Nicholas Herring has been involved with technology from a very early age resulting is his passion for developing software. Nicholas grew up in the age of multiplayer Doom over IPX with parallel cables and has been addicted since. Receiving a 486DX at the age of seven, Nicholas slowly learned batch scripting and BASIC. During the advent of Windows 95, C++ became the next challenge while building small mutators for Quake 2. Once Nicholas figured out how to create a machine gun rocket launcher that eventually crashed the server, he was engulfed in the Modding community. Absorbing every facet of development, the next goal became to learn the process and structure of creating virtual worlds for players. During this time Nicholas picked up OpenGL and C++ in greater depth in order to understand the many pieces of these worlds. His modding career was under the radar until his collegiate expeditions.

    While in college, Nicholas was introduced to the world of managed code. Through his peers, he was exposed to higher level concepts of development pipelines such as Source Control Management, Defect Tracking, and Knowledge Bases. This is where Nicholas found his passion: Architecture. Realizing that the concept of building a game engine from scratch was just reinventing the wheel, Nicholas focused more on the high level concepts of architecture based on abstraction and intermediate layers. At this point writing an algorithm for optimizing ray-tracing meant nothing, but designing an architecture to support an intermediate interpretation of the algorithm to operate with any API (DX or OGL) was more important and challenging (In which later he discovered to be Unreal's RHI). This mentality lead Nicholas to game engines which had a more refined architecture: Unreal Engine.

    After many prototype mod projects, Nicholas found himself as part of the most talented group at his university. This lead to his heavy involvement in the COR Project. Throughout this project Nicholas gained a deeper understanding of engine architecture, production pipelines, quality assurance, and public relations. COR Project became his family. With twenty other developers and his team of twenty play testers, Nicholas developed many gameplay aspects, scheduled and executed presentations with gaming companies, and managed the community and release of the project. This project exposed him to many aspects of the gaming industry, from the development level to the business level since COR Project received many offers to because a commercial project. There are three moments that Nicholas finds the most exhilarating for this project:

    During the course of the COR Project, Nicholas realized that it isn't the games that he enjoys. He wants nothing to do with defining such a subjective term as "fun". He was in love with the technology, the team dynamics, and the fact that a group of people from many different backgrounds can come together and create a world from nothing. This reasoning is why Atlantis Cyberspace (ACI) has been such a perfect fit for Nicholas. At ACI, Nicholas is in charge of a research and development team for bridging gaming technology and military technology with virtual reality hardware to train dismounted infantry for various countries' military. Nicholas has worked with many aspects of technology and development processes at his stay at ACI. From deploying the company's first experimental human factor testing simulator to designing ACI's patented core tech, Nicholas has pinpointed his passion and is honing his skills with the latest technologies from the gaming, military, simulation, and virtual reality industries.