Built with Unity WebGL

Challenge

This project involved developing a web application featuring personalized AI assistants with real-time 3D avatars. The goal was to help users manage everyday tasks with a visually interactive assistant—directly in the browser.

During development, several key challenges emerged, especially when targeting Safari and iOS devices: Safari and iOS devices:

Memory Crashes in Safari

The Unity WebGL build relied on a caching system that stored avatar assets in memory without releasing them.
Each time a new avatar was loaded, memory usage increased. Over time, this caused Safari to crash due to excessive memory consumption.

Audio Not Playing on iOS

Safari on iOS blocks audio playback until a user interacts directly with the page.
This caused the application’s voice assistant to remain silent on load, breaking the user experience.

Avatars Stuck in Loading

Some avatars would become stuck during the loading phase, never completing initialization.
This was caused by large model sizes and dropped packets on slower internet connections, leaving the loading process incomplete.

Solution

I addressed these platform-specific issues with a combination of optimization and user-driven interaction flows:

Removed Unity’s Caching System for WebGL

Disabled Unity’s default asset caching for WebGL builds, ensuring unused assets were properly discarded.
This stabilized memory usage across avatar changes and prevented long-session crashes, especially on Safari.

User Interaction Trigger for Audio

Implemented a start button that required a user tap or click before initializing the voice assistant.
This complied with Safari’s autoplay policy and ensured audio would play reliably after the user engaged.

Avatar Optimization & Load Handling

Reduced texture resolution and removed unnecessary geometry from avatar models to make them lighter and faster to load.
Improved asset streaming logic to detect failed or incomplete downloads, allowing the app to retry or fallback gracefully, avoiding stuck avatars.

Result

The result was a stable, cross-platform WebGL experience with responsive 3D avatars and smooth audio interaction. Users on iOS and Safari could now engage with their personalized AI assistant without crashes, audio issues, or avatar loading problems. These optimizations improved both performance and reliability, helping deliver a polished and accessible AI assistant experience in the browser.

1Mind