Savio Menifer

Savio Menifer

Interaction Designer in Kerala, India, he/him

Projects

2023

Spirit Seek is a co-located social VR game where players become tiny forest spirits playing hide and seek between plants, leaves, and grass 🍃. With a few Quest headsets and an empty play space, Spirit Seek lets you play hide and seek using just your hands and body in an refreshing nature-inspired world.

2022

Designed a social VR world focused on exploring how unique VR affordances can be used to facilitate intimate and meaningful connection between people. This project was part of my master's thesis at University of Twente.

2020

Involved in the design of a virtual co-presence experience for physically separated couples during COVID-19 lockdowns. We designed a VR stargazing experience that fostered intimacy by encouraging play and self-disclosure.

Work Experience

2023 — Now
Thiruvananthapuram, India

Creating world-class immersive experiences using AR, VR, MR, and emerging technologies across diverse domains including healthcare, e-commerce, entertainment, and travel.

2023 — Now
Thiruvananthapuram, India

Helping e-commerce businesses leverage the power of extended reality technologies to create innovative and engaging shopping experiences.

2023 — 2023
Remote

Developed an open-source implementation of XR captions in Unity, as part of the XROS Fellowship and XR Access's Prototype for the People project, which aims to create accessible open-source solutions for XR.

2022 — 2022
Amsterdam, NL

Worked on the design and development of a social VR game for the Oculus Quest 2, implemented in Unity and Normcore.

2021 — 2021
Enschede, NL

Developed the frontend in the Vue UI framework for Esports Ladder, a research project at University of Twente focused on encouraging inter-organisational connectivity through esports.

2020 — 2020
Enschede, NL

Collaborated with the creative team at Wirelab on projects that involved UI/UX design, visual design, branding, and marketing.

2018 — 2019
Thiruvananthapuram, India

Worked on fully fledged UX projects, with extensive involvement in user research, wireframing and prototyping.

2018 — 2018
Kerala, India

Conceptualised and designed social media marketing campaigns for various brands in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

Speaking

2022
Neos VR

A virtual talk during which I presented my master's thesis to the Edu-Science community in the social VR platform Neos.

Volunteering

2022 — 2022
Rotterdam

Demonstrated immersive VR experiences to the attendees of Immersive Tech Week 2022, and helped them try out different experiences.

Education

2019 — 2022
Enschede, NL

A 2-year master's programme with a multidisciplinary approach, with courses covering technology, design, research and storytelling. I graduated cum laude with my thesis titled "Firefly Island: Exploring intimacy in social VR", which looked at how VR can enable meaningful and authentic connection through its novel affordances.

2014 — 2018
Kerala, India

A 4-year professional undergraduate programme that focused on foundational knowledge of Computer Science and Engineering, with courses including programming principles, OOP, algorithms, neural networks, and computer graphics.

Certifications

2022

In this MOOC organised by the University of Michigan, I learned how to design new user experiences for XR. The course extends the design thinking approach to XR, while focusing on methods for ideating and prototyping new XR experiences, and also critiquing new and existing XR experiences from an ethical standpoint.

Contact

LinkedIn
GitHub
Website