Bringing XR to Puerto Rico.
Visionary is the student organization I founded at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez to bring virtual and augmented reality to a campus where no one was building with them yet. I wanted to learn the technology and use it — so I started the place to do it, and got Meta (Oculus at the time) to back it.
No one was working with it, so I built the room.
I wanted to learn VR and AR and actually develop with them — but nobody at my university was. Rather than wait for a course or a lab to exist, I founded Visionary as a student organization and went looking for hardware and backing. Meta — Oculus at the time — sponsored us: computers, headsets, and funding to host events. We were the only group in Puerto Rico with that sponsorship, and the headsets they sent us were the only ones on the island that had never been put up for sale.
Hackathons, workshops, and the island's first VR builds.
Visionary grew into a community of around 200 members and a steady cadence of heavily-attended events. We ran the first VR hackathons in Puerto Rico — getting students who had never touched a headset to ship something playable in a weekend. The work spanned the whole XR stack, from headset development to web and mobile AR.
VR hackathon · live demo
Hackathon winners & crew
Meta-sponsored · UPR Mayagüez
It lit the fuse on everything after.
Visionary is where the whole career started — the first time I led a team, secured a corporate partner, and turned a personal curiosity into something other people could learn from. Every immersive project I've worked on since traces back to the decision to stop waiting for permission and start the organization myself.