I build the interactive layer of installations.

I'm Mike Edwards. I trained as a designer, and now I work as an engineer. rich|⁠strange is my practice.

A lot of my time goes into work nobody photographs, like accessibility for visitors with vision, hearing, and movement disabilities, the hand-over pack, the tests, and how a system comes back after a power cut. I learned some of that at the American Museum of Natural History, where I helped design exhibits and kept older ones running, both in the museum and on tour with partner institutions around the world. I want an installation to keep working long after I've handed it over.

I keep coming back to mixed reality. In 2011 it was a motion-tracked projection floor where students learned by moving, and in 2015–16 an augmented-reality app that pins photos to the places they were taken. Since then I've built browser VR and Unity AR prototypes for healthcare clients under NDA (2018, 2023), and now I'm working on projection mapping and calibration in Godot.

I'll be posting field notes on this work soon. The lab has the tools I've built for it.