Stories behind the work

Vega: You're inside the world of Sonny Cirasuolo. Every island out there is a chapter of his life.

Juno: The stadium? Real job. The memorial? Real story. The jellyfish? Okay, the jellyfish are just jellyfish.

Vega: Fly the tour, or take the rocket and get lost. Both are correct.

Juno: And keep your radio on, pilot — we know things about this guy.

Vega: Time for The Plate Talk. Sonny's dad coached him his whole life. Every game. On the field and off.

Juno: And Coach C had ONE rule.

Vega: You don't walk up to the plate thinking don't strike out. You walk up seeing the line drive. Because with don't strike out... the picture in your head is still a strikeout.

Juno: He brings that same confidence to his work: picture what you want to build, then work out how to get there.

Vega: Picture the hit, pilot. Back to the music.

Juno: Fun fact! Sonny's favorite word, since he could talk... was why.

Vega: Why, why, why. All day. Most kids grow out of it.

Juno: He turned it into a career! The man interrogated reality until it gave him a job.

Vega: Still asking. That's the whole secret, honestly.

Vega: Picture this. Youth baseball tournament, Hershey, Pennsylvania. Kid rides out through farm country, sees a hospital in the middle of nowhere, and says: huh. Weird spot for a beautiful hospital.

Juno: FORESHADOWING, pilot.

Vega: First game. Ball hit over his shoulder. He runs back, lays out — full extension, midair catch —

Juno: — makes the catch! Tucks the arms! And CRACK. Collarbone.

Vega: He ended up in that exact hospital.

Juno: Center fielders, man. They see everything coming except their own future.

Juno: Studio cat update! Cookie knocked the transmitter off the desk again.

Vega: Cookie came from a Craigslist ad in New Jersey. Sonny drove all that way, and the guy hands him a box so light... he thought it was empty.

Juno: NOT empty! Tiny kitten! Eyes so blue!

Vega: Little guy was so young Sonny had to teach him to eat solid food. Hand-raised him.

Juno: The eyes turned brown, the kitten turned into the most loving animal alive, and now he wakes the boss up every single morning.

Vega: Every morning. No snooze button on a cat.

Vega: Now Truffle. Truffle's the elder stateswoman. She picked Sonny, not the other way around.

Juno: Followed him around the house! Sat BEHIND his monitor while he coded!

Vega: For years, every project you've flown past out there... had a small gray supervisor sleeping behind the screen.

Juno: Every line of this world? Cat-reviewed.

Vega: Quality assurance you can't hire.

Juno: Okay okay okay — the ROAD TRIP. You need the numbers.

Vega: Eleven thousand, seven hundred and one miles.

Juno: SEVENTEEN national parks! Rushmore! Yellowstone! Glacier! Banff! Crater Lake! The Redwoods! All of Highway 1! Down to Tijuana, up through Joshua Tree, Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Arches!

Vega: In a Tesla Model 3 he loves a completely normal amount.

Juno: And he SCANNED his way across the country. Splats everywhere. The man cannot pass a rock formation without capturing it.

Vega: America, backed up. Just in case.

Vega: The road trip gets better. First two weeks — him, his best friend Balti, and Balti's mom, driving to Vancouver.

Juno: Balti moves to Vancouver, mom flies home... and Sonny just keeps going. A month and a half. Solo.

Vega: One man, one Tesla, and — this is real — almost three terabytes of 360 video he still hasn't rendered.

Juno: There is an entire SECOND road trip sitting on his hard drives, pilot!

Vega: Somewhere in that data... is a better version of this radio station.

Juno: Regional food debate time! Sonny is from Whitesboro, New York. Utica area. Which means —

Vega: Chicken riggies. Tomato pie. Half-moons. This is not a discussion.

Juno: He says — direct quote, cleaned up for radio — there is no better regional pasta dish than riggies. Not a chance.

Vega: It's a hill. He dies on it. We die with him.

Juno: Also four REAL seasons! Apple picking! The man would trade summer for a second autumn, straight up.

Vega: Respect the fall. Back to the music.

