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Theodore Cruickshank

Technical director at Fun and Awe. I've spent over a decade building for headsets and phones, from VR fitness on Meta Quest to spatial music on Apple Vision Pro.

Each block is a job I've held, and its height is the years I spent there. Drag one to move it, or select it to read about the role.

Work

  1. to now

    Technical Director

    Fun and Awe, remote

    I lead the technical vision at a studio making immersive work at the intersection of art, play and storytelling. Right now that's OPERATOR, our first Apple Vision Pro app: a spatial music tool where you compose by arranging blocks in 3D space, inspired by industrial design and architectural models.

  2. to

    Engineering Team Lead

    FitXR, London

    Led engineering on the original VR fitness app for Meta Quest: boxing, dance, HIIT, sculpt and combat classes in your headset, with new content every week. We shipped hand tracking, a mixed reality mode for Quest 3, a seasonal challenge system and family sharing. Independent studies found our workouts burned 16% more calories than traditional fitness apps.

  3. to

    Senior Developer

    VirtualRetail.io, London

    Built core features for a merchandising platform for retailers. Brands could walk a digital twin of a real shop in VR, with accurate materials and colour, and decide what goes where without building physical mock-ups. It ran across VR, AR, desktop, iPad and large-format showrooms.

  4. to

    Developer

    Pupil (now Digital Reality Corp), London

    Worked on spatial intelligence for the built world: surveying technology, digital workflows and spatial data platforms covering the real estate lifecycle, from development planning to portfolio-scale digital twins.

  5. to

    Programmer

    PikPok, Wellington

    Shipped games at New Zealand's biggest mobile studio, whose portfolio, including Into the Dead, Flick Kick Football and Robot Unicorn Attack 2, has been downloaded nearly half a billion times. This is where the obsession with interactive work started.

About

Portrait of Theodore Cruickshank

I started out making mobile games at PikPok in Wellington. In London I worked on spatial data for buildings at Pupil, then on digital twins of shops at VirtualRetail.io, before spending four and a half years leading engineering at FitXR.

Now I'm technical director at Fun and Awe, a studio making immersive work at the intersection of art, play and storytelling. The studio's work is rooted in the physical world: real materials, object design and architecture, made for people to share a space and play together. Alongside OPERATOR, the studio has made SPECTRUM, a playable installation of spheres floating across a room.

The blocks at the top of this page are a nod to OPERATOR, where you compose music by arranging blocks in space. If you're reading this in a headset browser, you can step in and pick them up.

What I work with

  • Unity and C#
  • Meta Quest
  • Apple Vision Pro
  • VR, MR and XR
  • Spatial computing
  • Real-time 3D
  • Mobile
  • Technical architecture
  • Team leadership

Education

Victoria University of Wellington
BSc, Computer Science, 2013 to 2015
Whitecliffe College
Diploma in Software Development, 2011 to 2012

Contact

Want to talk about immersive tech, a project, or a role? Email is the quickest way to reach me.