◆ Curriculum vitae

Aaron
Z Wang

Media artist and researcher working on installations, real-time simulations, AI agents, and more. Also a producer and game designer.

Name

Zejing Wang, known as Aaron

Based

Los Angeles, USA

Email

zejingw@usc.edu

Interests

Interactive media art · AI characters built from archives · real-time simulation · mixed reality

Languages

English (fluent) · Mandarin Chinese (native)

◆ Education

Aug 2025 to Jun 2027Los Angeles, USA

MS Game Design and Development

University of Southern California

  • With a Graduate Certificate in Product Management. GPA 4.0 / 4.0.
  • George Lucas Family Endowed Scholarship (2026); Annenberg Fellowship (2026 to 2027).
  • Training: interactive media design and production; game systems, character development and interactive storytelling; scientific visualization and procedural workflows in Houdini; product and project management.
Sep 2022 to Jun 2025London, UK

BA Media, Game and Interactive Media Pathway

University College London

  • First Class Honours.
  • UCL Undergraduate Scholarship for Excellence, 2024, awarded to the most outstanding student within the Faculty.
  • Training: game narrative and interactive experience development in C# and HLSL; VR/AR design; practice-based research; media history; digital cultures and anthropological approaches to digital practice; multimodality and media text analysis.
Jun to Aug 2023Stanford, USA

Visiting Student

Stanford University

  • GPA 4.0 / 4.0.
  • Training: Python programming; computer graphics; game theory and marketing.

◆ Research in progress

Aug 2026 to presentLos Angeles, USA

Memory Space: Chinatown AR

Research Assistant · USC Mobile & Environmental Media Lab · Prof. Scott Fisher

  • AI characters grounded in archival records that let visitors meet the history of the Los Angeles Chinatown demolished in the 1930s for Union Station, inside an AR reconstruction of the neighbourhood.
  • Built the project database and data governance for the archival materials. Building the conversational AI behind the characters and AI tools that connect the project's assets across platforms.
  • Project page →
May 2026 to presentLos Angeles, USA

Immersive Archive: an archive-grounded agent built from Morton Heilig's manuscripts

Research Assistant · USC Mobile & Environmental Media Lab · Prof. Scott Fisher

  • Extending the Immersive Archive (a USC MEML initiative reconstructing landmark XR milestones such as Heilig's Sensorama, Sutherland's HMD and NASA VIEWlab in Unity VR) into an interactive environment.
  • Developing an archive-grounded embodied agent based on Morton Heilig's original manuscripts and related historical records, so users can approach XR history through first-person exploration and source-grounded dialogue.
  • Building an end-to-end RAG pipeline with Dify: OCR and transcription, metadata construction, semantic retrieval, conversational generation and retrieval-quality evaluation, designed to integrate with real-time ASR/TTS and avatar-driven interaction.
  • Outputs so far: a working prototype in the lab, and a paper on archive fidelity and character fidelity in preparation. Planned: a reusable framework for source-grounded embodied agents in immersive archives.
  • Project page →
Jan 2026 to presentLos Angeles, USA

Dark Matter Interactive Experience, part of the Lyman-Alpha Forest Research Collaboration

Annenberg Fellow · Prof. Sean Bouchard & Prof. Martzi Campos

  • Interactive media component of the Lyman-Alpha Forest Research Collaboration, a cosmology initiative across USC, UC Riverside and Carnegie Science Observatories.
  • Translating research on dark matter, gravitational effects, intergalactic gas distribution and Lyman-alpha forest data into a real-time simulation experience for public audiences.
  • Developing a Unity-based interactive installation for Carnegie Science Observatories' large-format display; coordinating scientists and designers, running project meetings, and preparing progress material for the research team and the Templeton Foundation.
  • Planned outputs: a public installation in Pasadena, a web-based game, and a research paper on translating cosmological simulation into a public interactive experience.
  • Project page →

◆ Research experience

Sep 2024 to May 2025London, UK

How Can Verlet Physics Simulations Influence Human Agency in Digital Games

Independent Researcher · UCL · Mr William Sykes & Dr Dane Sutherland

  • A practice-based dissertation on how flexible, continuously responsive Verlet physics systems shape perceived player agency differently from conventional rigid-body mechanics.
  • Drawing on Affordance Theory and the MDA framework, combining iterative game design, early-stage player testing and comparative analysis. A custom Verlet physics and collision framework was written from scratch.
  • Informal playtests with children in the target age range suggested that soft-body deformation and responsive physical feedback lead players to find what they can do by experimenting.
  • Output: Verlet Voyage, presented at the UCL BA Media Degree Show 2025.
Sep 2023 to Apr 2024
Sep 2024 to Feb 2025London, UK