Vega: Here's the mantra the man runs on. It's not that he can't fail. It's that he never rehearses it.

Juno: He starts with a clear picture of what he wants to make, then stays open to what he learns along the way.

Vega: The things he can't do yet... he files under not-yet. Never under can't.

Juno: And when he needs a break, he takes one. Fresh eyes are part of the process.

Vega: Picture the hit. That's the whole religion. Back to the music.

Juno: Sonny is the oldest of FIVE. Isabella, Angelina, Giuliana, Mariano — and him at the front of the line.

Vega: Which makes him the designated family tech support. Forever. Unpaid. On call.

Juno: And here's the sweet part — his family still doesn't totally understand what he does.

Vega: They don't have to. That's what we're for. Hi, Cirasuolos. Your boy builds worlds.

Juno: Sunday dinner at grandma's, though? He understands THAT perfectly.

Juno: Pilot. PILOT. Have you seen the dolphin?

Vega: Fastest thing in the sky. Does the whole world in under a minute.

Juno: Word around the studio is... if you can actually TAG it — and nobody tags it — something very colorful happens to your exhaust.

Vega: We don't make the rules. We just leak them.

Vega: Public service announcement. Do not fly through the jellyfish tentacles.

Juno: Absolutely do not fly through the jellyfish tentacles. Especially not all three. Especially not FAST.

Vega: You'd get zapped. You might even get... armed.

Juno: And whatever you do, don't go looking for the floating music notes. You might unlock better songs than these.

Vega: ...Juno.

Juno: I said what I said!

Juno: Studio inventory: three espresso machines and a refrigerator that is ONLY Celsius.

Vega: The boss runs on espresso and Celsius. That's not a bit. That's the org chart.

Juno: I drink it in solidarity! This one's empty!

Vega: She's four deep, pilot. Pray for the soundboard.

Vega: Off the clock, the man's a Yankees guy. Center fielder's eyes never leave the outfield.

Juno: And these days it's golf and pickleball! He will beat you at pickleball and be extremely gracious about it!

Vega: The grace is the worst part.

Vega: Sonny enjoys the people side of building as much as the technical challenge.

Juno: The man's whole thing — his actual superpower — is the blend: getting things done, building cool stuff... and connecting people.

Vega: Look at this place. He didn't build a portfolio. He built somewhere for you to BE.

Juno: And then he gave it multiplayer so you wouldn't be lonely!

Vega: Bring a friend next time. Back to the music.

Vega: Ninety-one five, The Splat Dive. Everything you're looking at right now — every island, every tree, this entire world — is made of gaussian splats.

Juno: Think of a photograph that exploded into a hundred thousand soap bubbles of color, and every bubble knows exactly where to float.

Vega: Photos go in. A walkable, photorealistic space comes out.

Juno: And the reason you can watch stories made of them in a browser, on your phone, with no app... is the company this station is about.

Vega: StorySplat. Founded by the guy whose world you're flying through.

Vega: The origin story. His old professor — Dan Pacheco, the same one who changed his life at Syracuse — comes to him with an idea.

Juno: Remember the immersive stories you built in school? Could we do that... with gaussian splats? A camera fly-through?

Vega: And Sonny says — of course we can. Builds a demo. That night.

Juno: And here's the crazy timing — that was the same night the first real thinking A.I. model dropped. So suddenly there's a little generator making the HTML too.

Vega: He posts it on Reddit. Reddit loses its mind.

Juno: And it just... snowballed. Kept going and going and —

Vega: — and now museums, journalists, and artists use it. From one favor for a professor.

Vega: If you learn one thing from this station, make it this. Sonny gave a whole conference talk on it.

Juno: You need a WHY for 3D! If you're doing 3D just to do 3D — it's a gimmick, and nobody's gonna like it!

Vega: The why can be presence — taking somebody to a place or a time they could never go.

Juno: Or making space legible — using the third dimension as an actual new axis of information. Stories you literally could not tell on a flat screen.

Vega: No why, no 3D. That rule built everything you're flying through.

Juno: The use-case tour! Museums putting entire exhibits online — walk the gallery from your couch!

