AKP the Reality Engineer

Immersed in my first Virtual Reality experience, Virtual Seattle, 1990

Aaron Kaleva Pulkka

Biography:

Since first playing Pong at a pizza parlor at the tender age of five, I have been addicted to video games. There was something about flying those little blips around a television screen that demanded attention and screamed of unlimited potential. During the mid-1970s video games were few and far between, so it was hard to get enough access to them. In the meantime I keep myself busy with grade school.

Playing Pong was probably the first major turning point in my life -- the second followed closely behind. One partially overcast Seattle afternoon in 1977, I waited a few hours in line to get a front row seat for Star Wars. Like many people of my generation, that film changed my life. My interest in science fact and fiction soared. My interest in robotics, that was sparked by an earlier trip to Disneyland, burst into a fixation and my interest in computer graphics, especially for video games, became a driving force.

It would be a few more years before I got consistent access to computers to write games on...

In 1984, I attended North Seattle Community College , where I became Student Body President and shifted my focus from being an Actor to an Electrical Engineer. Upon arriving at the University of Washington I chose the Computer Engineering specialty (within which I focused on Robotics), which was subsequently moved to the Computer Science department. I took a brief break from my undergraduate education to work as a Software Engineer for Tektronix . I then became enamored with the technology known as Virtual Reality and began volunteering for the Human Interface Technology Laboratory . When I completed my Bachelor of Science, this turned into a Research Associate position as I transitioned into the graduate Computer Science program. I have recently relocated, from Seattle to Los Angeles , to put my Master of Science in Computer Science degree to use as a Show Designer and Senior Programmer for the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio.

for now, here is some information about my family:

• Tori Pulkka, my wife
• Zoie Pulkka, my daughter
• Meriko Gessling, my mother-in-law

My honeymoon at Tokyo Disneyland, 1994

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