Kyle Machulis (@qDot) currently spends his days as a mild-mannered engineer, and his nights sitting in front of his computer with the firm belief that someone on the internet cares about what he does.

Nonpolynomial Labs houses Kyle’s personal projects in immersive environment and alternative input research. Going by his favorite mantra, “As free as possible”, he works to create immersion in video games and virtual worlds through the absolute cheapest, easiest means possible. Not only does he not have a research budget, but he also enjoys proving the fact that simple user interface additions to a very complex computer-generated world can create new kinds of emergent play and interaction.

Kyle is known as a tinkerer/hacker/pioneer/visionary in the realm of sex technology (or at least, a ton of bloggers seem to think so). Through his Slashdong webpage, he uses the topic of teledildonics (remotely actuated sexual experience) to teach the basic concepts of electrical and mechanical engineering. He also tracks the convergence of sex and technological advances in toys and interaction. He was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at Prixxx Arse Elektronika.

Kyle runs the OpenYou Project, reverse engineering and documenting protocols and hardware for consumer health tracking. His interest stems from the idea of taking biometrics beyond health and sports tracking, and integrating it into the quality of his every day activities, whether these are physically active (like rock climbing) or sedentary (like programming).

For the past two years, Kyle has investigated the biometric potentials of point clouds with depth-capturing devices like LIDAR and the Kinect sensor. In the project below, Kyle presents a 3D scan of 512 people in the Fursuit Parade.