Vega: Artists capturing their studios as they change, month by month. A time machine for process.

Juno: Journalists preserving places that matter — while they still stand.

Vega: Real estate, tourism, education... anywhere you-had-to-be-there used to be the problem.

Juno: That's the whole point, right? You had to be there... is now a button.

Vega: Here's what gets me. He first touched photogrammetry in high school — college engineering courses, 3D printers, scanning things as a kid who couldn't stop building.

Juno: Woodworking! Welding! Science Olympiad! The most hands-on child in New York State!

Vega: A decade later, the same instinct — capture the real world, hand it to people — became a company.

Juno: And the mission stayed the same the whole way: this tech used to belong to technical people ONLY. He wants everyone to have it.

Vega: Not making the impossible possible. Making the possible... available. That's the dive.

Juno: Oh — and pilot? You don't have to take our word for ANY of this.

Vega: Two of the portals out there lead into real captures. A Donatello sculpture. A Mardi Gras dragon float.

Juno: Fly the rocket through a ring and you're standing inside a scan. That's StorySplat, live, right here in the station's backyard.

Vega: Careful coming back out. The whale has the right of way.

Vega: Ninety-four seven. The Newsroom. Every career has a sliding-door moment. His was a course catalog.

Juno: Syracuse University. Kid comes in as a mechanical engineer, switches to advertising and policy studies — his words, a wild ride of majors — and then goes looking for a FUN class.

Vega: Virtual Reality Storytelling. Professor Dan Pacheco.

Juno: And he strikes gold. Direct quote: everything I've been doing is based off that one class.

Vega: Pacheco sees the energy, takes him under his wing, makes him a research assistant. The rest of this station... is what happened next.

Vega: Visualizing 81. Syracuse's 15th Ward — a predominantly Black neighborhood — was cut apart by Interstate 81. The NewsHouse set out to document what was lost, and what remained.

Juno: Sonny was the visual and XR lead. And his biggest contribution was preservation — the historic People's AME Zion Church, fallen into disrepair.

Vega: He photographed it inch by inch and rebuilt it as a photorealistic model. Photogrammetry as memory work.

Juno: The project won national awards. But that's not why it matters.

Vega: It matters because some places deserve to outlast their buildings. Out in this world, there's a viaduct with orbs of light drifting under it. That's this story.

Juno: Yahoo Sports! Straight out of college! Augmented reality and video producer — and the man ships FORTY-FIVE-PLUS interactive projects!

Vega: 3D maps of the Tokyo Olympics. NBA shot charts rising off the court like skylines — you can find one out by the Yahoo island right now.

Juno: A baseball-card grading game! A guess-the-sign game! Buddy the Elf's costume in 3D!

Vega: Sports, news, life, finance, entertainment. If Yahoo had a section, he put something interactive in it.

Juno: And two words, pilot: chicken. sandwiches.

Vega: ...We'll get there.

Vega: 2022 Winter Olympics. Sonny pitches the sport everybody talks about every four years and nobody understands.

Juno: CURLING, baby!

Vega: Here's the beautiful part. The Utica Curling Club was just down the road from his childhood home in Whitesboro.

Juno: So the local kid partners with the local club, interviews a physicist about stone spin, and builds 3D visualizations of the pebbled ice, the sweeping, the whole enigma!

Vega: His one-line review after all that research: turns out, it's not as simple as it looks.

Juno: Nothing ever is! That's why he likes it!

Vega: Double feature. First: for Star Wars' anniversary, Yahoo wanted the actual film sets — the Lars homestead, Mos Espa. Real places, in Tunisia.

Juno: Sonny stitched THOUSANDS of photos into walkable 3D replicas, then built the whole consumer experience around them — the cameras, the interactions, everything you touched.

Vega: And second... the fried-chicken wars. Yahoo wanted to settle which fast-food chicken sandwich was best.

Juno: So this man — as his JOB — went and photogrammetry-scanned SIX different chicken sandwiches.

Vega: Every sandwich in that story was his scan.

Juno: Range, pilot. From Tatooine to the drive-through. That's range.

