Technologist and founder working where aerial data, 3D reconstruction and media production meet. FPV & stabilised drone operator, gaussian splats, point clouds, maps and surveys — since the early days of mobile.
Photographs and renders from his own posts on bartsakwerda.com. Open one for the full image and its source.
Bart Sakwerda calls himself a technologist and entrepreneur drawn to organisations in accelerated growth.1 Over two decades that has meant mobile software before the smartphone, a media studio founded in a typhoon-hit province, drone surveys flown on three continents and, more recently, generative AI and 3D capture.
“I am a technologist and entrepreneur drawn to organizations experiencing accelerated growth.”LinkedIn profile summary1
His first projects were mobile and web content made between 2002 and 2007,2 built for the Java ME and DoJa platforms.1 DoJa was NTT Docomo’s Java profile for i-mode handsets in Japan. From 2005 to 2008 he studied at the University of the Arts London, taking modules in games design, C++, multiplayer games and 3D asset production.1
In 2008 he published Concept of the time adaptable GUI for the mobile phone users in Mobile User Experience, a paper that has since been cited five times.3 A companion concept for a context-aware OS and app is archived on Behance under the title “2008 concept context aware os/app — 4 yrs prior iOS 4”.2
By 2013 he was working in Asia. His Behance record lists mobile development, research and design for mikomi in Bangkok, and a photo-documentation project for an engineering client in Thailand in the last quarter of 2013.2 He received workplace fire-safety training while working at Image Furniture in Klaeng, Rayong Province.9 He also produced a comparison of two industrial cities, Katowice in Poland and Hegang in China.2 Katowice, in Upper Silesia, is where he was born.4 He founded App Ops, a developer studio based in Wan Chai, Hong Kong.2
Typhoon Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Yolanda, struck the central Visayas in November 2013. Bart joined the rehabilitation effort in Santa Fe on Bantayan Island, contributing to construction, media work and tourism promotion.5 He documented the reconstruction7 and designed an identity for the island covering disaster, livelihoods and tourism.35 He later listed the typhoon first among the events that drew him into aerial surveying.8
In 2014, during that rehabilitation period, he founded Budots Media in Cebu.6 The studio started in Budlaan, moved to Banilad and in 2015 settled in Maribago, Lapu-Lapu City.6 Its survey arm, Data Ops Philippines, was renamed Aerial & Data Ops in 2019.5 It describes itself as a photogrammetry, aerial scan and data-processing studio in Lapu-Lapu and part of the Budots Media group.33
From 2016 to 2020 Budots Media also kept offices on Hackney and Camden High Street in London.6 Some of the earliest machine-learning and conversational work on this site comes from those years:
Since 2023 the studio has also worked with clients in Saudi Arabia.6 Arabic is one of the eight languages it works in.15 In Riyadh he flew drone surveys and made NeRF and photogrammetry captures.14 On 18 March 2023 he joined Abdulrahman AlAzwari and Adel AlRumithah at the Saudi ChatGPT Hackathon, organised with Tuwaiq Academy, KACST and Vectara. Their entry was an application for assessing candidates in technical interviews.16
Today he is based in London. Aerial Data Ops has flown more than 1,000 sites, including in Saudi Arabia, Thailand, the Philippines and Poland, and is CAA-licensed and UK-insured.17 Recent captures include a gaussian-splat map of the All England Lawn Tennis Club at Wimbledon18 and 3D models and maps of Burgess Park in south London.39 Since December 2025 he has also been a security consultant at Hyatt in London.22 In 2026 he posted a test of Anthropic’s Claude managing a 1,000-drone show sequence in Blender.23
Each area has its own page with the full record. Here is how they fit together.
3D gaussian splatting (3DGS) represents a scene as millions of small, semi-transparent 3D gaussians fitted to overlapping photographs. It was introduced at SIGGRAPH 2023 and renders photoreal views in real time.36 Earlier photogrammetry produced heavier meshes that were slower to view. 3DGS is the centre of Aerial Data Ops’ work, alongside condition reports, FPV fly-throughs, 2D maps and orthomosaics, and digital twins. Basic deliverables are turned around in one to two days.17
The archive is public. As of mid-2026 it held 142 models on Sketchfab, with about 49,300 views and 82.7 million triangles published.21 He has also offered around 600 GB of aerial 3DGS PLY files of London to the mapping community.31 The same technique works underwater: scuba captures of coral off Olango Island in Cebu are among the splats.32
Budots Media is a multimedia production house that develops original IP and takes on commissions.6 For the Department of Tourism Region 7 it has produced three campaigns: FMA7 on Filipino martial arts, RIDE7 on motorsport, and DIVE7 on scuba destinations around Cebu.6 Its event coverage includes the 2022 Ironman 70.3 in Cebu for the Savoy Hotel Mactan and the 2023 Japanese Donbori festival in Cebu.5
Earlier productions range from music videos to 360° VR.12 Since 2024 the studio has been shifting towards games production.6 A newer brand, Cebu News, publishes short-form video news, mainly on Facebook.6
Maps have been a constant. A Medium retrospective collects base maps of the Philippines made between 2014 and 2018. One of them, from 2015, was made in “crude conditions in a small town with only ink printer”.25
Tourism data came next:
The 2023 vision for Philippines Travel Company names the problems the data is meant to address: unreliable information and a transport system that is hard to plan around, especially between islands.24
The AI work predates the current wave. It started with whale-shark identification in 201610 and chatbots in 2018.11 Since then:
His Hugging Face profile has listed interests in vision, geography, and Philippine datasets and language models.30
A parallel career in security runs alongside the studio work. Between 2016 and 2024 he worked as a static guard, as a bouncer at Alibi bar in London, and in security and reception at serviced apartments. During the COVID-19 emergency he worked across several London venues.9 In the Philippines he coordinated humanitarian operations through sea accidents, fires, floods, landslides and typhoons.9 After Typhoon Odette in December 2021, Budots Media ran an emergency response in Lapu-Lapu City.38 Since December 2025 he has been a security consultant at Hyatt in London.22
The two cities the work moves between, drawn as outlines. Move across the canvas to slide “Cebu” over “London”. Every crossing is solved exactly, and the tangents there are drawn and measured. The study follows the Path Intersections example from Paper.js.
