Tomme Denney · Boston, Massachusetts
XR interaction designer & prototyper
I design how people move, reach, look and get feedback inside virtual worlds — then build it in Unity, so it can be tried in a headset instead of argued about in a deck.
Game-design craft, human-centred interaction design and real-time Unity prototyping — for games, spatial computing, simulation and emerging interactive products. My XR work runs inside live guided tours in the US, Canada and Italy.
MS in Extended Reality with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction, and a BFA in Game Design, both from Northeastern University. Since 2024, one of the developers at See Reality.
I treat comfort as an accessibility problem rather than a polish pass: locomotion, session length, play space and the person who has never worn a headset are design questions from the first sketch.
What I bring to a team
The human-facing half of an interactive system: what a person needs to understand, what they can do with their hands, head and body, what the system tells them back, and how a first-time user gets from putting the headset on to doing the thing. I design that, then build it far enough in Unity that a team can try it rather than imagine it — and work with engineers, artists and domain experts to get it the rest of the way.
- Interaction design for XR. Hand tracking, controllers and gaze as input; interaction states and feedback; onboarding for people who have never worn a headset; locomotion and comfort in room-scale VR and passthrough mixed reality.
- Game design. Mechanics and player decisions, control schemes, challenge and level flow, blockouts, design documentation, and iterating against playtests.
- Prototyping. Unity and C# on Meta Quest and OpenXR — passthrough, hand tracking, room-scale VR, and networked multiplayer in Normcore, in progress. I build to answer design questions and to show expected behaviour, not as a production engineer.
- HCI research. Interview-led design, presence and emotional-response surveys, and, from coursework, eye-tracking and heart-rate instrumentation.
- Learning now. Figma, for interaction wireframes and flows ahead of a build.
Most of the work here is games and tourism XR. The same method — break a real procedure into steps a novice can perform physically, and give them feedback while they do it — is what I would bring to simulation, training, and interfaces for systems that act in the physical world, robots included. Those are directions I am interested in, not ones I have shipped.
How I actually work
Five phases, run end to end on two graduate projects in Design for Dignity, with a graded deliverable at each one. I show this sequence only on projects that genuinely went through it — a process diagram on a project that skipped ideation is a lie with a nice icon.
- Research
- Definition
- Ideation
- Synthesis
- Delivery
What I mean by dignity
From graduate coursework in Design for Dignity: a design either honours four things about a person or erodes them. Merit — is this someone of inherent worth, or a funnel stage? Autonomy — can they choose, refuse, exit, and control how they are represented? Human rights — what are they entitled to regardless of whether they are a valuable user? Interpersonal connection — does this strengthen a relationship between people, or stand in for one?
I would rather show it than claim it. In Inhabiting Memory, every interpretive room came from that person's own interview rather than my reading of them, and I ruled out the most obvious mechanic available — letting a visitor handle a deceased relative as an object — because it treats a person as a prop. Those are the pillars working as build constraints, which is the only form in which they mean anything.
Instrumented evaluation
Graduate coursework in Biometrics of Design put me on eye tracking and heart-rate instrumentation — measuring where attention actually went and what the body did, rather than asking someone to recall it afterwards. It is the least common thing on this site and the one I would most like to use again: self-report tells you what a person believes about an experience, and instrumentation tells you what happened to them.
Where the rest of it comes from
Game interface design — diegetic UI, iconography, and taking a sketch through to a tested prototype. Interaction and experience foundations — object surveys, heuristic critique, and low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes. XR history and theory, which is where the argument that spatial media behaves differently from a screen actually comes from. And psychology, which is what any claim about attention, memory or cognitive load has to rest on.