About

XR and robotics simulation engineer, PhD student at Waterloo. VR in Unity/Unreal, ROS teleoperation, digital twins, and VLA fine-tuning on real arms.

  • VR / XR — Quest 3, OpenXR, hands, 3D UI
  • Teleop — whole-body IK, ROS into XR
  • Sim & twins — Unity, Habitat-Sim, mapping
  • VLAs — SmolVLA / π0 on Kinova Gen3

Projects

Professional Experience

Nov 2025 - Present

PhD Researcher — Robotics, XR & Real-Time Visualization

University of Waterloo — Waterloo, Canada

Unity XR systems that stream live ROS into 3D and drive remote robots — teleoperation, digital twins, Gaussian-splatting scenes, full-body IK, and VLA fine-tuning (SmolVLA / π0) on a Kinova Gen3.

ROS Teleoperation Gaussian Splatting Unity VLA
Nov 2023 - Present

Unity VR Developer

BMad Technology Inc. — Montreal, Canada

Developed and owned quality of a Quest 3 multiplayer VR simulation using Photon PUN, Meta SDK, Firebase, and MongoDB. Integrated a full operator dashboard with an LLM assistant — voice (text-to-speech and speech-to-speech), a RAG knowledge system, business logic, and function/tool calling. Built interaction systems and developer tooling. Debugged multiplayer desync, authority, and timing through systematic root-cause analysis. Maintained CI/CD (GitHub Actions) and optimized runtime with the Unity Profiler.

Unity Photon PUN Meta SDK CI/CD
2024 - Feb 2026

Founder & Full-Stack Developer — AI Platform

Sibnik AI — Montreal, Canada

Designed and delivered an AI-powered platform (web, iOS, admin dashboards, chatbot, RAG). Built a scalable Cloudflare Workers backend for asset ingestion, AI processing, and multi-tenant APIs. Implemented embeddings and semantic search; deployed to the App Store with test/production environments and automation for catalog management and analytics.

RAG Cloudflare iOS APIs
Feb 2023 - Sep 2023

3D Software Developer (Medical Tech)

XSENSOR Technology Corp. — Calgary, Canada

Built real-time ML-driven heatmap and sensor visualizations in Unity with correctness validation. Developed large-scale 3D visualization tools (2,600 sensors) and tested stability and edge cases. Integrated Unity systems with .NET applications and ran cross-boundary integration testing. Worked with inverse kinematics, HLSL shaders, and sockets.

Unity ML Shaders .NET
Jan 2025 - Mar 2025

AR Full-Stack Developer

Blizza Brands Inc. — Toronto, Canada

Developed AR experiences and validated tracking, animation, and cross-device behavior. Built a role-based asset-management platform (Next.js + Strapi) with regression-tested API/UI flows. Delivered 3D WebGL product showcases and managed TestFlight releases with defect reproduction and verification.

AR Three.js Next.js WebGL
Jul 2022 - Mar 2023

Unity Developer — Full Stack

Optim Structure Inc. — Montreal, Canada

Built Unity Android inspection and reporting apps with verified cloud-sync accuracy. Implemented ML-based barcode scanning and improved reliability via field testing. Built dashboards and WebGL tools with regression-tested API workflows; improved report-generation efficiency ~4×.

Unity OpenCV Vue.js Cloud
2021 - 2023

Research VR Developer (MSc)

Bishop's University — Sherbrooke, Canada

MSc research on VR memory optimization (Quest 2) and ML pipelines for VR interaction. Implemented and validated hand- and gesture-recognition in Unity.

VR Research ML Pipelines Unity
Before 2021

Software & Research Developer

Multiple Organizations — Tehran, Iran

Backend, fintech, and real-time systems (Node.js, Python, Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, WebSockets). Aerospace and image-processing research (CFD, OpenCV, ML, cross-correlation) with validated numerical outputs. Built Android, Electron, and Unity applications for visualization and lab tooling.

Python CFD OpenCV Real-Time

Skills & Technologies

Robotics & Simulation

ROS Real-Time Data Streams Digital Twins Robot Teleoperation VLA / SmolVLA / π0 Gaussian Splatting Physics Simulation Inverse Kinematics Sensor Visualization

3D / XR Engines

Unity (C#) Unreal Engine Meta Quest SDK OpenXR Photon PUN HLSL Shaders WebGL / Three.js

AI & Computer Vision

PyTorch OpenCV LLM Agents / Function Calling VLM RAG / Embeddings Hand Pose / Gesture Speech-to-Speech (STS) Image Processing

Engineering & Cloud

C# / Python / C++ CI/CD (GitHub Actions) Profiling & Optimization .NET Cloudflare / GCP Node.js

Publications

Brain Volume Predicts Skewed Locomotor Output and Lower Temporal Regularity

O. Demers, A. Yavari, S. Ghaffari, R. Nouri, M. Majidi, M. Bayatzadeh, S. Rezayani, R. Butler

Submitted, 2025

Real-Time Hand Gesture Recognition for OpenXR Using Transformer-Based Machine Learning

S. Rezayani, R. Butler

Project PDF

Education

2025 - Present

PhD, Robotics & Computer Vision

University of Waterloo — Waterloo, Canada

Research: XR teleoperation, digital twins, Gaussian splatting, and vision-language-action models on real robots.

2021 - 2023

MSc, Computer Science

Bishop's University — Sherbrooke, Canada

Thesis: Sculpting in VR with human hands and memory optimization in Unity (Quest 2).

Research: ML pipelines for VR interaction, plus hand- and gesture-recognition in Unity.

2013 - 2021

BSc & MSc, Aerospace Engineering

AmirKabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) — Tehran, Iran

Focus: Image processing, CFD, computer vision, finite element methods, numerical methods.

Awards & Recognition

Epic Games Unreal Fellowship

Selected participant (North America), 2024

Epic Games

GameLab Technovation Jam

3rd Place, 2024

Technovation

AUT GameCraft

5th Place, 2024

AUT

Get in Touch

Open to robotics, XR, and simulation roles. Fastest way to reach me:

salarworking@gmail.com LinkedIn