Formative Years: Childhood, Teenage
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Early Experiments in Future Interfaces
From an early age, I was an awe of adaptive interfaces depicted in science-fiction films. Even as a teenager with no access to advanced tools I felt compelled to explore how such interfaces might feel to use. This VFX clip is one of my earliest self-initiated experiments: a visualization of myself interacting with a dynamic, task-specific, agentic HUD. I was fascinated by interface concepts that required no physical input: only speech, context and system-level responsiveness.
Back in high school, as I got bored of studying the traditional way, I wished for a more interactive way to learn. So I started messing around with simple VFX to imagine what it would be like if I could study using holograms instead of books.
In this little experiment, I pictured myself pulling up notes in mid-air, zooming in and out of diagrams, expanding pages around me, and highlighting keywords in space.
I obviously didn’t have any real tools to build something like that back then, but visualizing it was my way of exploring how studying could feel if interfaces were more fluid and spatial. Looking back, these small projects were my first steps toward the kind of work I’ve been doing now and interested now.
Early Experiments in Augmentation
These photos are from the fourth attempt at building my sci‑fi–inspired exoskeleton. Each earlier version had some flaw that forced me to rethink the entire approach, until this one finally worked to a reasonable extent. At the time, I gave myself a pat on the shoulder, it felt like actually being a “builder” or “inventor.” I figured out automated lighting, wiring and circuitry and even some basic animatronics using brushless motors salvaged from old RC cars.
But the reality hit me when a few older people around me mocked the project, saying I was just making cosplay that would end up in the trash after two weekends. I had put so much time into it that the comments really discouraged me. So instead of brushing it off, I decided to take things more seriously and understand what “superhuman abilities” could actually mean in real life.
That kicked off a whole research rabbit hole. I started looking into human flight systems (like Gravity Industries), exoskeletons, human augmentation research, robotics, mecha systems, weaponry, agentic systems, and everything that sat at the boundary of imagination and engineering. I even explored supernatural ideas like magic, only to realize they didn’t have any practical merits.
That research eventually made me realize that technology and science are the only realistic means for superhuman augmentation. And that understanding has stuck with me ever since and influenced my project choices.
Spacecraft Design:
I was invited by my high school to represent our school (Chennai, India) in the prestigious NASA Space Settlement Contest. As part of a four-member team, I contributed by designing and 3D modeling spacecrafts tailored to specific utilities, helping bring our conceptual vision to life.
Other Experiments
This is a short film created using action figures, using a variety of filmmaking techniques such as stop-motion, green-screen overlays, rotoscoping, score and sound effects, all to bring a battle story to life.
Resourcefulness drove my inventiveness:
Legos, M-Seal Models and Custom Action Figures:
Since early childhood, I was curiously inclined to create new things from scratch - every passion
right from modelling action figures using epoxy putty because couldn’t access or afford it and recording my own original music ideas.
Powerpoint UIs:
When I was 9, I had a weird idea to use hyperlinks in Microsoft Powerpoint to create my own UIs for operating systems, thinking how this is how OS could be built. I was fascinated by the UI of new launched Windows 8, admired 7 and Vista but wanted something of my own.
DIY IMAX Theater:
I was 12, and I wanted to watch movies on a giant IMAX screen I discovered on the internet, but it was unavailable here in Chennai, India back in 2015 - I tinkered with a minecraft plugin for constructing a giant IMAX screen inside the game for web-streaming to watch and enjoy movies.
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