Immersive Air Taxi Experience
Developed for Joby Aviation, this immersive VR experience takes passengers on a simulated flight from the DXB International Airport to Downtown Dubai and ending in Palm Jumeirah. Built in Unreal Engine, the experience combines a city-scale digital environment with detailed architecture, animated urban activity, and environmental effects to offer a glimpse into the future of urban air mobility.
Working within the production team, I refined the environments along the flight route, focusing on downtown Dubai, the takeoff airport, and the coast. My contributions included environmental polish, entourage around the takeoff area, animated train and vehicle activity, and boats around the landing area—adding details visible to the VR passenger’s view.
Client / Studio
Joby Aviation / Agile Lens
Role
Environmental Design & Worldbuilding
Stack
Unreal Engine, Cesium, Codex
Mapping the Journey
The experience was designed to offer a glimpse into the future of urban air mobility, presenting flight as an exciting new way to navigate Dubai. Rather than following the entire journey in real time, we used cinematic transitions and carefully timed teleportation to move passengers between key moments along the route, maintaining a sense of momentum and discovery throughout the experience.
Flight path highlighting takeoff, landing, and cinematic teleportation points.
Crafting the Environment
Building an immersive experience at the scale of an entire city meant being intentional about where we invested our time and resources. Rather than treating every part of the environment equally, we prioritized the locations and details that passengers would notice most in VR, from the areas surrounding takeoff and landing to recognizable landmarks along the flight path.
My work focused on bringing these moments to life through architectural asset integration, environmental detailing, and landscape refinement, balancing visual fidelity with the performance demands of real-time VR.
Refined downtown cityscape with integrated architectural assets and landmarks.
Bringing the City to Life
Beyond the architecture, the smaller details were essential to making Dubai feel like a living, breathing city. I populated the takeoff and landing environments with vehicles, trains, boats, and other entourage, adding activity and visual interest to the moments passengers would experience up close.
Animated trains, vehicles, and boats bringing activity to the takeoff and landing environments.
Vertiport and surrounding environment with added architectural and urban details.
I also worked on integrating the surrounding landscape and coastline, addressing overlapping geometry and visual inconsistencies between Cesium tiles and water surfaces. This involved defining water boundaries and refining how the terrain met the coastline to create a more seamless environment. Throughout development, I used AI-assisted Unreal workflows to accelerate tasks such as bulk asset replacement, boundary editing, and VR performance optimization.
Refined shoreline geometry and water boundaries along Dubai's coastline.