Category: Project

At the end of 2018, I was involved as a Unity developer in a contract job for a company called Marshmallow Laser Feast called Sweet Dreams. It was a VR project using Vive Pro headsets (with backpack-mounted laptops) and interactions with a physical environment. The idea was to explore what it would be like to eat and drink in VR. Collaborating with chefs from Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant to produce consumables which were experienced by the participants as part of a bizarre adaptive adventure through the death of a foreign world whose demise was brought about through an extreme gluttony, culminating in the user drinking the sun!

The project was a great success and was exhibited at the Sundance Film Festival.

My role on the project was that of a Unity developer, working directly with building out the VR experience as part of a team of three. I was especially focussed on the interactions between the real-world elements and the digital VR experience, using tracking pucks and OSC communications to bring the real world into the virtual.

Sweet Dreams was developed with the support of the BFI’s Film Fund

DREAM is an EC-funded project that will deliver the next generation robot-enhanced therapy (RET). It develops clinically relevant interactive capacities for social robots that can operate autonomously for limited periods under the supervision of a psychotherapist. DREAM will also provide policy guidelines to govern ethically compliant deployment of supervised autonomy RET. The core of the DREAM RET robot is its cognitive model which interprets sensory data (body movement and emotion appearance cues), uses these perceptions to assess the child’s behaviour by learning to map them to therapist-specific behavioural classes, and then learns to map these child behaviours to appropriate robot actions as specified by the therapists.*

I worked on this project as a research assistant between 2015-2019.

Briefly, the main challenges addressed by the DREAM project therefore are:

• Child-robot interaction strategies: We focus on evidence-based therapies suitable for improving social interaction skills. The robot will assist the therapist in teaching the child social skills like turn-taking, imitation and joint attention.
• Cognitive social behaviour for supervised autonomy: We will develop a new platform-independent cognitive controller based on the needs of human social interaction, exploiting the propensity of people to “fill in the gaps” in social interaction by generating behaviour that facilitates interpretation by ASD children.
• Child-specific behaviour assessment: We will create a model that can track and quantify changes in child behaviour based on off-body sensory data as well as provide quantitative inter-individual comparisons to assist therapist in their tasks.
• Multi-sensory data fusion and interpretation for diagnostic support: Multi-sensory data will be used to provide quantitative support for the diagnosis and care/treatment of ASD, replacing current labour intensive techniques involving paper and pencil, or manual video analysis.
• Ethics of human-robot interaction: We will ensure that the technical design of the robot complies with existing ethical, social, and legal norms. We also address new ethical and legal issues raised by the particular kind of interaction that emerges in the interaction between children and autonomous robots in therapeutic contexts.

* (text copied from dream2020.eu)

Freelance job working with Marshmallow Laser Feast to create a visualisation of the Ethereum network. The piece was displayed at the annual Blockchains developer conference, being displayed on two screens, an LED wall displayed behind a holographic scrim layer. The visualisation was developed as a representation of the network’s history, evolving and being manipulated by historic data across the various forks.

“Has your imagination been colonised?”

Voodoonaut is a weird art film disguised as a science fiction experience. from visionary director/creator John Clay. Between 2022 and 2024 I assisted in the creation of this film primarily taking on the roles of Assistant Producer. In addition to this role, I wore a number of other hats such as creative consultant, audio editor, camera technician, vfx engineer, composer.

To save the world from an otherworldly threat, Lt Julia Earle’s consciousness is projected into outer space. All is well until her body disappears.

Featuring the acting talents of Sofia Martins Gray, Camille Alexander, Lars Chittka, Barbara Pugilise, Hazel Turnock, Nicholas Anson, Patrick Lyons, Ashleigh Cole, Patrick Lyons, Sarah Merrifield, Ziwa Gwatidzo, Liam Rigney, Annalie Wilson, Ola Kitchen, Nathan Ridley, Iggy Crespop, Arran Goodchild, Kyriaki Karadelis and Neil Anderson.

Filmed By Lou Smith, Neil Anderson, Sofia Martins Gray, Aloha Dead, Rob Homewood, Ludovic Cairtey, Levant Kucukkaya, Sergio Angot, Shogo Hino and Andras Paul.

‘It’s a broken alien black box recorder of a puzzle movie. This film isn’t wilfully trying to confound you, it just has it’s own way of talking. There is no wrong answer, there is only your need to question cinematic space exploration.’

John Clay, Director

Instagram –   / voodoonautfilm  
Facebook –   / chemicallysinister  

Voodoonaut Soundtrack –    • Voodoonaut – The Soundtrack