Consulting, GPUs at home
Out on my own consulting on XR and AI. At home: a GPU cluster serving local models instead of renting someone else's API, an agent orchestration harness to drive it, and ABM research.
VFX, spatial computing, and whatever's next
RenderMan at Lucasfilm, a medtech startup in Singapore, XR at Dell, VR cockpits and NeRFs. These days: consulting, and a homelab full of GPUs.
I'm Martin, a creative technologist who gets curious about whatever tool just showed up and started breaking things in an interesting way.
By the numbers
3½ Years at Lucasfilm
7+ Patents from Dell
307 Photos in the archive
1st of 22,000, NASA Space Apps
How I got here
AWE Asia mainstage
Took the VRChat club scene to the AWE Asia mainstage- how grassroots communities throw weekly full-body-tracked gigs in open metaverses, and why they bother. Twenty-odd years after I was mixing video at the real thing.
Neural rendering
Training NeRFs from phone-quality SFM pointclouds, then working out what to actually do with the volume it hands back.
Dell
Six and a half years, four different hats, ending as XR strategy lead in the CTO office. Ran Dell XR Studios from Singapore, put demos on stage at CES, SIGGRAPH and GTC, and picked up 7 patents and a President's Award along the way.
Spatial tracking and VR
Rebuilding real rooms in virtual space with drone footage, structure-from-motion, and a homemade lidar scanner- then building the hardware to walk around inside the result.
BetaSight
Co-founded a medtech startup at Entrepreneur First Singapore with Dr. Corey Manders. Glaucoma testing in a VR headset: instead of staring at a dot in a Humphrey machine you follow points of light around, and the eye-tracking data trains a network to flag disease markers. It went through ISO 13485 and into clinical trial approvals, with the Singapore Eye Research Institute as research partner.
Shading and rendering
Started out deep in RenderMan and Houdini- carpaint shaders, dynamic camera mapping, particle advection with PCopen. That ran through Framestore, Dr. D and Base FX in Beijing, then three and a half years at Lucasfilm on The Force Awakens, Thor: Ragnarok and Ready Player One.
Live visuals
Met a crew mixing video live at an event and got hooked. Live visuals for electronic acts, years before any of it was called XR.