Vanlife with Agents

An Office That Moves

The agent stack that ran my working life from a van. A Hermes agent on a VPS I talk to over WhatsApp, a heavier setup on the laptop, smart glasses for everything in between, and the honest downsides nobody puts in the demo video.

Vanlife with Agents

Building a Home on Wheels

Two weeks turning an ex-accessibility van into a bedroom, office and kitchen. Solar, Starlink, a swivel seat, a butane oven, and the two boss fights nobody warns you about, namely American banking and van insurance on a visitor visa.

Vanlife with Agents

The $7,000 Decision

I landed in Boston with three months in the US ahead of me and a budget that American accommodation prices were about to eat alive. So I put an AI agent to work hunting vans, and a week later I was on a bus to Philadelphia.

Zenflow - MR Transitions for Sleep and Relaxation

An MR system that gradually transforms your room into a starry night sky, co-designed with pranayama practitioners to make breathing-based relaxation easier to sustain.

NZCarAuctions

NZ Car Auctions, Part 3: Predicting Prices With XGBoost

A small side project that evolved from a simple daily crawler into a price prediction tool for New Zealand insurance auctions.

NZCarAuctions

NZ Car Auctions, Part 1: Building a 660,000-Record Dataset

How a small daily crawler pointed at New Zealand's insurance auctions quietly grew into a three-year, 660,000-record public dataset. Scraping, GitHub Actions, cleaning, and the gotchas along the way.

NZCarAuctions

NZ Car Auctions, Part 2: Analytics With Zero Servers

What 1,100 days of NZ salvage auctions reveal, and how FindCars NZ serves interactive charts and a free JSON API from a purely static site.

Evolution of Volumetric Capture

Haptic Hongi, Reiterated

Four years after the first table in Brisbane, the project came back to SIGGRAPH Asia, this time in Sydney, on a Magic Leap 2, with a capture pipeline light enough to fit in a suitcase. The final post in this series, with a look back at how far volumetric capture came between 2019 and 2023.

Evolution of Volumetric Capture

Haptic Hongi: A Greeting You Can Feel

In a hongi, noses and foreheads press together and breath is shared. You cannot do that with a hologram, unless you bolt a shape memory alloy actuator to the headset and let it press back. Part three of the volumetric capture series, where the work gains a sense of touch.

Pinning a Biomechanical Model to a Lump of Silicone

The breast group at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute had spent years building mathematical models of how breast tissue deforms. My job was to get one of those models out of the solver and onto a silicone phantom sitting on a desk, seen through a HoloLens 2, and to make it stay there.

Macbook Air 2020 USB C port replacement

Replacing the faulty USB-C port of a 2020 MacBook Air (Intel)

Meet Biscuit, a Dog That Isn't There

A low-poly golden retriever that lives in your room instead of on a screen. Built on a HoloLens 2 in 2021 to find out whether a virtual pet stops feeling like software once it has somewhere to stand.

Remote Collaboration

Bringing 3D to Zoom

Four years of remote collaboration research that all assumed everyone owns a headset, and then a pandemic in which nobody did. XRTB puts the VR person into an ordinary Zoom call as just another face on the grid.

Remote Collaboration

Volumetric Training

Four ways to show somebody how to service a motorcycle engine, compared head to head. A volumetric recording of the instructor beat an avatar, a hand, and an annotation on almost everything that mattered.

Two Wrecks, One Free Motorcycle

A field guide to having expensive fun with no money, worked through on the example of ending up with a road-legal 250 that cost nothing. Two auction wrecks, an engine crane doing a job it was never sold for, and a receipt that came out even.

Evolution of Volumetric Capture

First Contact : XR for Good

An art installation that uses various modes of Extended Reality (XR) to support social engagement and generate connections with a view to reversing processes of societal atomisation and intercultural discomfort (racism).

Remote Collaboration

Pointing With Sound

Every visual cue fails the moment the thing you need is behind you. Putting the remote expert's voice in 3D, and adding audio beacons, solved a problem the visual work could not.

Remote Collaboration

Which Cue Is Actually Doing the Work?

Eight depth cameras, a Magic Leap on one head and a Vive Pro on another, and a study designed to separate eye gaze from hand gesture instead of shipping them as a bundle. The answer was not the one the gaze research predicted.

NeuralDrum

Leveraging cognitive synchronization to create a collaborative music production experience with immersive visualization in virtual reality.

Hyperscanning

Comparisons between Real and Virtual Environments using Hyperscanning

Hybrid Office

What are the functional, programmatic and technical parameters for a home office that allows for remote collaboration by applying architectural cross reality design principles?

Evolution of Volumetric Capture

Come to the Table

It started with a kitchen table in New Zealand and a question from artist Mairi Gunn: can XR help strangers from different cultures actually meet? We recorded real conversations volumetrically and took the table to SIGGRAPH Asia 2019. This is the first post in a series tracing four years of that work.

Remote Collaboration

Wearable RemoteFusion

Four depth cameras stitching a live 3D model of a room, so a remote expert can walk around your workspace instead of watching a video of it. The first system of my PhD, and the study that showed the two people in a call want opposite things.

The Sandbox That Draws Its Own Contours

A short-throw projector and a depth camera turn a box of sand into a live topographic map. Built for Te Papa during the Mahuki accelerator, out of timber from my weekend job at PlaceMakers.

How the Garage Happened

How a Masters student on a tight scholarship accidentally stumbled into car flipping, learned to wrench, and funded skiing, surfing, and road trips across New Zealand.

Engraved Acrylic LED Light accessory

Scavenging spare components from the MagicMirror project to build something cool!

Integrating speakers into a Motorcycle Helmet

Bringing the music inside the helmet.

MagicMirror

Final Touches

The Mirror is finally ready. A satisfying end to one of the most interesting projects to date.

First Car

Moving onto bigger projects - the freedom of having four wheels.

MagicMirror

Building the Hardware

After getting the software side of things up and running, it is time to build the hardware, the cost-efficient way.

MagicMirror

Creating Custom Modules

Time to turn specific requirements into reality by writing custom modules.

MagicMirror

Idea and Inspiration

A six-month bed rest after ACL surgery in 2016 created the unexpected opportunity to start building things. After days of browsing DIY projects on Pinterest, the Magic Mirror project emerged as the first step toward something that felt like real-world Augmented Reality.

Ambilight

Ambilight, short for "ambient lighting", is originally a lighting system for televisions developed by Philips, however today it is used in reference to all types and brands of ambient lighting in the context where lighting is utilized to complement the light coming from your main display.

Building a shelf instead of cleaning the table

The table is always a mess, full of electronics. Tidying up is not fun, so a shelf was built instead.

Join the adventure

At five years old, an electronics starter kit introduced LEDs and stepper motors and the hook was set. About a decade later, a new obsession arrived: computers. This is where it all started.