Star Wars: Project Porg
Befriend, feed, and train a nest of living porgs in your own home — an experimental Magic Leap experience from Schell Games and ILMxLAB.
Overview
Star Wars: Project Porg is an experimental mixed-reality demo built for the Magic Leap One, created by Schell Games in collaboration with Lucasfilm's ILMxLAB. The brief was open-ended: invent a brand-new experience for Magic Leap's platform using one of Star Wars' most beloved creatures — the porgs from The Last Jedi.
It drops a nest of living porgs into your real-world space, where — guided by C-3PO himself (voiced by Anthony Daniels) — you feed them treats, play with them, and teach them to move through the room around you. It plays less like a game than a relationship: the porgs watch, react, and warm up to you the more time you spend together.
My Role
I joined as UI/UX engineer and engine integrator embedded with the design teams, building novel systems that let art and design realize their vision on pre-release hardware. Much of the job was bridging departments — translating creative intent into something technically achievable, and carrying tech's constraints and needs back the other way.
The real challenge was the ground itself: we were developing against pre-alpha Magic Leap hardware and software, with the platform shifting under our feet as we built on it. Revealed in October 2018 at Magic Leap's L.E.A.P. conference and released as a free download that December, Project Porg became an early showcase for believable, emotionally responsive characters that share physical space with the viewer (animation supervised by Paul Kavanagh).
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