Object tracking for FATS AR
Overmatch · 2021–2026
Tracking a physically held object inside an AR scenario, accurately enough to train against. I designed successive OptiTrack head-mounted camera rigs, then wrote the micro-PC software that consumed OptiTrack rigid-body output, applied the camera-rig extrinsics, and transformed it into headset space for motion compensation and prediction on-headset.
Keeping the transform stage off-headset was a deliberate call. It meant the later Magic Leap 1 to Magic Leap 2 platform transition was largely transparent — a migration that would otherwise have landed squarely on the tracking pipeline.
From 400 KB to 28 KB
Paradigm Entertainment · 1998–2009
Replaced the SGI/Nintendo N64 audio stack with a custom implementation that cut the audio memory footprint from roughly 400 KB — about ten percent of the machine’s total RAM — down to 28 KB.
A generation later on PlayStation 2, the same constraints produced an audio compression format reaching 5:1 at seven clock cycles per sample to decompress on the IOP.
The allocator under a decade of shipped titles
Paradigm Entertainment, later Gearbox Software · 1998–2016
I architected the technology engine’s systems layers from scratch — memory, threading, file I/O, background streaming, audio, hardware-accelerated math, asset conditioning, and the profiling and debugging toolchain. At the base of it sat an allocator with pointer-sized overhead and O(1) behavior on most operations.
Fragmentation stayed down across a decade of shipping titles. Years later at Gearbox I replaced memory management on Battleborn with a custom allocator on the same principles, cutting fragmentation and improving processing performance.
A video codec that ran inside the frame budget
Terminal Reality · 2009–2012
Def Jam Rapstar recorded the player through a camera peripheral while the game was running. I designed and implemented a real-time video codec from scratch to compress that video live during gameplay, alongside the complete audio processing pipeline — effects, signal analysis, and the microphone analysis that drove scoring.
Compression, capture, and gameplay sharing one frame budget, on 2010 console hardware.
Occlusion against a door that moves
Overmatch · 2021–2026
Static spatial mapping cannot occlude a virtual entity behind a real door that is swinging, because the map was captured before the door moved. I designed a door-angle sensor and its firmware so the geometry reported itself in real time.
A sensing problem solved with a sensor rather than with more computer vision. It was one piece of OM Gadgets, the full-stack platform I architected for instrumenting and tracking physical objects in real time — hardware, firmware, and software, end to end.
One AR session across many headsets
Magic Leap Horizons · 2018–2021
Shared co-located AR: several people in one physical room, in one session, seeing the same virtual objects in the same places. Underneath it is a distributed state and spatial-alignment problem. I also integrated thermal imaging into Magic Leap’s AR stack and authored a physical object tracking library for registering real-world objects into AR.
This work sat on the team bidding the U.S. Army IVAS program, where I led prototype development on the Magic Leap 1 platform.