Featured Projects, Strategy, and Case Studies
City-scale digital transformation across web platforms, cloud modernization, AI adoption, and data analytics—plus VR/AR/MR products and research prototypes that sharpen how I build and lead innovation teams.
Enterprise Digital Transformation
High-level work I’ve led and operationalized across large portfolios, including city-wide cross-platform projects, design, and modernization strategy.
City of El Paso Website Redesign
Led the redesign of the city’s primary web experience to improve accessibility, user experience, mobile access, standardize service content publishing, and incorporate web analytics.
My.ElPaso Employee Experience Platform
Rebuilt the employee intranet to improve discovery and searchability, mobile access, and engagement, enabling a scalable foundation for internal communications, tools, and knowledge.
CRM + EP311 Enterprise Workflow Modernization
Led the in-house, from-scratch, cloud development of a centralized CRM to improve service-request visibility, workflow consistency, and resident communications, supporting cross-department service delivery.
Data Analytics & KPI Governance
Developed a data strategy spanning governance, dashboards, and KPI enablement—supporting executive decision-making and public transparency through a scalable analytics approach.
Cloud Modernization Strategy
Led the modernization roadmap to reduce technical debt and improve resilience and scalability—aligning cloud migration with security posture, operating models, and service outcomes.
Smart City Innovation – Emerging Tech
Delivered smart-city initiatives, including smart classification for service requests and public-facing AR experiences—bridging civic systems with emerging technology.
Boost Human – Software Product Launches
Commercial software development work in XR for product thinking, rapid prototyping, and human-centered design and innovation.
Virtual Training (Automotive QA)
Built a VR training experience with configurable parameters and performance outputs—designed to standardize quality training and reduce variability.
Telepresence (AR Remote Assistance)
Developed AR-supported remote assistance workflows to share POV and annotate in-context—accelerating troubleshooting and support.Smart Guides (AR Procedure Capture)
Virtual Patients (HoloLens Clinical Simulations)
Led holographic patient simulation development with speech capabilities for training and diagnosis workflows, deployed at state Universities—built on social-agent interaction frameworks in MR.
Smart Guides (AR Procedure Capture)
An AR guidance system that records expert procedures and enables hands-free playback, supporting novice performance in the field.
Insights AR Dinonosaur Hiking Guides
An offline, location-based, mobile AR experience developed for the Insights museum that offers a guided hiking trail tour with landmark and fossil information.
Prototype Products (Home Tours, Anatomy AR)
Explored multiple AR prototype directions—location-based experiences, architectural visualization, and learning-focused AR—to validate interaction patterns and product hypotheses.
Research-to-Product Strategy
Selected research projects that informed how I design interactive systems, conversational agents, and XR experiences.
VAIF — Virtual Agent Interaction Framework (Unity)
Created a Unity-centered framework to accelerate building social agents across mobile, VR, and AR—bridging research prototypes and deployable experiences. Developed in 2018
Speech-Enabled VR Agent (Young Merlin)
Built a speech-driven embodied conversational agent experience to explore rapport and storytelling through fully automated agent interaction in VR.
Multi-Agent VR Learning (Boston History Experience )
Co-directed early work on a VR learning experience where students interact with multiple embodied agents to explore conflicting perspectives and deepen historical reasoning.
Trust and Motives with Virtual Agents (Gods of the Neon City)
Designed a speech-enabled narrative experience to study trust and meaning-making when agents may have hidden motives—useful for product-grade interaction design.
Insights AR Dinonosaur Hiking Guides
An offline, location-based, mobile AR experience developed for the Insights museum that offers a guided hiking trail tour with landmark and fossil information.
Foundations (Earlier XR & Conversational Agent Work)
I maintain a longer history of XR and conversational-agent research prototypes (rapport, familiarity, multiparty dialogue, virtual humans). you can read about these in my research and publications page.
There are way too many people to acknowledge and thank individually, but none of this would be possible without the incredible work of our city’s IT teams, Boost Human’s co-founders, developers, and investors, UTEP’s College of Engineering, College of Business, and College of Education, the Borderplex Alliance and Binational Tech Consortium, and all of our partner organizations.
Ivan Gris 