Portfolio
Creative Technologist
AI Prototyper · Gameplay Engineer
I'm a software engineer and game designer who builds experimental interactive experiences. My work spans AI research, immersive technology, real-time game systems, and creative tools.
Currently AI Prototyper on AR glasses at Meta Reality Labs Research
01 — Featured project
A desktop app for building music-synchronized lightshows for LED poi. I designed and built it with an AI-assisted workflow, and I use it to make the shows I perform.
LED poi don't have a screen. Each one has a single strip of LEDs that shows a narrow slice of an image at a time. Spin it, and your eye stitches those slices into a full picture. That makes the art awkward to author: images are tiny, they have to loop cleanly around a circle, and they need to change in time with the music.
Doing that by hand for a whole song takes a long time. I wanted a tool that would do the tedious parts, like finding the beats and sections and planning the changes, and leave me the creative decisions.
1
Local analysis on my machine finds tempo and beat candidates, silences, change points, and stutters. Optionally, the audio goes to Gemini, which labels sections (intro, verse, chorus…) with energy levels and short descriptions. Every section can be edited, split, merged, or dragged on the timeline.
2
I choose how busy the show should be, for example a new image on every beat with strobes on stutters. The editor then turns the song map into a plan of image changes across both poi.
3
Looping pixel-art images sit in a lane for each poi. The live stage previews them as spinning discs, in sync with the audio, so I can judge a section before it ever reaches the hardware.
4
The finished sequence is exported to the physical poi, where it plays in time with the music.
The poi only ever lights one column. Each column is drawn at the angle the poi has reached, so the image wraps into a disc: columns become angles, rows become distance from your hand. Slow it down to see the slices.
Source image col 1 / 48
On the poi
Illustrative only: a 48 × 14 pattern drawn in the browser, not NeoPoi's real resolution or output.
It's the most complete thing I've made on my own. An unusual idea went through tool and UI design, AI-assisted programming, audio analysis, and a hardware constraint, and came out as shows I actually perform. I made every product decision, and the tool kept changing as I used it.
02 — Experience
Most of my career has been spent next to researchers, turning new sensing and ML capabilities into things people can pick up and use. One stretch was spent shipping a production game system.
Meta · Reality Labs Research
AI-first interactions for AR glasses, built on input technology that's still in research.
Microsoft · HoloLens
Shipped the Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer, a customer-facing Unity mixed-reality training system for the US Army.
Meta · Reality Labs Research
VR, haptics, and machine-learning prototypes built alongside research scientists.
AIST · Tokyo, Japan
Simulated shoppers that helped evaluate store layouts for social-distancing compliance.
Education
B.S. Computer Science: Game Design, with an emphasis in VR and AI
03 — Other work
A VR throwing interaction that tunes itself. AEPsych's continuous-outcome models search the interaction's parameters for the settings that make each player throw most accurately. I proposed the demo and built the gameplay and Unity client.
The Unity/C# front end and client/server protocol that let Unity developers run AEPsych experiments. I also wrote the documentation and handled support.
An immersive VR demo built to show a novel haptic technology. It became the technology's first successful demonstration to company stakeholders.
Gesture recognition built on computer-vision hand tracking and Gaussian-process modeling, written to unblock a haptics research team.
Shopper agents trained in Unity ML-Agents to test how store layouts affect social distancing. Human play in a multiplayer VR store provided demonstrations for a GAIL agent. A pure reinforcement-learning agent ended up producing the more usable simulation.
A VR horror game that reads the player's skin response and heart rate, then uses a stress-controller state machine to change the game environment in response.
Play in browser
Play in browser
Small games built in a week each with crisp-game-lib, each to a strict constraint. Ringout's brief, for example, was "one button." Click a screenshot to play.
04 — Skills
Brighter items are the ones I use daily. The rest I've used for real projects, but less often.
05 — Flow arts
Outside of work I spin poi: LED poi, fire poi, and silk. I choreograph sets to music and post them as Poi_Fish.
It's also where a lot of my design taste comes from. A good spin and a good game interaction have similar requirements: readable motion, timing that lands on the beat, and a short loop between trying something and seeing it. NeoPoi exists because I wanted better tools for my own art.
06 — About
My favorite part of the work is first contact with a new capability: an eye tracker, an EMG band, a haptic actuator, a model that can describe a song. Figuring out what it's actually good for usually means building something quickly, putting it in someone's hands, and changing it until it feels right.
I studied computer science with a focus on game design at UC Santa Cruz. Since then I've worked as a research prototyper and as a production game engineer, and I use AI tools heavily in how I build. Lately I've been most interested in real-time generative models and the kinds of play they could make possible.
Away from screens: circus arts (aerial silks, trapeze, lyra), jiu-jitsu, tennis, and taking my cat Salem to places cats don't usually go.