Big Blue Ceiling Prototyping & Fabrication
We build things that are supposed to be impossible on the timeline, on the budget, or on the hardware. Usually all three.
Big Blue Ceiling (B2C) is a boutique R&D lab in Sonora, California, founded in 2008 by Robert "Eddie" Offermann. We do applied AI research, real-time graphics, immersive systems, and physical prototyping, and we ship the results instead of writing whitepapers about them. Our shop occupies 9,000 square feet that includes a fabrication floor with CNC equipment, 3D resin printers, and a laser cutter, plus custom optical rigs, an ISO-5/Class-100 cleanroom, and a mobile hyperspectral imaging platform in active development. When we say "prototyping and fabrication," we mean it literally: software, hardware, and the awkward middle where most projects die.
Eddie has been shipping software for over 30 years, most of it in computer graphics and real-time systems.
He taught at Full Sail University, did photogrammetry and matchmoving at Asylum VFX, and worked VFX pipeline and color science at Method Studios. At Mirada, the studio co-founded by Guillermo del Toro, he was Technical Creative Director for AR, XR, and AI-driven face replacement. At Meta Reality Labs he worked on volumetric avatars and non-wearable projection prototypes. At DigitalFish he built AAA game prototypes and ran live motion capture for titles including Call of Duty: Vanguard and World of Warcraft.
The through-line is real-time humans: capturing them, rendering them, animating them, and making machines that respond to them believably. That is the problem B2C keeps solving, in new forms, for new clients.
Frndo (frndo.ai) is an AI avatar companion built on a three-layer architecture: an ethical reasoning framework we call the Rabbi, trained via QLoRA on synthetic data generated from philosophical texts; swappable persona adapters served via multi-LoRA inference; and a real-time avatar layer that coordinates emotional affect, expression, and prosody on-device. The stack runs a custom 24B-parameter fine-tune with NVFP4 quantization and hardware-aware routing to bf16 fallbacks, with sub-300ms TTS latency targets, on-device sentiment analysis via ONNX, and multiple voice synthesis and voice-cloning pipelines. Eddie serves as Frndo's full-time CAIO/CTO.
BigBlueBam (bigbluebam.com) is our open-source work suite built for human-AI teams: fourteen apps in one workspace, covering project boards, sprint planning, team messaging, helpdesk, knowledge base, collaborative docs, CRM, goals and OKRs, workflow automation, invoicing, and more, all exposed to AI agents through 804 MCP tools. The premise is that agents are teammates rather than bolted-on chatbots. They pick up tickets, move cards across the board, respond to customers, and escalate to a human when they hit ambiguity or the edge of their scope. The safety model is engineered rather than asserted: service-account agents run behind a fail-closed policy gate, destructive actions require two-step confirmation with time-limited tokens for humans and agents alike, and every agent has a kill switch. Self-hosted, one command to deploy, MIT licensed.
A deep-research autonomous agent framework aimed at biotech and finance workloads, where "the model said so" is not an acceptable citation and multi-step verification actually matters.
Autonomous robotics research (a six-axis robotic arm with a depth and tracking camera stack, run by an LLM agent with no pre-built perception pipeline, on purpose). Mobile hyperspectral imaging. Custom optics. Musical theatre, occasionally. The lab exists so that ideas with no obvious product category have somewhere to become real.
B2C is available for consulting on AI strategy and immersive storytelling. We are a good fit when your problem does not decompose into a standard SaaS purchase: when you need someone who has personally built the inference stack, the capture stage, the rendering pipeline, and the business case, and can tell you honestly which parts are hard, which parts are solved, and which parts are hype.
We are a small shop by design. You work with the person whose name is on the patents.
Contact: eddie@bigblueceiling.com | bigblueceiling.com | (407) 222-6590