Recently, Arn Hyndman drove from Toronto to Ottawa with a work colleague for a meeting.

As research and development technologists with Nortel Networks (the company calls them architects), the two didn’t chat about the company’s stock price or office gossip, they riffed on ideas.

“We were just shooting the breeze. We’re inspired by challenges that we see ourselves in the world around us,” Hyndman says. They came up with 10 different ideas for possible new technology projects.

It isn’t just idle talk. They’ll eventually get to make some of these ideas happen.

Hyndman, who’s now 37, began inventing technology a young teen on Vancouver Island. His parents declared video games like Space Invaders off limits so, using the family’s rudimentary computer, Hyndman designed his own version of the popular game.

It wasn’t perfect, but it kept him and his friends amused for awhile. He kept writing programs and then studied computer science at the University of British Columbia. He was eventually hired as a junior developer at Nortel in Ottawa. The company helped finance his masters in software engineering (he minored in human computer interaction) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.

There, he and his classmates solved a problem for NASA: There was a six-second delay between moving the joystick of the remote control for the lunar rover and the thing actually moving, so astronauts would over-steer and even crash it. Hyndman helped invent a new monitor that would predict where the rover would go in real time.

Back at Nortel, Hyndman went on to get patents for various inventions: One that helps compatibility between network devices and their management system, and another that enables you to ID yourself while using a wireless device so you can login or make purchases.

Currently, he’s chief architect on a project called web.alive. It will allow people to talk on the web using live voice and 3-D avatars. An alternative to video conferencing, its main use will be for virtual business meetings.

Hyndman spends his days working on the project in numerous ways. He sometimes observes people using web.alive — other Nortel staff and outsiders — to see where it needs work. He runs a lot of problem-solving meetings where he and the developers on his team brainstorm ways to fix flaws in the interface.

And, during coffee breaks and over lunch and in the hallways, he chats with other architects — there are about 20 at Nortel — about technology problems and possible solutions for fixing them.
“We just throw around ideas all the time.”