I put imaginary things in the real world.

On Niantic's Spatial Solutions team, where we build demos, put our spatial-computing services through their paces, and help deliver tailored solutions for customers. My focus is the creative and technical art that makes those experiences land.

• Art Director on a closed Meow Wolf proof of concept: merging real-world locations with mobile gameplay and high-end AR artworks, hitting a “mind-blowing” visual bar while staying true to Meow Wolf’s surreal, iconic brand. We explored new ways to connect physical discovery with digital storytelling, laying the foundation for a global AR experience built on collaborative universe-building.
• Significant R&D into Gaussian Splat reconstruction: new format loaders, rendering optimizations and whole effect systems across Desktop, Web, Mobile and VR, with direct contributions to open-source libraries like gsplat-unity.

The NZXR crew became Niantic Aotearoa post acquisition. Still a tight group of spatial-computing specialists shipping world-first AR for live games and prototyping what comes next.

• Creative Lead on a major update to Pokémon GO’s AR photography mode. I held the vision and relentlessly pushed to ship a cohesive, well-rounded, fun feature. Alongside a talented team, I contributed across Design, UX, Technical Art and Programming to meet our quality and performance bar.
• Worked on internal research projects and gameplay demos defining the next generation of spatial computing. Collaborated with multidisciplinary teams to prove out new AR mechanics through rapid prototyping and technical look-dev.
• Built prototypes across the hardware spectrum, from everyday smartphones to the latest head-mounted displays, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in spatial computing.

Co-founded NZXR from the ground up in Aotearoa: a world-class XR studio working at the sweet spot where hardware, software and human experience meet. In 2022 we made the call to join Niantic full-time through an acquisition.

• Wore both the founder's and Senior Technical Artist's hats, holding the technical vision while staying hands-on, building the AR prototypes and systems that turned ambitious ideas into shipped reality.
• Drove our flagship StoryXR platform: persistent, multiplayer AR deployed at city scale, taking Unity scenes into the real world through interconnected, spatially-anchored StoryZones.
• Delivered innovative XR projects with top studios locally and globally, including skatrix.io, Destination Mars, Qualcomm and Niantic, plus confidential work. The strength of the team and our projects ultimately led to the Niantic acquisition.

Contracted to Niantic, the billion-dollar leader in location-based mobile AR, working remotely from Wellington with their London team. Brought on to sharpen how the team prototyped content, I grew into owning an AR prototype end to end.

• Initially brought on to refine how the team prototyped content, proving out gameplay concepts and helping take an internal project to green light so the core team could focus on building for scale.
• That grew into full ownership of an AR prototype, built in parallel with the main game. Despite the 12-hour offset from the London office, I delivered the creative and technical build seamlessly from New Zealand, working with the Creative Director and Lead Game Designer to shape the mechanics and engineer the core Unity systems.
• As the sole Technical Artist, I was the primary link to our in-house AR SDK team, testing experimental features and feeding back critical results. My optimization work on systems that crossed the SDK boundary significantly improved performance, taking the build from under 15 fps to a smooth 50 fps+. I shared those changes upstream with the SDK team, improving it for everyone.

Technical Artist on Dr. Grordbort's Invaders, Magic Leap's flagship game and a finalist in both the VES and D.I.C.E. Awards. I worked across teams and disciplines, building the tools and processes that kept iteration loops short and production running at full speed.

• Kept the game running smoothly and looking great on Magic Leap One, guiding the art team with asset budgets and profiler-driven optimization.
• Built, maintained and evolved asset production pipelines in flight, as our hardware, SDKs and operating system moved from prototype to shipped consumer devices.
• Created custom publishing tools for models and textures with full visual diffs against previous versions (Python, Qt, OpenGL, GLSL), alongside internal tooling for spatial prototyping and rapid asset review.
• Developed room “scan shaders” with the Studio Director, looking amazing while directing the player's gaze, and designed and championed the game's accessibility guidelines, leading to an update focused entirely on accessibility.
• On the studio diversity committee I helped reshape hiring to reach underrepresented people in games, and was a consistent voice against routine overtime, prioritising well-being and retention.

Grew PikPok's analytics team from a seed idea to a high-performing group of four, fully integrated into the product development and analysis cycle. As manager I ran the team's day-to-day operations.

• Designed and built a gameplay-analytics pipeline that turned billions of monthly events into actionable insight, ingesting millions of events daily into performance indicators for product managers and game designers.
• Created real-time dashboards across PikPok's 30+ products, plus custom collection and reporting of the business KPIs that decision-makers relied on.
• Partnered with product managers and developers to instrument the right events up front, and brought analysis into meetings, reviews and scrums to actively shape product decisions.
• Collected and aggregated financial performance from every monetization partner as soon as it was available, with detailed payment breakdowns to support the finance team.

Built the Technical Art team from a clean slate, with great managers behind me and a talented team alongside, focused on inter-department communication, troubleshooting and performance optimization. I was there through the studio’s transformation, from shipping discs for game consoles as Sidhe, to the rise of PikPok alongside the launch of the iPhone and the first mobile app stores.

• Owned the art department's production tools, primarily Maya and Photoshop, writing custom Maya plugins in C++ and scripts in Python and MEL, plus Photoshop automation in JavaScript.
• Built and maintained the content pipelines that got art into the game. Kept things running as the studio grew and evolved across many engines. Renderware, Gamebryo, PhyreEngine, Fusion (our proprietary engine) and Unity.
• Worked closely with the Graphics team to build a shared real-time shader pipeline (CgFX) running in both the Maya viewport and Fusion, shortening the iteration loop by bringing engine shaders back into content creation tooling.
• Shipped 10+ console and 30+ mobile titles, including Into the Dead, Giant Boulder of Death, the Flick Kick series, Rival Stars Basketball and Robot Unicorn Attack 2.