Body, Mind and Soul: Emotion and Quattuor Scapes

Artist · group exhibitions at Arebyte Gallery, London

  • Interactive installations that turn emotion, identity, cognition and embodiment into participatory experiences.
  • Made Emotion (solo) and Quattuor Scapes (technical director, team of four): game mechanics, custom software, controller-based interaction and real-time visual systems, with the installation design and wall text for each.
  • Emotion shown in Algorithmic Unconscious, Arebyte Gallery, 1 to 3 March 2024, within Arebyte's Arts Council England-funded programme The Body, The Mind, The Soul; Quattuor Scapes shown at Arebyte in 2025. The two exhibitions reached more than 1,000 visitors.

◆ Teaching

Aug 2026 to presentLos Angeles, USA

Student Assistant, CTIN 101 Fundamentals of Procedural Media

School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

  • Help build the syllabus and the exams for an undergraduate course in JavaScript creative coding, including how the exams assess students' use of AI tools.
Jan to May 2026Los Angeles, USA

Teaching Assistant, CTXA-523 Visualizing Science Production

School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

  • Supported weekly hands-on labs for a graduate scientific visualization course using Houdini's procedural workflow: particle and flocking systems, Vellum soft-body simulation, terrain and worldbuilding, volumetric and pyro effects, growth systems, dataset-based visualization.
  • Reviewed weekly assignments and final projects, giving formative feedback to help students translate scientific concepts and research ideas into clear 3D simulations and procedural visual forms.
  • Held virtual office hours and supported students through the course Discord, troubleshooting Houdini workflows and refining visual strategies.

◆ Professional experience

May to Aug 2026Shenzhen, China

Product Management Intern

Supercell, Shenzhen

  • Designed gameplay features for the mainland China version of Clash Royale: wrote the requirements and specifications and built the prototypes. Feature detail withheld under NDA.
  • Ran player surveys and playability tests and fed the results into the next iteration; coordinated design, engineering and operations through the cycle.
  • Defined and prototyped an internal project management platform: dashboards, task tracking, scheduling, one-click tickets, and natural-language task entry built on the Claude API and internal LLM APIs, connected to Git, TAPD/Jira, Slack and the publishing systems.
  • Supported the China publishing strategy for an unannounced Supercell title.
  • Project page →
Aug 2025 to May 2026Los Angeles, USA

Lead Producer, Balloon

USC Games, student production

  • Led a team of 26 across engineering, design, art and audio, from ten countries, to develop an investor-backed student game from concept to production.
  • Managed scope, resource allocation, risk assessment and milestone delivery across the development lifecycle.
  • Ran communication between the team and external investors: turned the creative vision into development plans and reported progress against business objectives.
  • Guided the project from concept to a playable, production-ready milestone. Project page →
Aug to Sep 2024Shenzhen, China

Technical Game Designer Intern

Tencent Games

  • Built gameplay modules and custom shaders in Tencent's Unreal-based engine: surface behaviours, environmental effects and material interactions for large MMO environments, with Hunyuan AI in some of the workflows.
  • Turned design concepts into working system behaviours, prototypes and tools on short iteration cycles.
  • Worked with engine developers and technical artists on rendering features and GPU performance.

◆ Technical & research skills

Research methods

Practice-based research; interactive-system evaluation; iterative prototyping; user testing.

Engines & real-time graphics

Unity, Unreal Engine 5, MetaHuman; HLSL, procedural generation, real-time rendering optimisation; real-time simulation for interactive environments.

AI & computational methods

End-to-end RAG pipeline development with Dify; Claude/GPT API integration; vector databases; OCR/ASR/TTS pipeline integration; retrieval quality evaluation; Python scripting for AI workflows.

XR & interactive media

VR experience design; immersive environments; motion capture; spatial narrative design.

3D & scientific visualization

Houdini; procedural workflows; simulation; scientific visualization; dataset-based visual interpretation.

Programming & tools

C#, Python, JavaScript, Google Apps Script. Git, Figma, FigJam, Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office.

Email me Selected projects