Experience

• Founded the company’s R&D function and ran it end to end, taking open product questions through to working systems and deciding on evidence what was worth committing development resources to.
• Owned physical object tracking for FATS AR. 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. Because the transform stage ran off-headset, the later Magic Leap 1 to Magic Leap 2 platform transition was largely transparent.
• Architected and built OM Gadgets, a full-stack platform for instrumenting and tracking physical objects in real time — hardware, firmware, and software, end to end.
• Designed prototype sensing devices and their firmware, including a door-angle sensor that let virtual entities be occluded correctly behind a real door as it swung — dynamic occlusion against a moving physical object, which static spatial mapping does not solve.
• Ran a build-at-home, iterate-in-office hardware cycle that kept fabrication and rework off the team’s critical path.

Magic Leap’s defense-focused arm, formed to pursue U.S. military AR programs.

• Led prototype development on the team bidding the U.S. Army IVAS program, building headset augmentations on the Magic Leap 1 platform.
• Delivered high-precision object tracking, custom peripheral input devices, and AR scenario systems for military training.
• Integrated thermal imaging into Magic Leap’s AR stack and authored a physical object tracking library for registering real-world objects into AR.
• Solved shared co-located AR — a single session across multiple headsets in one physical space, a distributed state and spatial-alignment problem.

• Designed a first-person procedural level generation system in Unreal Engine 4, and an MVVM UI framework layered over Unity’s UI system.
• Owned UI and level management on an unreleased Unity project; supported tools and production on Orcs Must Die: Unchained.

• Owned the studio-wide low-level library suite: platform abstraction, memory management, threading primitives, debug networking, containers, concurrent processing, and unit testing.
• Replaced memory management on Battleborn with a custom allocator that cut fragmentation and improved processing performance, and delivered a tool suite for inspecting high-volume gameplay event streams.

• Designed and implemented a real-time video codec from scratch that compressed camera-peripheral video live during gameplay, plus the complete audio processing pipeline — effects, signal analysis, and microphone analysis for scoring, on Def Jam Rapstar.
• Owned the Rancor Rampage mode of Kinect: Star Wars — fully destructible levels driven by a cause-and-effect event-chain scoring system, under hard memory and performance budgets.
• Delivered a full PlayStation 3 platform implementation, integrated tools and build processes into Visual Studio, and owned the Wii U port and performance optimization of The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct.
• Mentored engineers across three shipped projects.

• 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 — along with the pluggable DCC conversion pipeline, asset database, and level editor implemented in .NET.
• Set the coding standards for those systems and personally reviewed all memory, threading, file I/O, audio, and asset conditioning work produced by the studio.
• Designed the memory allocator at the base of it — pointer-sized overhead, O(1) behavior on most operations, and fragmentation held down across a decade of shipping titles.
• Replaced the SGI/Nintendo N64 audio stack with a custom implementation that cut the audio memory footprint from roughly 400 KB to 28 KB, and designed a PlayStation 2 audio compression format achieving 5:1 compression at seven clock cycles per sample to decompress on the IOP.
• Drove memory, shader, and CPU optimization across Stuntman: Ignition, BattleZone, Terminator 3, and Mission: Impossible — Operation Surma, including collision routines rewritten in Xbox assembly for a 100x speedup and VU microcode optimization on PS2.

• Maintained AudioWorks2, a real-time audio simulation product, and completed a tank simulator built for Krauss-Maffei, the German defense manufacturer.