An unplanned home birth, in the middle of full lockdown, and delivering Adele myself on the bathroom floor—that’s pretty high up the list. Just before lockdown, we did get to meet and talk to one of the gods of tech, Gabe Newell (aka ‘Gaben’), so he was definitely winning before Adele arrived.
I had this desire to be doing cool stuff and to have a job I enjoyed instead of working for someone else and wasting my life on boring crap just to get paid. There’s a quote from the late, great Carl Sagan: “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” I chose engineering mostly out of curiosity. I had grown up around computers and technology but didn’t understand how they worked and wanted to learn. Even when I left university, I didn’t have a specific goal, so I decided general R&D [research and development] was where you got to solve problems and play with new technologies, to build cool things just to prove it was possible. It turned out all right.
Victoria University of Wellington happened to be my home city university, but I also saw a focus on ‘new’ engineering disciplines and digital tech that the other universities did not have. Plus Professor Dale Carnegie, the Dean of Engineering, came to Wellington College to give a recruitment talk and told us there was a robot called Marvin stalking the halls of the Engineering School. That was more of a deciding factor than I should probably admit.
“If some shiny tech thing is going to change the world, then I should probably have a play to see what all the fuss is about, right?”
I like playing with tech, tinkering and messing with things to see what new possibilities open up. The Eight360 company began as a hobby, a weekend project to build something cool. VR was just starting to hit the mainstream and become a real thing, and partly it was just an excuse to buy an Oculus Rift headset for ‘research purposes’. However, it’s deeper than that. VR has been described as ‘the final medium’, a truly transformative technology that will change the world and enable things we’ve never even dreamed of. It is a new frontier to explore, offering opportunities to develop new ways of interacting, of telling stories, and delivering experiences. If some shiny tech thing is going to change the world, then I should probably have a play to see what all the fuss is about, right?
I was never really a gamer and spent more time tinkering under the hood than playing, because fiddling was the fun bit. I was more about taking my computer apart and replacing bits with other bits to explore what was possible. The games I did enjoy were more problem-solving and strategy, classics like Age of Empires and The Incredible Machine.
The dream is to see the NOVA being used worldwide and to see what different groups will use it for. We’ve created an enabling technology that can be used to solve problems, but it will be fascinating to see how those customers use NOVA to solve their individual problems. Now NOVA is ready to be released into the world, we are also looking at the next technologies and schemes we could work on, and that is really exciting because in another five years we don’t know what will be available and possible. The future is awesome because it keeps changing. You have to be willing to step into the unknown and learn new stuff if you want to play at the forefront of technology. Engineering is not a field or a specialisation as such, it is a mindset you can apply to anything and take to many places. My first job out of university was designing hydroponics equipment for greenhouse growers. The second was dairy automation systems for milking cows. Now I do VR.