Work
Labs, stages, programmes & playable things.
Labs, LED stages, universities and funded programmes, and the partners and people involved.
MusicFutures
2025 – 2026Helping the Liverpool City Region win a £7.2m music innovation programme, then building the machinery that hands it out.
Dreamlab
2024 – presentA lab of 48+ experts that has helped over 100 businesses and freelancers since 2024. It started in a garage.
MediaCity Innovation Hub
2023 – 2025Backing other people's innovation: 35+ funded R&D collaborations on a £3.2m innovation accelerator.
Crucial FX
2023Playable, projection-mapped and interactive experiences for brands like Monster, Kia and Costa.
Pathway Studios
2022Realtime content, in-camera VFX and innovation on a 6,000 sq ft LED volume in Manchester.
Draw & Code
2021 – 2022Mocap, volumetric capture, virtual production and hardware R&D with Liverpool's immersive specialists.
TMRW Foundation
2020 – 2021Product Director on a state-of-the-art web-based realtime games engine, and the 3D experience platform built on top of it. No goggles necessary.
XLab & MA Immersive Arts
2018 – 2020Launching the world's first MA Immersive Arts, and co-running the Experimental Technologies Lab.
SODA Manchester
2015 – 2018Shaping the curriculum for a £35 million school built for the digital storytellers of the future.
Centre for Disruptive Media
2010 – 2015Pioneering digital learning: the UK's first university iTunes site, an early YouTube Edu partnership, and a photography course that lived inside an app.
Also
Books, awards & tools I've built
Things that sit alongside the main roles: a living book about creative AI, a pair of data engines, a mixed-reality football game, a regional immersive network and a couple of nice awards.
Dream Machine
2025 – presentA living book about AI and the next creative economy, with a newsletter and podcast that track what is actually happening.
Soundings
2026A live map of every registered creative company in the UK: roughly 745,000 of them, in 65 regional views.
Bearings
2026 – presentAn independent engine that reads roughly 560 funders, investors and tender portals every day, and works out who each opportunity is actually for.
Qube Smash
2023An original mixed-reality football game: tracking, realtime games engines and an immersive space.
Immersive Shaun the Sheep
2020A £1.08m AHRC research partnership to build a headset-free, AI-driven Shaun the Sheep experience in Shanghai.
500 UK Trailblazers
2024Named one of the 500 UK Trailblazers in the UKII Intelligence Report 2024, sponsored by Verizon and Epic Games, for AI workflow innovation.
BIMA 100
2020Named among the 100 most influential, pioneering and changemaking people in the UK digital and tech industry.
Immersive Liverpool
2018 – presentA city region network for immersive technology, started in 2018: a year of monthly events, a delegation to Dublin, a cluster strategy, and a community that outlasted all of it.
Experiments
80 more things I made.
Prototypes, hacks, residencies, installations, talks and odd ideas from twenty years of trying things. Mostly on video.
Open the experiments
