Dive In. Dig Out. Build Up.

"If you can't measure something, you can't hope to improve it." Overclocking is a highly measured effort — and Immersi founder Aaron Schradin saw ways to improve it. He made a wager with AMD brass that he could outperform their existing cooling methods. Their response: "Can you have it ready for CES next week?" Schradin went straight into the machine shop, built the device, and the team flew out to support the demo. That wager showed measured improvement — and it opened the door to everything that followed.

AMD brought Immersi in to build cooling systems for a live demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show. The cooling pots were designed and fabricated in under two weeks. The team hit 6.5 GHz on stage — watch the CES demo. AMD saw the promise and wanted more.

When Schradin grew weary of the project, AMD brought the mountain to him — flying overclocking teams from eight countries to compete in his Holland Township garage. Broadcast live at amdblackops.com, the event featured 18-hour sessions, tanks of liquid nitrogen and helium, and hardware burning through at alarming rates. Video of the competition racked up 888,000 YouTube views. The Holland Sentinel covered the unlikely story of a global tech competition staged in a West Michigan garage.

AMD knew Schradin had a childhood goal of earning a Guinness World Record. On August 31, 2011, they made it happen. Using the "Schradin router" — a custom liquid helium delivery system described as "miraculous" by AMD's Simon Solotko — the team pushed a pre-release AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer chip to 8.429 GHz, verified on-site by Guinness adjudicator Freddie Hoff. The record was presented at a party in a hotel directly across the street from Intel's Developer Forum — a deliberate move to steal the thunder from AMD's biggest rival. Watch the record-breaking run.

As for whether 8.429 GHz was truly the limit of what the hardware could do — well, AMD always believed the community should hold the records. Friend or foe.

AMD sent Schradin to break the mainland China record in a US vs. China competition format. After assessing his opponent's setup, Schradin chose a different approach — he met with the Chinese overclocker, explained the technological advantage, and proposed collaboration over competition. The partnership made local Chinese headlines and achieved far more than a rivalry ever could.

Immersi was already embedded in the AM General ecosystem through engineering work on the commercial H2 and H3 programs. The team was working alongside the military HUMVEE program daily — close enough to see the problems, close enough to cross-pollinate the solutions.

The HUMVEE is one of the most recognizable military vehicles ever built — a legacy platform applied to roles far beyond what was originally anticipated. As mission requirements evolved, more powerful engines were fitted into the vehicle. But the climate control systems didn't keep pace. The crew compartment was getting hotter, louder, and harder to sustain for extended operations. AM General needed a thermal insulation solution that could manage the heat output of the upgraded powertrain without adding significant weight or cost to an already stretched platform.

Immersi developed a multi-layered underbody insulation and cladding system — a moisture-resistant, sound-absorbing, heat-reflective composite that could be manufactured cost-effectively and applied to the vehicle's existing architecture. The solution addressed the thermal problem it was designed for, but it did more than that. The layered construction also provided significant acoustic dampening, reducing crew fatigue. And critically, the material composition augmented the platform's resistance to fragmentation from underbody events — a vulnerability the HUMVEE was never originally designed to withstand.

Nothing else on the market hit all three requirements simultaneously. Existing solutions typically traded weight for protection, or cost for thermal performance. Immersi's approach reduced weight, lowered cost, improved thermal and acoustic comfort, and enhanced survivability — all in a single integrated system. One solution, applied to roles unanticipated, giving new life to a legacy vehicle and saving more lives in the process.

The patents were filed by Immersi, with Schradin as inventor. U.S. Patent Application No. 20070218790 — "Composite Insulation" — describes the layered architecture: a moisture-resistant layer attached to one surface of a sound-absorbing layer, with a heat-reflective layer attached to the opposite surface. The intellectual property was subsequently acquired and transferred to AM General for integration across their vehicle platforms. It's the kind of outcome a consulting engagement is designed to produce — proprietary innovation that becomes part of the client's permanent capability.

