Vishal Nayak

Bio

Born and raised in the Silicon Valley, I have always had a love of animation.

As a child of the 80's, I was fascinated with the animation in Saturday morning cartoons and in my Atari 2600 video games. As I grew older, the birth of the computer graphics industry blew my mind away. "Pixar" became a household name and their current movie was always my latest obsession.

I attended U.C. Berkeley for my undergraduate school and graduated with a Bachelors degree in Cognitive Science and a minor in Computer Science. My area of specialization in Cognitive Science was Computational Modeling, which dealt with artificial intelligence and the modeling of the human brain.

I had been searching for graduate programs that would enable me to pursue my true passion of computer graphics programming. When I found an intriguingly unique and interdisciplinary program called Media Arts and Technology at U.C. Santa Barbara, I knew that this was the one. My emphasis was multimedia engineering, which focused on multimedia software development.

The best quality of this program is its interdisciplinary nature. The students of MAT consist of media artists, electronic musicians, composers, engineers, and computer scientists. They work hand-in-hand with the Art, Music, Psychology, Computer Science, and Engineering departments. The eclectic nature of the program has truly taught me the power of working with students of different backgrounds. The diversity of the various perspectives, ideas, and skills brought to the table is extremely valuable to any project.

At Santa Barbara, I had the fortune of finding a game company called Playspace. The goal of this company, in a sentence, is to create games that get to know the player. The ideas of this company invigorated and inspired me and I worked with them for my second year. My masters thesis, which I completed and presented in June 2005, dealt with the emotional expressiveness of game characters through their body language.

I graduated from UCSB with an M.S. in multimedia engineering in June 2005.

The past two years, I worked for Definitive Studios in San Francisco. We developed and shipped the PSP title Traxxpad: Portable Studio. An unorthodox game, Traxxpad is actually more of an application that transforms the PSP into a powerful piece of music studio equipment. It allows users to compose music, create songs, and export those songs to share with friends. Traxxpad enables anyone with a PSP and $40 to produce music. Users no longer need thousands of dollars of music studio equipment. Most importantly, Traxxpad fosters creativity, and pushes the boundary of games.