Kuldeep is Thoughtworks India's practice lead for extended-reality(XR) development. Curious by nature, Kuldeep is a tinkerer. For instance, he fixes most of his home electronics himself. Amazed by the way he juggles with his gadgets, his kids think of him as their very own Tony Stark.

Kuldeep’s current team is spread across Gurgaon, Pune and Coimbatore. XR teams are device-dependent. Before the lockdown struck, Kuldeep and his team  hadn’t really thought of working remotely. The lockdown however, created an opportunity to explore the new possibilities.

With an intent to reduce the dependence on physical devices, the team used shared emulators coupled with a robust automation test running as part of their pipeline, which in turn leverages these containerised emulators. As a result, the team has been able to build confidence in a large part of the functionality they develop. They’ve also reorganised their work day to fix specific times of the day for rituals such as “desk-checks”, so they can respect each other’s flex work schedules.

Kuldeep’s team has also found novel ways to brainstorm and showcase new XR functionality. By simulating the field-of-view of standard AR interfaces and mimicking where the gaze pointer will be, they’ve been able to co-design several new features. On the other hand, their custom experience streamer allows them to showcase their new functionality almost in real-time.

Kuldeep’s extremely happy to work from home as for him, it means more family time, better client engagement and less commute. Occasionally, he wouldn’t mind visiting the office to socialise with his colleagues. Kuldeep believes that if the XR teams can operate from home then every team can.