Immersi has a deep history in furniture mechanism design — the active, complex mechanical systems hidden inside the chairs people sit in every day. Recliners that pivot at the axis of the human hip. Gliders that track smooth arcs on concealed rail systems. Modular mechanisms that automatically adjust tension based on the weight of the person sitting down. These aren't cosmetic design choices — they're precision-engineered assemblies that must survive hundreds of thousands of cycles while feeling effortless to the user.

For Leggett & Platt, Immersi developed a modular chair mechanism with a self-weighing feature — a system where a shuttle travels inside a housing, with a biasing member that adjusts tension automatically based on the seated user's weight. The mechanism limits travel to discrete positions and adapts force requirements without manual adjustment. U.S. Patent No. 9,072,383 — "Modular chair mechanism with self-weighing" — was granted in 2015.

For HNI Technologies and their Paoli brand, Immersi co-invented both a recliner and a glider designed for contract and commercial seating. The recliner (Pub. No. 20070108823) features a bracket that rotates about an axis approximating the hip joint of the seated user — a more anatomically correct recline than conventional mechanisms. The glider (Pub. No. 20070108814) uses elongated arcuate tracks and wheel assemblies for a smooth, controlled gliding motion. Both were designed as part of a modular system enabling ganged and spanned seating configurations. The product line was recognized among peers at NeoCon, the contract furniture industry's premier trade show in Chicago.

Reclining mechanisms, glider assemblies, self-weighing tension systems, modular gangable configurations. The furniture work represents one slice of Immersi's patent portfolio — but it demonstrates the kind of mechanism design and manufacturing insight that translates across every industry the firm touches.

BundeZe was born the way every good invention is — out of necessity. The team needed something that would make it easy for first-day sailors to keep things tidy on deck. It had to stay attached to an item whether tied up or not, so it was always right where you needed it. The standard bungee ball wasn't enough. To be perfect, it had to be strong, buoyant, tolerant of sun, salt, and freezing temperatures for long and reliable use. And one more thing — you had to be able to operate it while wearing bulky winter gloves. That requirement meant BundeZe didn't stop being useful when sailing season ended. When the sleds and skis come out, the gloves go on, and the need to bundle, organize, and secure gear doesn't go away — it gets worse.

What started as a marine gear tie evolved into two product lines, both 100% made in Michigan. The BundeZe itself is the ultimate mess-management tool — stronger and more versatile than a bungee ball, usable with gloves, and at home on a boat, a kayak, a worksite, or in the garage. The Bandit is a minimalist multi-tool wallet built from aircraft-grade hard coat anodized aluminum, wrapped in shock cord that holds up to 8 cards or 30 bills. Cut into the chassis are metric and standard wrenches, a Phillips and flathead bit, and a bottle opener. It's expandable, rebuildable, waterproof, and the kind of thing that starts conversations every time it comes out of a pocket.

The Bandit was brought to market through a Kickstarter campaign run by Immersi Solutions, LLC. The campaign featured reward tiers named after Old West figures — Doc Holliday, Calamity Jane, Ike Clanton, Bonnie & Clyde — each with its own irreverent personality. The product shipped and found its way onto Amazon, Etsy, StackSocial, and into the hands of people who use it for everything from fishing rod bundling to kayak deck organization to everyday carry.

BundeZe found its way off the boat and into use cases the team never anticipated. Fishing, hunting, camping, load management, cable organization, loom weaving, tree stand hunting rigs, garage storage. The product page is full of people finding new ways to use it. That's the mark of a good design — when users start inventing applications faster than you can document them.

Hurricane Helene didn't follow the script. It struck the mountains of western North Carolina — a region home to many of the very people who typically deploy to disaster zones. This time, the responders were the ones who needed help. And because they understood what it takes to mount an effective response, they knew exactly what to ask for: force-multiplying technology. The call came to Immersi and the Virtual Sandtable team to deploy drone scanning, 3D terrain mapping, and the operational tools to bring order to the chaos.

