Charles Poole, the owner of IS Studios, is currently one of the most experienced mixed reality developers in the business. Like many of the other people well known for their development chops on the HoloLens and Magic Leap One, he fell into it accidentally. Through a combination of determination and blind luck, as well as the ability to pick up a new UX paradigm that requires technical acumen with both .NET and Unity, he is currently one of those rare people with 3+ years of hands-on MR design, development and project management experience. You’ll have to ask him yourself for the full story, but it basically comes down – as with so many others – to getting his hands on a very expensive device and learning to make it hum (ideally using spatial audio).
Charles is soft spoken and kind. One of the very interesting things about his background is that he is a mathematician – and so in that small subclass of software developers who actually knows math! There’s nothing nicer in the world of programming than having a friend you can hit up when you are having problems with an algorithm or with your matrix math.
What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
Hackers, I think watching Hackers in 95/96 shaped my childhood and later choices when it came to education and what I spent my time on.
What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
Super Mario Brothers on the NES, or Sky Kid, also on NES. I remember playing it for hours just to get to the 3rd or 4th level, then watching my father get a lot further.
Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
Maybe Buckminster Fuller, Neal Stephenson maybe Michael Crichton. I read a lot as a child, I feel as though all the views I was exposed to through fiction and non-fiction had a big influence in how I see the world and approach problems. In general the problems seem really big, cause a lot of drama, are entertaining to read and experience, then the solution just happens to come together from a character that has the experience to pull a solution out of their ass.
When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
A big one recently, and kind of mild, was using Photon for the multiplayer aspects of my work. I was against Photon for a long time, I wanted to be in control of every aspect of what I was building. So I’d do things like make a custom socket server, write the server in Dark rift, use WebRTC. One of the most important things about freelancing is using every tool you have to accelerate development, while keeping it altogether. We had to make a decision recently about a multiplayer backend that could scale to thousands of users, but still be self hosted, and the time-frame was extremely compressed, so I revisited Photon, specifically PUN2 which had been released since the last time I had used PUN, and it felt like it had come a long way in the time since I had used it last.
Simpler and more personal – My daughter’s kindergarten teacher had been pushing for her to repeat kindergarten. I was staunchly against it, she was getting top marks, won the science fair over 5th graders, and with something she had actually done and came up with on her own, we only bought the materials. But she just wasn’t emotionally ready for the pace to get quicker in first grade, and her teacher made her excited about helping out for another year. So, we agreed to have her repeat kindergarten, because she loves to learn, and we didn’t want to make school into something she hated.
What’s a skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
Managing my time, I’m terrible at managing my time, I tend to get sucked into a project and neglect everything else. I would work every day from 9am – 9pm or later. I had to step back and put a rigid stop time on my day so I would spend time with my kids and not just work through their whole childhood.
What inspires you to learn?
I want to do everything myself, and push myself outside my developer comfort zone everyday. I’ll say ‘yes’ to things just for the challenge of figuring it out.
What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
That things can only get better. I started off this dev journey making a thousand bucks a month, living in a tiny apartment with my wife and two kids. Every day, week, month feels like things have gotten better for us, at some point I want to turn around and help make other people’s lives better too.
What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
That anything is possible with enough hard work. I have an applied math background, and have seen sparks of insight and intuition I know I’d never have, but I still feel like I’d get there eventually if I put enough hours into it.
What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
Something agent based, an intelligent agent that acts as your exocortex. AI/ML is the future of Human Computer Interaction, the killer app won’t feel like an app, it will just be part of your life.
What book have you recommended the most?
Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, it’s shaping up to be the most prescient book I’ve read. It was written in 2006 but the trends he wrote about are what we’re starting to see today, the nascent AR technology.
