Product. Engineering. A little play.
I run product and engineering for VR therapy software used in clinics,
and build small things after hours.
At the desk
I build VR therapy software with a game designer's habits.
I'm Director of Product Development & Engineering at CUREOsity GmbH, leading the team that ships VR therapy software on Meta Quest, HTC Vive, and PICO: nine direct reports across development, IT and data, in a team of 14.
I started as a Technical Designer building gamified rehabilitation tools. Today I translate between therapists, engineers and management, and keep releases moving in a domain where every change goes through a quality system.
Right now
readme
CUREOsity · since 2019 · built 2026-10-24
On the keys
On the music stand
From building the experience to leading the people behind it.
Designed and pitched a gamified walking rehabilitation app for the MOTEK Ryzen robot. Built the prototype in Unity with HTC Vive and an overhead projector: scrappy, but it worked.
Built therapy apps and audited how the team actually worked. Redesigned the concepting pipeline and cleaned up the Jira setup (first taste of process improvement).
Turned medical requirements into specs engineers could build. Worked directly with therapists to prototype therapy apps, wrote the specs, and started fixing the production processes that were slowing everyone down.
Ran the team shipping VR therapy software, which grew from 5 to 8 developers. Owned the roadmap and set up the team's kanban workflow in Jira, and spent a lot of time translating between therapists who wanted features and engineers who wanted clean architecture. CUREO went from fewer than 5 apps to 25+, over five major releases. It now has 150+ customers with over 600 headsets worldwide.
I lead product development and engineering for CUREO, VR therapy software with 150+ customers and over 600 headsets worldwide: the roadmap, the releases, and the medical-device paperwork that goes with them. Nine direct reports across development, IT and data, in a team of 14. I also manage the company's Claude rollout: almost 25 seats across almost all departments, with data-protection and AI-policy governance under way.
Designed and pitched a gamified walking rehabilitation app for the MOTEK Ryzen robot. Built the prototype in Unity with HTC Vive and an overhead projector: scrappy, but it worked.
In the notebook
Things I built to see whether they would work.
Side project: an iOS and Android app that finds verified disabled parking spaces near where you are going, from council open data in cities across Europe, and keeps working with no signal.
Capacitor + React + MapLibrelucsmits.com/parkind ↗
Local party game where muscular wizards fight to be the last wizard standing. I was on the design team and did the audio design.
Unreal Engine 4 / Nintendo Switch / Steam
Anti-gravity racing game where two Egyptian gods race through a futuristic Egyptian city. Made by a student team of 21 at Breda University of Applied Sciences. I was Lead Design and General Design.
Lux Engine (custom) / Unity / Houdini / Windows, built for PlayStation 4
A photography site that works like the cork board above the desk: albums pinned up as polaroids, the featured ones also hanging in this room. Built to make publishing a trip's photos a ten-minute job.
Astro SSR · Vercel Blob · PhotoSwipe · a cameraSee the board on the wall ↗photo.lucsmits.dev ↗Before you go
Say hello if any of this sounds like your problem.
I'm open to good conversations, about work or anything else on this page.
luc.smits5@gmail.comCUREOsity GmbH / Head of Software → Director · 2022 - Present
CUREO is VR therapy software for ergo- and physiotherapy. Patients do their exercises in a headset while the therapist steers the session from a tablet. When I took over the software team it was used in a handful of clinics. Today it has 150+ customers with over 600 VR headsets worldwide, and 25+ gamified therapy applications.
When I took over the software team, CUREO was used in a handful of clinics. The software had to meet medical-device rules, but there was little structure around how the team worked. Priorities were unclear and a lot of knowledge lived only in people's heads. As more customers came on board, deadlines started slipping and nobody outside the team could see why.
My first job was structure. I sat down with the team and mapped where work got stuck, then set up Jira workflows around those points. The team works from a kanban board. We started writing down what people knew, and I set up a development cycle that conforms to ISO 13485, so the medical-device documentation is part of the normal work. I pitched it to the team as more autonomy for them, which is what got them on board. I also brought my game-design experience to the team, and we made the therapy apps more of a game. Most of my work is translating what users want into work for the team: what customers ask for, what internal management needs, and what our own therapy and medical department wants.
At one point I chose technical debt and stability over new updates. We moved CUREO from Unreal Engine 4 to 5.5, and from supporting only Meta headsets to OpenXR. That meant fewer new updates while the work was going on. In the end the product is scalable, no longer tied to one headset maker, and much more stable.
I helped run studies with apps we built for them. For patients with Neglect, we built apps that replace standardized pen-and-paper tests with a VR version. For people with Parkinson's, we built several range-of-motion apps, such as Meteor and Taiko, as a replacement for BIG therapy. Another study set out to test whether embodied VR helps reduce chronic pain.
We shipped five major releases, CUREO 1 to CUREO 5, and people outside the team could follow progress in Jira instead of interrupting engineers. While I was Head of Software the team grew from 5 to 8 developers, designers and QA. Today I have 9 direct reports across development, IT and data, in a team of 14. CUREO runs on Meta Quest, HTC Vive, and PICO; across CUREO and earlier projects I have shipped on Nintendo Switch, Windows, Android and VR headsets, and built for PlayStation 4.
