When he was a kid, Mike Cuales was constantly disassembling and modifying his toys — often within minutes of receiving them.
One birthday, his parents gifted him a super cool remote-controlled car. Not an hour later, it was in pieces in the driveway of Cuales’ Long Island home, the motor augmented with extra batteries and ready for its stripped-down test drive.
“I watched it immediately catch fire,” Cuales said. “It was awesome.”
He doesn’t disagree with being likened to Toy Story’s Sid Phillips, the neighbor kid who reconstructed his toys into mutant hybrids frequently engaged in involuntary, explosive-laced guerilla warfare with each other.
“I was 100% Sid,” Cuales said. “Maybe a little less day-to-day evil.”
Sid eventually saw the error of his ways when the toys revealed their sentience and scared the living daylights out of him. But while Sid quit dismantling and terrorizing his toys and went on to become a garbage collector (he has a cameo in Toy Story 3), Cuales has never stopped deconstructing, figuring out and rebuilding things.
In fact, his drive to dismantle has shaped not just his hobbies but also his career.
What is your role with DELTA?
As DELTA’s Director of Digital Media Innovation, Cuales serves as a creative digital strategist and storyteller. He manages a diverse team of designers, developers and video producers in the creation of innovative multimedia learning experiences.
“My team has an incredibly diverse collection of skill sets, creative talent and technical wizardry,” Cuales explained. “We develop a broad range of digital content for NC State courses while also pushing the boundaries of innovation in educational tech.”
His many and varied projects with DELTA include the development and integration of new media platforms, defining a foundation for supporting VR classrooms and facilitating a campus-wide effort for producing virtual tours.
Cuales earned his Master’s in Industrial Design at the NC State College of Design and served for several years as an adjunct assistant professor in the Art + Design program, teaching animation and digital imaging. It was through fellow design faculty, back in 2002, that he heard about an open multimedia specialist position at DELTA.
“I took a chance with the job posting for this thing called DELTA and ran with it,” he said. Heading into his 24th year at NC State this fall, Cuales hasn’t looked back.
Fluent in multimedia design principles and educational technologies — particularly extended reality (XR) applications, an area in which he is considered an expert — and imbued with a restless drive to disassemble and build back better, Cuales has earned several promotions and numerous awards over the years.
“Mike is unafraid to throw spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks,” wrote Vice Provost Donna Petherbridge in her nomination of Cuales for the 2017 Provost’s Award for Excellence. “Mike is the person who says, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ Even if we don’t know in the moment how we are going to make something happen, he challenges us every day to move forward and figure it out.”
Not only did Cuales win the Provost’s Award, he was awarded the 2018 NC State University Award for Excellence — the most prestigious honor awarded to non-faculty university employees.
Eschewing his usual jeans and polo shirt, he even wore a suit for the recognition ceremony.
Cuales also represents DELTA as a frequent presenter at national XR and educational technology conferences, where he engages diverse audiences by demonstrating the impact of immersive educational experiences on learning. In short, he demonstrates how to make the inaccessible accessible.
What are some of your favorite DELTA projects?
Engaging with his creative team and partnering with faculty to develop immersive educational content is where Cuales shines.
DELTA began using VR to develop immersive learning experiences for students more than a decade ago by investing in hardware, software and staff to leverage newly available 360-degree video capture systems. Since then, DELTA has partnered with dozens of NC State faculty members on projects to improve student learning outcomes using XR.
Cuales has been involved with most of them in one way or another. He’s often the one in the back tinkering with the hardware.
Some of his favorite projects include:
- NC: State of Recreation, which makes outdoor recreation in North Carolina accessible to all through student-created immersive video
- Closing the Gap, a cross-generational immersive learning module taught through the Shelton Leadership Center
- eFIRE, which explored video techniques for capturing prescribed burns for in-the-field learning opportunities.
For the eFIRE project, the DELTA team literally stood inside fields of fire, recording prescribed burns with experts on site in the Sandhills.
And, as the desire for VR tours of brick-and-mortar and outdoor spaces continues to rise, Cuales and his team have risen to the occasion. Some of their recent work includes the College of Design 75th Anniversary tours; the Historic Russell School; the NC State Compost facility; and the Nanofabrication Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
“Many people don’t realize how small the skeleton crew is behind the scenes of major projects like these,” Cuales said. “My extremely competent and talented team is incredibly clever when it comes to marrying the traditional and the technical in these projects.”
What is your background?
Cuales was born in Long Island, New York, to parents who placed a high value on both formal education and experiential learning. His dad Hector, of Cuban and Curaçaoan ancestry, was a mechanically-inclined high school teacher who became a self-taught engineer, inventor and builder.
“My dad was the epitome of a ‘hands on’ guy,” Cuales said. “He had a nonstop work ethic that I’ve inherited.”
Though his dad passed away last year, Cuales still has his mom — who lives 300 yards from Cuales and is the only person who ever calls him Michael (generally when he’s in trouble, as moms are wont to do). Of Chinese and Jamaican ancestry, Mama Cuales recently celebrated her 91st birthday.
“Great multiethnic genetics,” Cuales said of his parents’ longevity. He also credits their genetics for his ability to stay slim despite a predilection for caloric fermented beverages.
When the family moved to North Carolina, Cuales stayed in New York to attend college at Hofstra University. After he finished his junior year, he decided to follow his family south because it was difficult to make ends meet at a private university on his own. He became a member of the Wolfpack, earning a degree in business management.
“After going broke and transferring to NC State, I couldn’t believe how much cheaper everything was,” he said. “My tuition at State was about the same amount as my beer money in New York.”
