Art / Work
La caverna del ojo
Enrico Mandirola's doctoral thesis project · Technical collaboration in Unreal Engine 5
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Technical collaboration (VR and Unreal Engine 5)
- With
- Enrico Mandirola (author)
- Tools
- Unreal Engine 5.5, Meta Quest 3, PCVR, Stationary Lighting, Blueprints, OculusXR
The project and its authorship
La caverna del ojo (The Cave of the Eye) is an art and research project conceived and directed by Enrico Mandirola as part of his doctoral thesis at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. The work looks into the relationship between the eye, the body, cinematic space and memory through an immersive virtual reality experience.
My part in the project has been solely technical collaboration: building the environment in Unreal Engine 5.5.4, the interaction architecture for VR headsets (Meta Quest 3 via PCVR) and graphics performance optimization.
Technical work and optimization in Unreal Engine
The technical work focused on turning the conceptual vision into an interactive three-dimensional environment with high standards of visual comfort and smoothness:
- Lighting pipeline for VR: Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM) turned off in favor of Stationary Lighting and Cascaded Shadow Maps (CSM), which sharply cut the per-eye rendering load.
- OculusXR setup: Fixed Foveated Rendering at High, Late Latching to reduce motion-to-photon latency, and dynamic resolution.
- Navigation and comfort: A teleport system with a fade to black (Camera Fade) in Level Blueprints to prevent motion sickness.
- Performance: GPU time brought down from ~120 ms to under 14 ms, for a stable frame rate above 72 FPS on Meta Quest 3.
Gallery
