10 Nov Meet Elijah Claude, XR Design Strategist

Adding another member to the team is always cause for celebration. Here at Futurus, we enjoy discovering the backgrounds, goals, and hobbies of our office’s fresh faces, and we love kickstarting this process by asking them a couple of fun questions. Meet Elijah, Futurus’ Extended Reality (XR) Design Strategist, and welcome him by learning about his favorite XR experiences, pastimes, and books below.

How did you get involved in the XR industry?

This is a long story, so I’ll try to keep it relatively short:

I’ve been interested in XR technology ever since I read Epic by Conor Kostick in elementary school. I no longer like many of the story’s dystopian elements, but it introduced the concept of virtual worlds to me at a young age and solicited my wonder at the thought of making a living by playing games. Epic also featured AI that became sentient and, later in the series, even adopted a multiverse structure.

Throughout high school, I was big into reading Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (VRMMOPRG) lite novels and anime like Sword Art Online and Log Horizon. Having seen so many imaginings of VR within books, lite novels, and anime, I was excited to see what was to come when the Oculus DK1 was released! Unfortunately, I didn’t have the means to get one for myself, so I attended every meetup I could that featured VR—that’s how I first met Annie about six years ago.

Eventually, I stumbled upon a job posting for Atlanta’s first VR arcade. I had to commute three hours to get there, but it was worth it! Working there, I realized that while there are tons of incredibly talented developers and artists creating unforgettable experiences, most of the time, these experiences lack strong user-friendliness. So, I figured I’d use the customer/technical experience I gained from working at the arcade to become a user experience designer for XR.

Again, I’m skipping a lot here because I also tried to invent my own corner of the metaverse as an extension of my childhood dream to invent hovercars! However, I suppose that’s a story for another day.

What is your favorite VR or AR experience? Why?

Choosing just one experience is incredibly hard, so I’m going to cheat! Here are several classics I enjoy: 

• Richie’s Plank Experience is one of the most immediately impactful experiences for anyone new to VR. It never gets boring watching people play this game for the first (or third) time!
• Half-Life Alyx—although I haven’t yet finished the game, I can already tell this is undoubtedly a high-end VR experience!
• Raw Data showed me the level of quality and polish attainable even in the earliest days of VR gaming. This game always gets people excited about the graphic fidelity, level of action, and even storytelling potential of VR.

• The Wizards‘ various magic spells and incantations are incredible, and the scale of the enemies you fight makes the game feel even more epic!
• Karnage Chronicles is an underrated example of how immersive, detailed, challenging, yet fun VR RPGs can be.
• Beat Saber—it’s popular for a reason! Amazingly immersive, physically engaging, and highly polished, I still get addicted to this game even after playing it almost daily for years.

When you’re not working in XR, what do you enjoy doing?

I enjoy reading, especially web fiction, listening to music (I pride myself on my eclectic playlists of ‘high octane’ music featuring genres ranging from power metal to experimental rap and epic orchestral music), and learning random things. Recently, I have been into psychology, anthropology, political theory, and urban planning. I also enjoy watching video essays about unique games—hopefully, I’ll be playing and creating games of my own sooner than later. I think worldbuilding is a ton of fun; I’ve been working on my own multiverse for stories, games, shows, etc. But above all else, I love spending time walking, talking, or binge-watching with my partner. This week we celebrate our sixth anniversary!

What have you been reading lately? 

Nowadays, I read web fiction almost exclusively because regular books feel much too short for me. My current web fictions are: The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound (fantasy LitRPG), Deathworlders (first contact sci-fi), The Wandering Inn (dark-ish fantasy Isekai/LitRPG), This Quest is Bullsh#t (comedic fantasy LitRPG), Dungeon Crawler Carl (dark, first contact LitRPG), and I’m on hiatus from Practical Guide to Evil (high fantasy), Zombie Knight (urban fantasy), and Brennus (metahumans). 

With that said, I promise I don’t read LitRPGs or science fantasy exclusively! I recently finished Coiling Dragon and I Shall Seal the Heavens, which are both Xianxias (eastern high fantasy), as well as Worm (parahumans), Mother of Learning (fantasy time loop), and Binti (Afrofuturism). Also, I plan on getting back into books by Branden Sanderson, Cory Doctorow, and Ursula Le Guin. Finally, I’ve been reading (albeit slowly) nonfiction books like Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Design of Everyday Things, The Miracle Equation, Anarchy Works Primer, and Phenomenology of Spirit. 

What do you look forward to learning or accomplishing as part of the Futurus team? 

I’m super excited to help build and support human-centered design in the XR space. As I mentioned above, there are so many talented developers and artists in this space, but many fail to create fully accessible, intuitive, and inclusive experiences. There is a lot to learn about how we can bring decades of human-factor science, user experience design, and psychology into the XR space. Not to mention the many ethical considerations that will need to be at the forefront of any conversation regarding how we design entire realities for or with people!

Is there anything else you’d like to share? 

Despite my social awkwardness, I can be very talkative when given the space to nerd out about what I’m interested in, as you can probably guess.  

If you want to hear more from me, check out my other content!

• Thoughts of a TechnoWizard – Check out my (almost) daily audio journal if you’d like to hear my unrefined, raw ‘train(wreck) of thought.’   
• A More Delightful Future – Listen to interviews with incredible people designing emergent technologies.  
• Becoming a TechnoWizard: Learning Out Loud! – Learn with me as I share my thoughts, ideas, and questions while discovering more about the topics that interest me. 
• Path of a Trillionaire/TechnoWizard – Feel free to support me via Patreon! There is a LOT that I want to be able to do in the XR space and beyond, and I’d love to be able to afford the resources to do so.  
• The Journal of TechnoWizardry – Read my somewhat refined ideas on how to change the world for the better in the form of fairly long, somewhat bi-weekly newsletters.