Unity 
AR Foundation visionOS An interactive spatial experience that takes users through the tequila-making process, from harvesting agave in the fields to fermentation and aging in oak barrels. Built for release during the launch window of the Apple Vision Pro, it combined immersive storytelling, luxury brand marketing, and interactive education.
Overview
DIAGEO Tequila Don Julio was designed as a premium branded app for the Apple Vision Pro, giving users a cinematic and interactive look into tequila production. Users were guided through:
- Harvesting: Use hand gestures to “cut” agave leaves alongside jimadores.
- Processing & Fermentation: Explore traditional ovens and fermentation stages with 360° captures and spatial audio.
- Aging: Interact with a tequila barrel by spinning an “aging wheel” to learn about different varieties based on their aging process.
- Spatial Gallery: From the lobby, users could access a gallery of immersive videos and brand storytelling content.
The app was positioned both as luxury marketing and as one of the first branded spatial experiences available on Vision Pro.
My Contributions
I was one of the developers on the project, with a primary focus on materials and visual fidelity in Unity.
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Created and optimized shaders and materials for the tequila bottles, environments, and spatial UI, incorporating creative workarounds for AVP’s shader, rendering, and UI limitations
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Implemented UI in both Unity and Xcode/SwiftUI, including interactive menus, spatial galleries, and control panels.
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Contributed to general app implementation, including setting up the flow of the tequila production journey from agave harvesting to barrel aging.
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Worked on spatial interactions like the barrel “age wheel” selection.
Technical Highlights & Challenges
Developing for the Apple Vision Pro came with a set of unique technical hurdles that required creative solutions. Early Unity support for AVP was unstable and undocumented, frequently requiring Unity and package updates. One challenge I encountered was with our materials and shaders. Many Shader Graph nodes weren’t supported, and even working around that, the results often looked very different between the Unity Editor and the device. This meant that achieving the realistic, premium look we were targeting took extensive iteration. For example, recreating the look of glass tequila bottles was particularly difficult since the platform doesn’t allow direct use of the camera feed as a texture, preventing me from adding a conventional refraction effect to the glass material. To work around this, I used a combination of cubemaps and in-engine background blending to approximate refraction and glassiness.
Another challenge came from UI and interaction constraints. Unity’s visionOS integration could not render the native translucent glass styled buttons the platform became known for, so I had to implement some UI natively in SwiftUI. At the time of development, eye tracking was also incompatible with Unity UI, and because of privacy concerns, visionOS does not allow access to eye tracking info that could otherwise be used for raycasting. Instead, we had to implement all interactable UI as quads with box colliders rather than traditional Canvas interactables. This also meant that none of the typical Unity layout elements or size fitting components worked on these non-Canvas quad meshes. This app featured multiple localizations though, so I had to roll my layout management and a system to dynamically generate our button meshes to fit the text size.
Finally, there was the matter of spatial interactivity and luxury brand experience design. Features like the agave-cutting gesture and the spinning barrel “age wheel” demanded both technical precision and intuitive UX. Every visual and interactive detail had to reflect the high-end feel of the Don Julio brand and the Vision Pro headset, which made debugging and refinement particularly meticulous. Since AVP’s Unity editor simulation wasn’t always reliable, nearly every visual or interactive change required building and testing directly on device, adding to the challenge.
Despite these constraints, the team was able to deliver an experience that felt polished, immersive, and premium—demonstrating both the strengths of the AVP platform and our ability to adapt to its current limitations.
Results
- Successfully launched as one of the first branded apps on Apple Vision Pro, aligning DIAGEO with cutting-edge luxury tech.
- Delivered a highly visual, immersive storytelling experience that matched the brand’s premium positioning.
- Despite significant platform hurdles, the app shipped on time and achieved the creative/marketing goals set by the client.
Reflection
This project pushed me to hone my skills in:
- Navigating bleeding-edge hardware limitations while still delivering high fidelity.
- Creative shader problem-solving, especially under AVP’s rendering restrictions.
- Balancing cross-platform strategy vs. platform-specific constraints (e.g., Unity XR vs. AVP’s quirks).
I also came away with a better appreciation for building internal testing/simulation tools early, especially on new hardware, and a more pragmatic perspective on when cross-platform abstractions are worth it versus when they introduce more headaches.