Move the pointer over the canvas. With no pointer, the word drifts on its own.
Every letter outline is a chain of cubic Bézier segments with control points \(P_0 \dots P_3\):
\[ \begin{aligned} B(t) &= (1-t)^3P_0 + 3(1-t)^2t\,P_1 \\ &\quad + 3(1-t)t^2P_2 + t^3P_3 \end{aligned} \]Its derivative is the tangent direction, itself a quadratic Bézier:
\[ \begin{aligned} B'(t) &= 3(1-t)^2(P_1-P_0) \\ &\quad + 6(1-t)t\,(P_2-P_1) + 3t^2(P_3-P_2) \end{aligned} \]A crossing is a pair \((t, s)\) with \(B_1(t) = B_2(s)\), found by recursive curve clipping. The crossing angle comes from the two tangents:
\[ \theta = \arccos \frac{\lvert B_1'(t)\cdot B_2'(s)\rvert}{\lVert B_1'(t)\rVert\,\lVert B_2'(s)\rVert} \]Each is drawn from published posts and repositories, and each links to the page that holds the wider context.
Large venues are hard to read from a flat map. For the All England Lawn Tennis Club, the base layer is a gaussian-splat capture with meshes added for logos and text. It was assembled in Spline so it runs in a web browser.18
The map ships in three forms: an interactive web map, an embeddable version for other sites and a standalone app for Apple Vision Pro. It lets visitors and event planners understand the court layout and surrounding infrastructure at a glance.18
Divers swim orbital paths around coral while photographing it, and the images are trained into gaussian splats that represent coral biomass accurately.19 The approach needs fewer data points than photogrammetry. It also copes better with water refraction and with backscatter, the noise that plagues underwater photography.19
Repeat captures of the same reef let scientists compare coral cover over time and spot bleaching, storm damage or recovery. The cost is low enough for community and student monitoring programmes as well as research.19 A capture off Olango Island is published on YouTube.32
Notes from a 2023 stay in Riyadh cover drone flights, NeRF and photogrammetry. They describe making 3D models from overlapping photos, and photoreal scenes you can move through, of cities, heritage sites and construction.14
A 2025 follow-up collects drone-based 3D scans and gaussian splats of buildings in the city, including the King Abdullah Financial District. They were captured to preserve light and reflections at night, and can be combined with mesh models.20
Less than four months after ChatGPT’s public launch, a three-person team at the Saudi ChatGPT Hackathon built an application to help assess candidates for technical tasks during technical interviews.16 It ran on ChatGPT 3.5, used Python and Django with an HTML, CSS and JavaScript front end, and was hosted on DigitalOcean. The code is public on GitHub.16
Alongside the survey and media work there is a long design practice. Dribbble lists brand and graphic, mobile and web design, and the Behance archive goes back to July 2010.
The design work tends to cross into 3D. Civic and tourism marks are rebuilt as rendered objects, and the same scenes are later captured from the air.
The published shots range from identities for an NGO, a mapping project and an electronic-music artist to 3D renders of the Department of Tourism and Lapu-Lapu City logos, a rigged Jollibee character, and a 3D model of a Filipino tourism bangka. Motion work includes animated social covers for tour operators and a promo for a booking chatbot. Sketchfab lists the tools behind the 3D pieces: Blender, Photoshop, Revit, Unity and Unreal. The earliest interface work is a 2008 concept for a context-aware phone OS, filed on Behance as arriving “4 yrs prior iOS 4”.
Studios and operations built between Cebu, London, Hong Kong and the Gulf — from post-typhoon media work to drone survey operations.
Multimedia production and original IP. Founded in Cebu in 2014 during the rehabilitation period after Typhoon Yolanda; Lapu-Lapu office from 2015, London studios in Hackney & Camden 2016–2020.
UAS operator focused on photogrammetry, point clouds and 3D gaussian splatting — London survey work, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Hundreds of GB of aerial 3DGS captures.
Travel, MICE events and destination media for the Philippines — island-hopping tours, tourist-arrival data apps and 3D destination maps.
Founder / developer, Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Disaster-response and livelihood apps for Bantayan Island, and machine learning for whale-shark identification in Cebu.
Drone photogrammetry, gaussian splats, NeRF and terrain models. Pick a capture and load the live Sketchfab viewer.
Java ME and DoJa handsets, typhoon reconstruction, VR music videos, NeRFs in Riyadh, splats of Wimbledon.
Posts from bartsakwerda.com, Medium and LinkedIn.
Tourism datasets, aerial image analysis, open datasets and the occasional paper.
Drone surveys and 3D capture in London, media production and travel in the Philippines, AI consulting anywhere.
Every claim on this page links to one of these public sources. Statistics reflect the source at the time it was captured.