London and Florida, 11 August 2023 – Hadean has appointed Royal O’Brien as Global Chief Technology Officer. Based in Florida, US, O’Brien will be responsible for driving the continued innovation and expansion of Hadean’s spatial computing technology across its commercial and defence and enterprise divisions globally and into the US market.
In his 30-year career as an executive, O’Brien has been a thought leader and architect of the development, marketing, and distribution of games, middleware, and cloud scaling solutions. Most recently, O’Brien was General Manager of Digital Media and Games at the Linux Foundation, providing strategic direction for the Games and Metaverse-related industries. Bringing together multiple major studios, sponsors, and engineering teams, he established the process, funding, operation, and foundation for the Open 3D Engine through the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) and Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF).
Craig Beddis, Hadean CEO, said: “We’ve been lucky enough to work with Royal for some time, so I couldn’t be more excited to have someone of his calibre join Hadean. Royal is one of the pioneers and driving forces of an open, interoperable metaverse and his vision of what the true metaverse should be aligns perfectly with our own. He is an incredible addition to our team and will be instrumental in shaping how Hadean continues to bridge the gap between physical and virtual worlds in a way that is collaborative, meaningful, and valuable for everyone.”
“I’m excited to join Hadean in such an exciting next chapter for the company,” said Royal O’Brien, Hadean’s Global CTO. “Throughout my career, I’ve worked to shape the future of tomorrow by removing restrictions of scale and possibility and driving new levels of creativity and velocity. Hadean’s technology is enabling this shift in the most powerful way and together we will work to change the future of how we collectively experience our world. A key part of that will be collaboration with some exciting players to bring these pieces together as we transform our shared vision for the metaverse into reality.”
Royal O’Brien served as a US Marine and is a business and engineering veteran with more than 30 years of experience in the corporate enterprise and video game industries. He has founded and exited multiple companies helping to service and licence technologies to various Fortune 500 companies.
Before becoming General Manager of Digital Media and Games at the Linux Foundation, O’Brien was the Game Tech Chief Evangelist at Amazon. There he worked directly with senior executive leaders at AWS to create the overall vision and strategy to define the O3DE open source project, plan, licence, timeline, and features in the preview and final release. Before Amazon, he created multiple patents in the video, audio, and digital asset distribution space as a senior engineer and executive responsible for corporate development, VC funding, and enterprise negotiations, focused on strategic marketing initiatives.
About Hadean
Founded in 2015, Hadean is a spatial computing company bridging physical and virtual worlds with distributed, scalable cloud technology solutions. Hadean’s technology and creative expertise drives interoperability and security in connected virtual experiences, serving customers in the enterprise, commercial, gaming and government sectors. To date, Hadean has worked with organisations such as Microsoft, Minecraft, Epic Games, Sony, Youre, Pixelynx, Francis Crick, CAE, BAE and Thales. www.hadean.com