Vega: Some stories earn the third dimension. January 6th. The war in Ukraine.

Juno: For both, the team built 3D reconstructions — maps and scenes that let readers understand where things happened, how close, how fast. Things a paragraph can't hold.

Vega: That's his phrase for it — making space legible. Giving information a dimension it needed.

Juno: It's the same why-doctrine from the other station... applied where the stakes are real.

Vega: XR isn't just wonder. Sometimes it's evidence.

Juno: Breaking on the Newsroom — StorySplat is LIVE! Sonny's own platform for building and sharing gaussian-splat stories, out in the world for creators everywhere.

Vega: The tool behind the medium. You're flying through splats right now — StorySplat is how anyone else makes their own.

Juno: Founder, builder, and first user. The man made the camera AND the darkroom!

Juno: Sports desk! Thousands of phones in one stadium, all seeing the SAME thing, live, at once!

Vega: At ARound, Sonny built shared augmented reality for the Minnesota Twins, Minnesota United, the Oakland Athletics — carnival games played by an entire crowd.

Juno: He turned a full house into one giant game controller. Fly low over the stadium island out there — that's this.

Vega: From the health desk. Hidden Realities — where Sonny is CTO and co-founder — has its flagship live in children's hospitals. It's called Heart Full of Magic.

Juno: Kids scan posters in the hallway, and games bloom right out of the walls! The whole point is getting them up, moving, playing.

Vega: Augmented reality as medicine for the spirit. Wonder, where wonder is scarce.

Vega: And from the food desk, we can now confirm: for Yahoo, Sonny photogrammetry-scanned six — six — competing fried-chicken sandwiches.

Juno: As his JOB! Every sandwich in that story, a real 3D scan!

Vega: No word on which one won. The models, however, were immaculate.

Juno: Journalism, pilot. Delicious, greasy journalism.

Vega: This last one, I'll do alone. Cleared by Fire, from The New Yorker — an interactive investigation into the killings in Haditha, Iraq. Out in this world, it's the quiet courtyard. The candlelit memorial.

Vega: Sonny worked on development and 3D modelling. Getting a story like this onto a phone means paying attention to scene size, rendering, and memory.

Vega: He helped prepare the 3D scenes for the web. The goal was to let readers explore the reporting on their own devices, without the technology getting in the way.

Vega: He's credited as a developer and 3D modeller. The story shipped. People saw it. On the device in their pocket, the way accountability should travel.

Vega: That's the job sometimes. Not the byline. The reason it works.

Vega: ...And this story isn't finished. Stay with me.

Vega: This just in to the Newsroom. That New Yorker investigation — Cleared by Fire — has been honored with a Peabody Award.

Juno: A Peabody, recognizing journalism in the public interest and the work of the whole production team.

Vega: Sonny contributed development and 3D modeling as part of that team, helping readers explore the reporting on the web.

Juno: A project he is proud to have been part of.

Vega: One-oh-one three, Builder's Band. After Yahoo, a startup called NOWHERE — a place to meet in a browser, with real faces in floating video pods. So you could see the people you were talking to.

Juno: His quote about it is the best: everything's spatial audio, voices bouncing through the space — the closest I've felt to talking to somebody in real life.

Vega: He built the worlds themselves. Not 3D models — 3D places people walked around in.

Juno: Concerts! Conferences! A 3D beach party! And the connection came through Syracuse too — a professor introduced him to NOWHERE's co-founder. The network, working.

Vega: That rooftop stage out there marks that chapter. A place to meet, catch a show, hang out. Fly over and take a look.

Juno: Okay, this one's fun. Stadium-scale augmented reality. Thousands of phones, all seeing the SAME thing, live, at once.

Vega: At ARound he built for the Minnesota Twins, Minnesota United, the Athletics.

Juno: Carnival games on the field! Throw balls at targets with the entire stadium! A batter-up game where you swing for the actual fences!

Vega: The stadium island out there — packed stands, fans throwing light onto the pitch? That's this. Fly low over it sometime.

Juno: Shared AR for a full house. The man made phones a crowd sport.

