Diageo and their product Tequila Don Julio into the world of spatial computing with a unique and engaging showcase experience. By using Unity and Apple Vision Pro, we were able to be first to market on this exciting device, and lean into their innovation objectives. Initial impressions and reactions have been really positive, and we’re excited for more people to get their hands on this and learn more about Tequila Don Julio.
Q: What’s next for Trigger XR and Diageo?
We want to expand the platform, add more functionality, and look for opportunities to partner with Diageo for further brand activations and experiences.
Interested in XR development? Learn more about the Unity engine and how it can be leveraged to create immersive AR, VR, and MR applications.
