Matt Hudson
Location-based XR Engineer · Digital Heritage · AI Integration
Tokyo, Japan · cosmonaut.mech@googlemail.com
x.com/mechpil0t · youtube.com/@BitCrushingCog · linkedin.com/in/matt-hudson-462b4b6a · github.com/mechpil0t
Location-based XR · Digital Heritage · AI Integration
Matt
Hudson
Location-based XR engineer. Placing digital content where it belongs — anchored to the real world, rooted in place and history.
01 — Selected Work
Digital Heritage & Historic Media
Returning demolished buildings and lost media to the exact places they came from — photogrammetry, visual positioning, runtime model loading and segmentation. "Ghosts of old Tokyo" overlaid on the live streetscape.
AR Navigation & AI Tours
LLM-driven guides that know where you're standing, paired with geospatial wayfinding that carries you from outdoors to indoors.
AR Authoring & Tooling
Pipelines and tools for building and placing AR content — hybrid authoring workflows, live places data, and social features.
World-Scale AR Games & Physics
Characters, monsters and game physics colliding with real-world geometry streamed from the Google Geospatial API — turning whole city blocks into a playable stage.
02 — About
I'm an XR engineer with 10 years of experience working in XR in Tokyo, with a focus on location-based augmented reality.
My core interest is digital heritage: using VPS and spatial anchoring to return historical content to the exact locations it came from. Old buildings, lost streetscapes, vanished spaces — placed back where they once stood, accessible through a phone or headset. I've been building prototypes in this space for years, and it's still the problem I find most worth solving.
Beyond heritage, I've worked extensively with AI-driven XR — integrating LLMs, generative media, AI translation, and conversational agents into spatial applications. AI tour guides that know where you're standing. Chatbots that respond to your physical context. Real-time translation layered into shared AR spaces.
On the web side, I'm drawn to map-based experiences — visualizing and interacting with location-based data on the map itself, not just through a camera. In addition, I build spatial and interactive experiences with Three.js, and I develop Snapchat Lenses for location-aware social AR.
03 — Expertise
001
Location-based AR
Visual positioning systems that anchor digital content to precise real-world coordinates. The core of most of my work — making AR that knows exactly where it is.
002
Digital Heritage
Returning historical content to the places it came from. Lost buildings, vanished streetscapes — placed back on the map using photogrammetry, VPS, and spatial anchoring.
003
AI in XR
Integrating AI into spatial applications — conversational agents that know your location, generative media, real-time translation, and AI tour guides that respond to physical context.
004
Web & Lens XR
Spatial and interactive experiences for the web using Three.js, and location-aware Snapchat Lenses for social AR. XR that lives in the browser or the camera roll.
005
VR Development
A decade of experience developing VR across Meta Quest, HTC Vive, and PC-VR hardware.
006
Mapping & Geospatial
Fusing digital maps with AR, using Google's photorealistic 3D Tiles combined with AR to sync content from map to real space.
04 — Links