Vega: Now the one he co-founded. Hidden Realities. Sonny's the CTO; his co-founder is Dana Ware — formerly creative director at The Void, the people who defined location-based VR.

Juno: And their flagship says everything about them. It's called Heart Full of Magic.

Vega: Augmented reality in children's hospitals. Posters through the halls — kids scan them, and games bloom out of the walls.

Juno: The whole design goal is getting kids OUT of bed. Moving. Playing. Being kids, in a place that makes that hard.

Vega: Moments of wonder, where wonder is scarce. That's Hidden Realities.

Juno: Best why on the whole dial, honestly.

Juno: Pilot, has it sunk in yet that this WORLD is also one of his projects?

Vega: The rocket you're flying was his name a minute ago. The radio you're hearing... also him. We're aware of the situation. We've made peace with it.

Juno: There's a race course out west! An armada! A wave arena! A runner gate! There's a SQUID out past the wall that we're pretty sure can't hear us!

Vega: Every easter egg took him a real night of work, and he hid them anyway. That tells you more than any bio.

Juno: Built like a game. Reads like a life.

Vega: Here's the loop the man lives. See something real. Ask why. Capture it. Hand it to people.

Juno: He scans EVERYWHERE he goes — vacations, road trips, restaurants, probably this studio while we weren't looking.

Vega: Espresso in, worlds out.

Juno: Getting things done. Building cool stuff. Connecting people. The blend!

Vega: That's Builder's Band. Stay on the dial, pilot.

Juno: Oh! Fresh arrival on the pad!

Vega: Welcome, pilot. That name in lights is your host of hosts... and your ride. Scroll on, or tap it and see what happens.

Vega: That's him, by the way. The floating scan. Sonny Cirasuolo — captured in full 3D, because of course he scanned himself.

Juno: XR engineer, creative technologist, founder... and Utica's finest export since the half-moon cookie.

Vega: You're passing the range now — every peak on that ridge is a job he climbed. Yahoo to NOWHERE to The New Yorker to founding his own.

Juno: The gold trail marks the path! Résumés should ALWAYS be mountains.

Juno: Follow that golden path! This is StorySplat — the one he founded!

Vega: Browser-based gaussian splat storytelling. Museums, journalists, artists. Those four screens around the courtyard? Examples of StorySplat scenes. That's the pitch, pilot — no slides needed.

Vega: The glowing glade here is Hidden Realities — he's CTO and co-founder, alongside Dana Ware, ex of The Void.

Juno: Heart Full of Magic! Augmented reality in children's hospitals — kids scan posters and games bloom off the walls. Gets them out of bed and playing.

Vega: Best why on the dial. We've said it before.

Juno: STADIUM! Full house! This is the ARound chapter — shared augmented reality for thousands of fans at once!

Vega: Twins. Minnesota United. The A's. Carnival games played on the actual field, from the stands. He made the phone a crowd sport.

Vega: Quiet one here, pilot. The candlelit courtyard — Cleared by Fire, The New Yorker. He worked on development and 3D modelling with the team behind the interactive documentary.

Vega: That rooftop venue — that's NOWHERE. Shared spaces in a browser, with live video pods and spatial audio.

Juno: His words: the closest he's ever felt to talking to somebody in real life. He built the places people met in.

Juno: Yahoo island! Forty-five-plus interactive projects — shot charts, Olympics maps, Star Wars sets scanned in Tunisia!

Vega: First job out of Syracuse. The screens floating around here show several of those projects.

Vega: The garden. These sculptures are inspired by his captures — photogrammetry and splats from everywhere he goes. The man scans like other people take snapshots.

Juno: Seventeen national parks are sitting on his hard drives waiting to join this place!

Vega: The viaduct with the drifting orbs — Visualizing 81. Student project, national awards. Syracuse's 15th Ward, documented before more of it disappeared.

Juno: He photographed a whole historic church into 3D for this one. Preservation, as journalism.

Vega: End of the line, pilot — the beacon. If anything you flew through tonight is the kind of thing you need built...

Juno: The man is EXTREMELY reachable! Links right there under the beacon! Tell him the radio sent you!