Schradin left Holland, Michigan on short notice — but before his truck could pull out, it was overwhelmed with relief supplies from the community. The route passed through Cincinnati, his hometown, where his grandmother, mother, and sister had been teachers in his childhood school system. Word had spread. The school banded together and sent busloads of supplies that quickly overwhelmed both the truck and the trailer. The overages filled a 40-foot trailer that would rendezvous with the team later in North Carolina. What started as one man driving south became a convoy of community commitment.

Less than 30 minutes from the destination, a bridge was condemned and closed. The detour took nearly three hours through makeshift one-lane mountain roads — some requiring four-wheel drive to navigate. The travel trailer, loaded with supplies, miraculously made it through. The topography had rapidly and fundamentally changed. Roads that existed the week before were gone. This wasn't a cleanup — it was a new landscape.

Operations ran from a Baptist church and school. The gymnasium had been converted into a sequencing center — organizing incoming materials, cubing out helicopter loads for transport, and servicing families through a makeshift drive-through where they arrived with shopping lists of what they needed to survive. When weather permitted, the primary mission was keeping the helicopters effective. Schradin would get airlifted to an inaccessible location, deploy the drones for scanning, set up Starlink for communications, and make contact with the locals to assess and relay their needs back to base. Sometimes a local would drive him to the next community. Other times, the terrain was so isolated the helicopter was the only way out.

The team collected and moved to the official Emergency Operations Center, where they were issued credentials. Inside, it was chaos. Most of the people attempting to run the center were simultaneously trying to reassemble their own homes and lives. Well-meaning teams unfamiliar with the area were arriving to help but often created more problems than they solved — some needed to be rescued themselves. The Immersi team, comprised mostly of locals, brought something the EOC desperately lacked: current, accurate ground truth. The drone scans produced 3D terrain models that gave decision-makers a boots-on-the-ground perspective of areas no one could physically reach — identifying collapsed bridges, undercut roads, displaced structures, and civilian debris fields. Each point of interest came with GPS coordinates, urgency classification, and recommended tasking.

Between flights, the work never stopped. Compiling maps. Repairing chainsaws. Troubleshooting machinery stretched beyond its limits. Sharing a warm, clean, safe place for teammates to sleep. One operator with two drones could scan 5,000 acres in 160 minutes while automatically avoiding rescue aircraft via ADS-B integration. The scanned environments were processed into portable, shareable 3D packages — parsed remotely by volunteers who could identify damage, tag locations, and generate prioritized tasking orders. Color-coded overlays in Virtual Sandtable turned raw devastation into structured, actionable work.

The deployment stretched across weeks and multiple trips. Each cycle refined the process — scan, parse, task, execute, rescan. The workflow that emerged became a replicable methodology: forward operators collecting data in the field, an operations center parsing and prioritizing remotely, and mobile teams executing tasking orders with precise coordinates and clear objectives. The approach proved effective enough that the U.S. Army contracted the team to share their methods and benchmark the workflow for military application in overseas disaster assistance.

If that kind of topographical trauma had occurred anywhere else in the United States, the outcome would have been so much more devastating. But the mountain people of North Carolina are resilient and graceful in ways most will never understand. They truly know how to survive. The technology was there to amplify that resilience — not replace it.

The original tasking was deceptively simple: create a virtual reality mission planner using all over-the-counter consumer products. The team built the first system with a toy drone, a laptop, and whatever VR headset was available at the bleeding edge of what the technology could do at the time — but it let a forward-operating person in reconnaissance survey an area undetected, then make decisions about who's involved and what kind of assets are needed. It answered the fundamental question: how can we use the terrain and environment to give us an unfair advantage?

Virtual Sandtable evolved from that first proof-of-concept into a comprehensive 3D visualization platform. vST aggregates data from topography maps, road maps, satellite imagery, weather reports, and drone scans into a single immersive environment. The software processes 2D imagery through photogrammetry to generate properly geolocated 3D terrain models that users can navigate in VR, MR, AR, desktop, or mobile. Built-in range-finding tools, asset placement, route calculators, and a database of virtual placeables turn raw terrain data into an interactive operational picture.