The apps are grouped into 7 modules, each with its own therapeutic goal.
CUREOsity GmbH / Head of Software · 2023 - Present
CUREO HUB is CUREO's online platform. Clinics use it to create patient profiles, build therapy reports and review treatment data. I helped design it, managed its build, and wrote the CUREO side of the end-to-end encryption in C++. It has been live since November 2025 and almost 30 clinics use it.
CUREO's therapy data lived on-device with no central way for clinics to manage patients, track progress, or generate reports. Therapists needed an online platform to create patient profiles, configure therapy plans, and review session data, all under the security requirements for medical data.
Co-designed the platform together with an external development company and managed the build. Worked with an internal engineer to design the encryption process, then integrated data synchronisation deep into CUREO's architecture. I implemented the encryption layer on the CUREO side in C++, and it had to stay out of the way of therapy session performance.
CUREO HUB went live in November 2025 and almost 30 clinics use it. It runs on a React/Vue frontend and an AWS RDS/EC2 backend, with the encryption layer inside the Unreal Engine 5 app. Clinics use it for patient profiles, therapy session reports and clinical data.
CUREOsity GmbH / Director of Product Development & Engineering · 2026 - Present
Two pieces of AI work at CUREOsity. I built a knowledge agent that answers IT and security questions from our own documents, and I manage the company's Claude rollout, which now gives almost 25 people a seat across almost all departments.
CUREOsity builds regulated medical software, so patient data, medical-device documentation and source code each have rules about where they may go. Customers also ask us IT and security questions, and the answers are spread across our own documents.
The knowledge agent is a website I built for work where you ask a question and get an answer from a knowledge base built on our documents. The data is embedded with MongoDB's Voyage AI for semantic search, and every answer comes with a confidence value. For Claude, we started with a pilot. We never formally finished it: it went well enough that we rolled out fast.
Almost 25 people across almost all departments have a Claude seat, and we are now working through data protection and AI policy governance. For the knowledge agent, the end goal is that customer questions can be imported in any format, answered, reviewed, approved and exported again in the same format.
Both pieces of work are still in progress.
Side project / Capacitor + React + MapLibre
An app for drivers with a disabled parking permit: search where you are going and see the nearest disabled parking spaces, how old each record is, and whether other drivers have checked it, then hand the parking space to your maps app. Built on evenings and weekends because the data existed but nobody had made it usable.
Disabled parking spaces are published by councils as open data, each city in its own format, licence and level of care, and outside those cities only volunteers on OpenStreetMap have mapped them. Drivers who depend on a parking space often circle a block several times or give up. The information problem is small; the daily impact on the people affected is not.
Trust the official record first and say how old it is. A pipeline pulls council records city by city, repairs and de-duplicates them, and keeps each city's licence and credit with its data; OpenStreetMap parking spaces fill the gaps, marked as such and never mixed in. Drivers can say a parking space is still there or gone, or add a missing one, without an account. The app is a Capacitor and React shell around a MapLibre map with downloadable city map packs, so it works in a car park with no signal, and it is designed for its audience: large legible type, every state in words as well as colour, and usable at 200% text.
Council records for 72 cities in 14 countries, nine of them bundled in the app, with OpenStreetMap parking spaces everywhere else. Now preparing the App Store and Google Play release.
Side project / Unreal Engine 4 / Nintendo Switch / Steam
A couch party game for up to four players: muscular wizards on one screen, spells that push and pull, and the last one standing wins. Built in Unreal Engine 4 by a team of 20, for Nintendo Switch and Steam.
I was part of the design team and did the audio design.
Released on Steam in April 2019 by Disco Dog, the team behind it, and published by Breda University of Applied Sciences. The game was also built for Nintendo Switch.
Side project / Lux Engine (custom) / Unity / Houdini / Windows, built for PlayStation 4
An anti-gravity racing game in which Egyptian gods race to decide who is superior, in a futuristic city where technology has mixed with ancient Egypt. You pick one of two gods, race on two tracks, Giza and Abydos, and use boost pads and tricks to keep your boost bar full.
A student team of designers, artists and programmers, 21 people in all, made it at Breda University of Applied Sciences. I was Lead Design and General Design. The programmers first built Lux Engine, a custom engine for anti-gravity racing that runs on PlayStation 4 and Windows, in the third block of 2018. The game came in the last eight-week block of the second year, with Unity as the scene editor and a Houdini tool from the technical artist that generates the tracks procedurally.
Built for PlayStation 4 and released on Windows on itch.io, published by Breda University of Applied Sciences. It never came out on PlayStation 4. The last update was version 1.0.4 in July 2018. It won the 2018 IGAD Award for best programming in year 2 and was runner-up for the IGAD Audience Award for year 2.
Side project / Astro SSR · Vercel Blob · PhotoSwipe · a camera
Photographs from trips and quiet weekends, published on a small self-built site. Uploads resize in the browser and land straight in blob storage, so a new album goes live without a deploy.
