Brad MartinFor the past twelve years, I’ve explored one persistent question: how do new capabilities become so useful they disappear into everyday life?
Every project has been an experiment. Not a test to prove technology, but testing every unnecessary layer of complexity that steals time, attention, creativity, confidence, and joy from the people living inside it.
Across healthcare, construction, robotics, entertainment, and the built environment, I’ve been searching for the moments where complexity quietly disappears and people are free to spend more time creating, exploring, connecting, and living.
Technology is successful when it feels like magic and people begin noticing what it gives back to their lives.
The industries have changed. The question never has.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-ClarkeEmerging technologies are most interesting when pointed at problems that still feel unresolved. Each exploration begins with a question about how something could work better. A technology offers a new way to test it. Projects become experiments and places to encounter real people, real constraints, and evidence that changes what I believe. As answers add value, the investigation continues and technologies come together.
“What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?”
-HammingDigital twins as shared environments for understanding and improving the physical world.
Physical-world decisions are rarely limited by information—they’re limited by fragmented understanding. Digital twins create a shared environment where people, systems, and intelligent agents can reason together before expensive decisions become permanent.
Many digital twins stop at visualization. They become beautiful models that people admire but rarely use because they don’t improve decisions, simplify workflows, or build organizational trust.
Across Universal Studios, Looking Glass, MiTek, WWT, and enterprise clients, I’ve explored digital twins as environments for design review, operational planning, AI workflows, construction coordination, simulation, and executive decision-making.
Digital twins are evolving from visual representations into computational environments where AI, robotics, simulation, and human expertise continuously interact.
A digital twin shouldn’t be another application people use. It should become the operating layer through which organizations understand and improve the physical world.
What happens when a digital twin begins reasoning alongside humans instead of simply representing reality?
This is my current thinking based on the evidence I’ve seen so far. I expect parts of it to be wrong, and I’ll update these notes as I learn.
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
-ClarkeSome parts of life still carry friction we’ve simply learned to accept. Others are blindly jumping to capabilities that didn’t exist until recently. As technology changes what is possible, old assumptions become worth questioning and entirely new possibilities begin to appear. These are questions I keep returning to, where emerging tools might remove an old constraint, reveal a new path, or help the physical world evolve around the people living in it. I want to remove constraints of the past and open up possibilities of the future, making them work together seamlessly and with purpose.
I’m interested in what should work differently and what could exist next. I’ve worked where new technologies meet the physical world: buildings, places, machines, and the experiences that happen around them. I’m drawn to problems where the old way no longer makes sense, and to possibilities that didn’t exist until recently.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
-KaySometimes that means removing friction from systems and workflows people have learned to live with.
Other times it means combining emerging technologies to create entirely new ways to understand, build, operate, learn, or experience the world around us.
The technologies keep changing. That’s part of what makes the work interesting. AI, simulation, robotics, spatial computing, and digital twins each reveal different possibilities; together, they can change what we assume is possible.
I keep working in that space: questioning inherited constraints, experimenting with what comes next, and turning new capabilities into things that genuinely improve how people live, work, create, and experience the physical world.
Another Reality Studio started twelve years ago with a simple curiosity: what happens when emerging technologies leave the demo and meet real problems? That question took me into places I never expected, to construction sites, hospitals, factories, stadiums, theme parks, classrooms, and complex infrastructure. The industries changed and so did the technology. What started with visualization and immersive computing grew into simulation, digital twins, synthetic data, AI, and robotics. Looking Glass grew from what those experiments kept revealing: the physical world is full of valuable information, but understanding it is still unnecessarily difficult. Models, systems, sensors, people, and decisions remain disconnected when they increasingly don’t have to be. I didn’t set out to work across so many technologies or industries. I kept following the same question into wherever it led next.
I am most interested in the space before the answer is obvious, where a problem is still strange enough to require curiosity and disciplined enough to require evidence.
How can emerging technologies remove friction from everyday life so people can spend more time doing what makes them human?