The system supports the full mission lifecycle. Before an operation, teams rehearse in a scaled 3D recreation of the actual environment — studying wall heights for breaching ladders, identifying line-of-sight for communications placement, and walking the ground before they set foot on it. During execution, vST displays assets moving in real-time over thick and thin data pipes, integrated with ATAK so commanders can track variables as they change — weather, injuries, landing zones, adversary positions. After the mission, the same environment supports debriefing — replaying who was where and what happened, helping operators ramp down properly. The system has been recognized through SBIR funding for providing TACPs, aircrew, and CAS scenario participants the ability to conduct pre-mission briefs and post-mission debriefs within a virtual battlespace while geographically separated.

The same platform that supports military operations proved itself in civilian disaster response during Hurricane Helene, where vST processed drone scans of devastated mountain terrain into actionable 3D models for emergency operations. The technology doesn't care whether the mission is a military objective or a search-and-rescue operation — the need to see the ground truth, make decisions, and coordinate distributed teams is the same. vST's methodology was subsequently contracted by the U.S. Army for benchmarking in overseas disaster assistance.

Legacy sandtables, 2D planning, and static mission rehearsals fall short of a sensory-rich experience that turns information into actionable intelligence. By empowering teams with a shared, fully-immersed virtual and interactive visual platform, commanders and service members at all levels and geographic locations can experience the actual operational environment before they enter it. That familiarity changes comfort levels, reduces casualties — both physical and mental — and condenses information from a variety of points to promote better decision making.

The United States Army Special Operations Command needed compute-intensive systems — VR environments, simulation platforms, training pipelines, mission rehearsal tools — and the technology was evolving faster than the defense acquisition process could keep up. By the time a system was specified, approved, funded, and delivered, the hardware named in the requirements was already a generation behind. The specs were written by people who understood the mission but not the computational domain, and they were locked to specific brands and model numbers rather than capability thresholds. The result was a cycle where the right system could never arrive in time, and the wrong system arrived on schedule.

USASOC brought Immersi in directly as a VR Subject Matter Expert — not to build a system, but to fix the way systems get defined. The task was to bridge the gap between operators who know what they need a system to do and acquisition professionals who need to write specifications that survive the procurement timeline. That gap was where every prior effort had broken down.

The core shift was moving from hardware-specific specifications to performance-based requirements. Instead of naming a GPU by manufacturer and model — a reference that becomes obsolete in months — the framework defines performance envelopes: minimum thresholds, target benchmarks, and scalability tiers that any qualifying hardware must meet at the time of evaluation. A classification system for computational workload types was developed so that stakeholders could categorize what a system needs to do — real-time rendering, photogrammetry processing, multi-user simulation, edge deployment — without needing to understand the underlying architecture. Each workload class maps to benchmark-based evaluation criteria rather than brand-locked specifications.

Frameworks only work if the people writing requirements understand them. A significant part of the engagement was educating stakeholders — program managers, acquisition officers, and end users — on how to translate mission needs into technical specifications without over-constraining the solution. The goal was to give non-technical decision-makers the vocabulary and structure to define what "good enough" looks like in computational terms, so the acquisition process could evaluate competing solutions on capability rather than component lists.

The tiered requirements approach was designed to flex with acquisition timelines — if a program takes 18 months to award, the performance thresholds still apply to whatever hardware exists at the point of evaluation, not whatever existed when the spec was written. The framework was delivered with applicability beyond USASOC, structured to be adopted across SOCOM or any command facing the same mismatch between technology velocity and procurement pace.

Defense doesn't have a technology problem. It has a specification problem. The hardware exists. The capability exists. What's missing is the ability to describe what's needed in terms that survive the time it takes to buy it. Specify the performance, not the part number — and the right system can arrive on time, every time.