our team
James Norling - Lead Developer / CTO
The CTO role is to ensure that the technical quality & capacity of the iSPARX network.
This role is responsible for all technical requirements of the platform.
Patrick Kitchen - Creative Director
Patrick is a South Slave Métis Creative Director in Canada with 20+ years Agency experience now concentrating efforts in indigenous design & commercial creative.
He learned his craft as a painter, production artist, designer, art director, and creative director now focused on Indigenous creative needs. He has a passion for the whole picture and likes to be involved in every aspect of the job from conception to execution helping clients send the right message to the right people.
Ethan Wimsett - Creative / Developer
Primarily creative elements of design & content - experimental & artistic studio development projects.
AAAron Hobman - Production Manager
test-1-2 turn the lights down low… Aaron runs the show!
Cassandra Albert - Advisor Operations
Advisor on the day to day business requirements including innovation & production.
Programmers
*we’re hiring
JoFF Rae - Executive Producer / CIO
As the Exec Producer / Innovation Officer, JoFF Rae plays a crucial internal and external role.
Internally, he is the cultural leader in the office: introducing energy, excitement and information to the larger team, while acting as a leader across projects and supporting the Design Manager.
Externally, he presents as a creative and strategy leader: someone who can articulately analyse a problem, craft a winning solution and then wrap said solution in the most useful, usable and delightful way possible.
Audrey Holyoake - Designer / EA
EA to the CIO & Designer Audrey ensures the design ethic & quality of the iSPARX.group. Plus she has to put up with JoFF.
Bram Holyoake - Producer
Bram has studied History & Law at Victoria University & has an interest in Football.
Oscar Holyoake - Producer
Production Manager Oscar makes content & builds physical installations to suit from 360° media to LED visuals installations, 3D models, editing & production.
Cole Holyoake - Designer UI/UX
Developer - Purple Unicorn Designer Cole designs & manages front end & aesthetic including graphics, UI/UX & other design elements of all iSPARX projects.
Developers & Creatives
*we’re hiring
OUR STORY
iSPARX - The Immersive Space Programme Augmented Reality Exchange is changing the way we interact with the world. Turn everyday objects, images, and places into new opportunities for engagement.
In 2017 we had been experimenting with interactive immersive media & 360° video production. iSPARX developed an AR App for an art exhibition in Wellington & soon after was involved in an International Indigenous Art & Technology Conference ABTEC in Winnipeg Canada where the technology gained some attention in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives & museums) industry. We then developed an interactive AR App Hinatore for Te Papa which won the prestigious National Digital Forum Award for Innovative Technology.
With our reputation establishing in the GLAM Industry we were asked to develop an App visualising statistics in sport for a Sydney based agency that won the Hyper Sports Innovation prize at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. We went on to work on Augmented Reality visualisation of statistics in live games with SportRadar (Worlds largest sports statistics agency) with Stadium Capital One, Washington.
Through reputation & networking we started to work with New York Agency Two Goats. They engaged iSPARX to develop & deliver an AR element to the Telemundo Latin Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas. This led to concept development for other media including a showcase for NBC Universal & Telemundo Innovation Expo in New York with our interactive & dynamic broadcast AR element.
Eventually we were given a simple brief by EY Seren (Ernst & Young UK) for a retail interactive AR App. We were told it was an App for a UK based retailer. We made the assumption that it would be a retailer with 200 outlets & proposed a positioning POC with AR & a collectible element with rewards. The "retailer" was BP International. We discovered while developing the POC that scale was the most important issue of the development. We had designed all our Apps to be dynamic in content & media & to have the ability to have a CMS applied to the functionality.
The EY/BP experience was a pivotal time in our direction. We made an effort to consolidate our development focus on our ability to provide templates of CMS & App with immersive media of substance; avoiding ‘novelty’ & concentrating on functional dynamic media; & working on products that are anticipating 5G & new technologies.
We all experienced the COVID-19 pandemic… soon after the first lockdown we decided to consolidate the business & structure again - this time in preparation for expansion & investment as we developed the ability to duplicate templates.
The iSPARX platform includes a powerful drag-and-drop web studio that enables anyone to easily create, manage, and track augmented reality experiences.