Selected work
Prototypes, platforms and apparatus. Each one started as a question that couldn't be answered by reading — so I built something to answer it.
Twenty years of turning ambiguous questions into things you can actually test. Some are research apparatus, some are production platforms, some are hardware I made because the commercial option cost thousands and measured the wrong thing.
Emotion recognition inside a VR headset, on a £10 chip
Cloud emotion-AI APIs are expensive, slow, and send your participants’ faces to somebody else’s server. So I put a Raspberry Pi Zero and a camera inside an Oculus Quest and ran the computer vision on the headset itself. Nothing left the device.
StoryFutures · 2019–2023 · Pi Zero, OpenCV, Python
Xperiment — millisecond timing in a browser, before that was possible
Online psychology needed lab-grade stimulus timing and everyone said the browser couldn’t do it. I spent seven years proving otherwise, rewriting the engine three times as the web platform caught up: ActionScript, then Haxe, then ES6. Lead author on the PeerJ tutorial that came out of it.
Founded 2011 · ran to 2018 · AS3 → Haxe → ES6
A six-channel taste delivery machine
Multisensory flavour research needs precisely timed, repeatable delivery of six liquids to a person’s mouth without them seeing what’s coming. There is no product for this. I designed and built one.
Unilever R&D · psychophysics apparatus
TestXR — a platform for running VR studies in the wild
Location-based VR studies are a logistical nightmare: multiple headsets, multiple sites, one dataset. TestXR coordinated them. I led the team that built it, on Django and AWS, and secured £200k to do it.
StoryFutures · Django, AWS · £200k secured
Wind and haptics you can post to someone
Multisensory experiences mostly live in expensive venues. My PhD student builds robotics that generate wind and touch on a desk instead, so the effect can be studied somewhere other than a purpose-built room. I supervise it and build alongside.
Ongoing · supervised PhD work · Arduino, servos, 3D printing
Centimetre-accurate indoor positioning, no GPS
Where does an audience actually go, and what holds them? Ultra-wideband beacons answer that to within a few centimetres inside a building, which self-report never will.
CoSTAR / StoryFutures · UWB hardware
LiveQual — live qualitative research that runs itself
Online focus groups and depth interviews, with the moderation tooling researchers actually need rather than a video call and a spreadsheet. Django, deployed and running.
Current · Django
The Inclusivity Bookshelf
Three physical bookshelves on campus, plus a website so any other institution can copy the model. Half carpentry, half web app, entirely about getting the right books in front of people who didn’t know to look for them.
Launched 2025 · inclusivitybookshelf.com
Can I Still Code?
A longitudinal study of what AI coding assistants do to developers’ underlying Python skill. Runs as a real platform with real participants, because a questionnaire wouldn’t answer it.
Ongoing · canistillcode.org · Django
Helen Falls In
A one-button retro arcade game. Helen cycles a canal towpath on a very wobbly bike. There was no research question; I wanted to find out how much game you can get from one button.
2026 · play it
Smaller things — a beard that vibrates when you face north, a Pi that tells you whether the car park is full, a trumpet trainer for an adult learner who is bad at sight reading — are in the notebook.