Now
I’m a technical project manager for the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, leading a team building futures ideation platforms, helping the Army Applications Laboratory with their new site, and solving whatever problems come up for internal teams and clients. My technical focus is whatever tools I can bend or make to get the job done, usually Python, JavaScript, or some clever Excel. I’ve never met a shell script I didn’t like, and enjoy automating tasks, as a colleague taught me years ago, “Make the computer do it.”
I split my time between working remote in Washington DC, visiting client sites, and commuting to the office in Los Angeles. If it isn’t in Trello, it doesn’t exist.
Then
The Early Years
I learned to load a Nagra when I was 6 years old, and it’s been quite a ride from there. An internship at a serious games lab found me recording, editing and installing dialogue and pretty soon I was doing that full time. After a few years at USC, the group I was a part of spun out to develop language software for the DoD. That meant cramped offices, expensive coffee, and working in 3 or more languages at a time.
After a few years in startup land I jumped back to USC as staff at the Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT). I helped design and run human computer interaction studies with one of the research teams, then jumped over to the ICT’s in house games team, developing location based, VR/MR, and laptop based training systems. I managed dialogue production and sound design, along with creative services from punch up writing to video production.
In the Spring of 2018, I transitioned to managing a webdev team full time, working with clients in Army Futures Command on a long running project around crowd-sourced futures ideation, coordinating online efforts with in person workshops, Army events, and other foresight organizations.
Projects
Gunslinger
A mixed reality entertainment demo set in the old west. The player tries to talk their way out of a sticky situation set in a 1:1 scale wild west saloon. Gunslinger combines life size virtual humans with speech recognition, dialogue management, IR tracking, and the occasional bullet. I was responsible for dialogue production in Gunslinger, from engineering the VO sessions to mixing on the final 15 channel hardware installation. I also designed and installed the video projection setups, consulted on the saloon design, and scripted much of the content. See Gunslinger in action.
CHAOS
Piggybacking on the technology in Gunslinger, CHAOS was a full size mixed reality Afghan compound installed at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. Squads of marines would work with their translator to try and bring stability to a small Afghan village. Unfortunately, not everyone was always on the same page. I designed and installed much of the hardware, and helped with the software design, coming in from Gunslinger as an expert. CHAOS presented a number of challenges, from complex mixed reality projection, to how to conceal props and effects while still making everything robust enough to survive a SESAMS training environment.
Bravemind
Bravemind is a leading VR exposure therapy application for treating post traumatic stress. I provided assets and audio expertise to Bravemind, focusing on naturalist sound design to immerse patients in the events they experienced. Bravemind has been recently extended to applications around trauma resulting from sexual assault, as well as conflicts beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. Vice Motherboard covered it here.
INOTS/ELITE
Imagine a dingy office in a small compartment of a Navy ship. No, dingier. That’s where INOTS, and it’s Army spin off, ELITE, teach newly commissioned officers how to counsel, direct, and if necessary, reprimand their subordinates. I took over dialogue production on INOTS and related projects in 2013, including engineering the sessions and reworking earlier material to meet new production standards. I helped automate the dialogue and video production pipeline, and also assumed responsibility for the mixed reality system hardware, both in Los Angeles and at installed sites across the US.
NDT
“New Dimensions in Testimony” is an interactive history exhibit, where the public can ask questions of virtual representations of Holocaust survivors. Starting with several hundred hours of interviews shot in both 4K and 6K RED, NDT uses a heavily automated FFmpeg/Nuke pipeline to trim and comp the interviews, leaving the busy work to the computers wherever possible. I helped put together the automation pipeline and supporting Python scripts, and also developed the audio workflow, including setting standards and training and supervising the voice assistants who did most of the RX work. I’m also engineering an extension of NDT towards other historical narratives, building new tools and automation to further improve turnaround times. NPR