Dr Roy Davies
Dr Roy C. Davies has been in the VR industry since the early days when the computers used were at least as big as large refrigerators and made by SGI, or if your budget didn't stretch that far, running VR applications on a PC meant a 200 Mhz Pentium running MSDOS. Starting as a Computer Scientist in Rehabilitation Robotics at Auckland University, he then spent 12 years at the University of Lund in Sweden in the department of Ergonomics, first to get a PhD in the Usability of Virtual Reality for Participatory Design and Brain Injury Rehabilitation, and then starting and running the multi-disciplinary VR centre, the Flexible Reality Centre which ties together 25 departments across the campus and has four large VR labs. On return to New Zealand Roy set up Nextspace, a collaboration between the hugely successful NZ- originated company, Right Hemisphere, and the government to build up the 3D-VR industry for New Zealand.
MindKits.co.nz was established in January 2009 by Tim Carr after working
away Sundays tinkering on his own projects. Tim decided it was time there
was a way that people could buy 'robot stuff' locally and someone was
willing to build community to allow average people to get started with
robotics and tinkering - both creatively and technically.
Tim's passionate to see new people explore robotics and to make it dead easy
for anyone to have a go at exploring the Kiwi way of 'Tinkering'.