Not entirely sure what to do next, Cuales went straight to graduate school, where he worked as a research assistant for the College of Design and the Computer Science department on a grant sponsored by the National Science Foundation. After a brief stint at a software startup following graduation, he was back to higher education for good.
Cuales loves pursuing volunteer work with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the North Carolina Museum of Art and the City of Raleigh Museum. He is a passionate advocate for the potential of XR technologies to foster immersive multimedia learning experiences for people of all ages and lends his skills to K-12 programs to encourage young people to explore these innovative technologies.
In addition to his museum work, Cuales began consulting for a range of organizations, affording him the opportunity to crisscross the country producing and consulting on educational media. It was through these professional efforts that he was hired to lead tech workshops in various cities across the country for AT&T, courtesy of his friend and fellow museum enthusiast Ernie Flowers.
Flowers, a photographer, North Carolina native and former employee of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, had retired to Port Ludlow, Washington. During a visit with Flowers, the pair stumbled upon the Western Flyer, a sunken sardine boat that famously carried Nobel Prizewinning author John Steinbeck and his naturalist friend, Ed Ricketts, some 4,000 miles along the Gulf of California. It was a journey that would later be chronicled in Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.”
Cuales had his fancy 360-degree camera with him, and they thought it would be fun to shoot some footage of the wrecked ship dry-docked for restoration. That footage, too good not to use for something, became Inside the Western Flyer, a 360-degree film exploring the legacy of the boat by pairing historical facts and Steinbeck’s actual writings with cutting-edge VR technology.
Cuales and Flowers partnered on a second documentary about Ed Ricketts’ life that became a permanent digital exhibit at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.
“I still can’t believe the level of access we were granted to primary sources, how much we learned about Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’ lives and the impact that had on marine ecology that most people don’t know,” Cuales said.
He continued, “We were just two nerds coming together to do cool sh*t.” (“Sorry about the expletives,” he added. “I’m from New York.”)
Variations on this phrase — replacing cool with amazing, hilarious or downright idiotic — basically sum up Cuales’ many collaborations with a number of creatives, including many DELTA staff and NC State faculty, who have influenced his life’s path. “I’ve had the opportunity to work with some incredibly creative talent over the years,” he said.
There’s his friend Derrek, a nomad who aspired to travel the U.S. in his purple school bus and capture all 59 U.S. National Parks in 360-video. The pair partnered on building an immersive room experience, Step Into the World of Georgia O’Keeffe, for the North Carolina Museum of Art that took them to the stark landscapes around Santa Fe.
The pair also worked on a film for the annual NC Museum of Natural Sciences BugFest in 2017 that featured way too many up close shots of creepy bugs. Cuales’ colleague in Digital Learning and project co-creator Arthur Ernest also jumped in to assist.
And at the intersection of Cuales’ professional work and personal pursuits is the influence of NC State Design faculty member Patrick FitzGerald, a big name in the area of experimental interactive media.
“I’m lucky that I get to bring my authentic self to work and be able to do what I love at NC State every day,” Cuales said, “but truly, I’m also driven by my work outside the university.”
What do you do in your spare time?
As one might guess, Cuales spends a lot of his spare time doing exactly what he does at work: experimenting and producing immersive learning experiences for educational and nonprofit organizations using the latest XR technologies, often in partnership with like-minded tech nerds.
“My 9-to-5 self looks a lot like my 5-to-9 self,” he said. “I don’t sleep much.”
Despite this, he prioritizes family time. Cuales and his wife Angela have two kids, a dog and a dwindling flock of selfie-happy chickens on a large lot in Apex which in past years had been a gathering spot for an annual DELTA pig-pickin’.
Cuales met his wife, a nature educator, during his senior year at NC State at the campus bookstore where they both worked. “She became my manager at the bookstore,” he explained. “Then we got married and she’s been my manager ever since.”
DELTA longtimers may remember when Cuales took month-long trips to Kazakhstan, in 2005 and 2008, to adopt his son and daughter. The system in Kazakhstan, he and Angela found, was professional and rigorous.
“The adoption officials were evaluating us just as carefully as we were evaluating them,” he said. “We felt like we made a genuine connection there.”
Cuales recalls, somewhat ruefully, returning to work after adopting his daughter to find his cubicle decorated — no, drenched — in pink. Glitter, sparkles, feather boas, tissue paper, even pink flip flops adorned every surface.
“It was like they knew who she would become,” he said, calling out Petherbridge in particular. “Pink, glitter, sparkles, bling… it’s everything she aspires to.” Now a high school junior, she runs cross-country and is learning to drive. Her brother, 19, is taking a gap year.
This fall, Cuales is looking forward to the EDUCAUSE annual conference in San Antonio, Texas, as well as a side trip with colleagues to visit the University of Texas at Arlington. And he’s especially looking forward to visiting a prominent European VR company that develops unique technologies driving arena-scale VR-eSports competitions.
What is something people may not know about you?
One of Cuales’ retirement plans is to spend his days taking apart and rebuilding old vehicles.
His current project car is a ‘69 Chevy Blazer inherited from his mother-in-law. When it quit running, Cuales spent 5 years taking it apart. With the aid of dozens of YouTube videos, he rebuilt the automatic transmission. It was successful — for a while.
“It did run…it doesn’t now,” Cuales explained, undaunted. “It’s a multi-decade project.”
Tinkering with cars and trucks appeals to Cuales because it obliges him to use his hands, to get in there and figure things out — as his dad would have done. “It’s a nice balance to the digital work I’m doing now,” he said. “Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from the computers and rebuild a carburetor.”
His interest is not limited to large engines. If the lawnmower malfunctions or if the toaster fizzles out, he’s on it. “I have this weird obsession with being the guy who still knows how to do this stuff,” he laughed. “Guess I’m old school.”
The Sid in him lives on.
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