PR

The Asian Cup was a massive project.
Season 1 covered Virtual Kick, Cheer Cam, and face painting across Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra, a week at each city.
Season 2 added a foosball table and a “Join the Team” activation on top of everything from Season 1, split and deployed across every major Australian city except Perth, running over 20 days.
One more person, Andy, got added to the team, and all of us — me, Marcus, David, Louis, Alex, and Ricky — got dispatched as the point person for our own assigned city.
Every solution except Cheer Cam was something brand-new we’d never built before, and Louis on backend, Ricky on design, Alex on video, and me on development — we all poured everything we had into it.
That’s when I touched Unity for the first time. Hook up a Kinect, catch the kick motion off it, send the ball flying, and have a goalkeeper block it — sounds simple, but it was brutal for a beginner.
Somehow, with a finished build in hand, the first stop was Canberra. Since it was the opening event, it got media coverage too, and the response was electric.
It was going great, really great — right around the time I was blowing out a satisfied victory-lap puff of a cigarette, feeling pretty pleased with myself, around 4pm, Marcus called me over.
“The kick isn’t working — either it doesn’t trigger at all, or it triggers randomly.”
“Huh?” What’s going on. I had Marcus operate it with a USB mini mouse as a stopgap, then went around back to check the Kinect’s depth map, and it was chaos.
Sunlight had started coming in. The inflatable dome had been set up with its entrance facing west, and as the sun went down, direct sunlight started streaming in through the entrance.
We’re screwed. I hadn’t even considered this. Panic. There wasn’t even time to beat myself up over why I hadn’t thought of it — I had to come up with a fix before the client noticed. Here was the plan: I wrote code to integrate a Panasonic motion sensor SDK into Unity (one that could work even in direct sunlight, though less accurate), and Marcus called the office — I don’t remember who exactly — and had them ship a Panasonic motion sensor to the airport in Canberra, then went and picked it up himself. The code was finished the following night, and the Panasonic-based solution started working, imperfectly but working, two days later.
God, that was terrifying. Lucky. Having that piece of hardware on hand was a stroke of luck from the heavens.
I decided to change direction completely and headed back to Sydney. The idea was this: all we really needed to track was foot movement, so did we even need a motion sensor at all? I just set up a webcam and did blob tracking on OpenCV, isolating just the feet with background removal.
It took a week. Canberra held up well enough in the meantime, and since the next stop was Customs House in Sydney, that’s where we ran the first real-world test. Success. Tim Cahill even showed up and played my Virtual Kick.
I went back to the office — now I had to build the foosball table and Join the Team.
The basic concept: mount a 55-inch TV face-up on top of the foosball table, flip a mouse upside down on each of the eight handle rods, convert the mouse movement into push/pull (Y-axis) and rotation (X-axis), and sync that with the handle rods inside the Unity game — I sketched that out and got to work.
Because it all came together so last-minute, and because it needed ongoing maintenance, we only ended up installing it in Brisbane, which was my city to manage. One way or another, after all the twists and turns, the Fan Fest wrapped up, and the company’s finances now qualified to sponsor the visa — we filed the application.
I needed IELTS. There was no time to study. After the Asian Cup, the NRL, the Cricket World Cup, and the Netball World Cup all lined up back to back, and I genuinely couldn’t find the time. Test day. I went with Miyoung. Miyoung had already been studying for IELTS for a while, trying to transfer into UTS’s Visual Communication program, so she gave me all kinds of advice. I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d done by the time I walked out. I barely scraped a 5.0. The visa application went in on July 6th. Then it was just waiting. No way to rush it. I shut up and waited. On October 16th, I was out at Randwick Racecourse working on a 360-degree camera shoot. Miyoung called me. It’s done. Yes, yes, yes.
Honestly, only that one day actually felt good. Because nothing much actually changed — same salary, same English, same apartment, same friends. The only thing that disappeared was that one unnameable, nagging anxiety.
Some time later, Miyoung’s stomach started hurting and we went to the ER at dawn. She spent two hours curled up in pain waiting, got a shot, got put on an IV drip, and we finally got discharged around dawn. On the way out, I pulled out my credit card to pay. Huh? They just told us to go. Why? I thought about it for a while — Medicare!!!!! Honestly, that was the day permanent residency really sank in, in a way I could actually feel.