Ross McCullough
Photorealistic AI avatar standing in atmospheric AR environment under crescent moon

Case Study · 01

Building digital humans that don't sleep.

HollaCo · 2021 — Present · Founder & CEO

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Context

The problem

Creators have a math problem. There are only so many hours in a day, and audiences are infinite. Every superfan who DMs gets a fraction of attention — or none at all. The biggest creators end up trading authenticity for scale, hiring teams to ghostwrite responses or simply going silent.

I started HollaCo to ask a different question: what if a creator could be in two places at once? What if their digital twin could meet fans where they are, at the pace of demand, without the human behind the platform ever burning out?

Babylon avatar standing in AR with green ground anchor ring visible

The Moment

“The first time it clicked, I was watching my debug console. I asked a question out loud and saw it travel: OpenAI Whisper transcribed it, n8n moved it through the pipeline, Supabase served the response, Websockets pushed it back — and my avatar, standing in my living room, spoke the answer in AR. Every service did its job. It just worked.”

Equivalent value

$1.05M

at agency $175/hr rates

Concept → ship

90 days

six concurrent products

01Pillar

AR foundation

Native ARKit on iOS, ARCore on Android. The avatar (that's me, in the HollaCo polo) is anchored to a horizontal surface via the device camera, scaled to room-size, with realistic shadows and physics-aware grounding.

ARKitARCoreSceneKit
02Pillar

Conversation engine

Speech-to-text round-trip with real-time response streaming. The avatar listens for questions, processes them through the AI layer, and responds with full lip-sync. Idle animations play during conversation lulls so the avatar never feels frozen.

OpenAI WhisperREST APIWebSockets
03Pillar

Built for orchestration

Babylon is plumbed through n8n. Voice questions hit OpenAI Whisper, route through structured workflows that query Supabase, return responses via Websockets, and drive everything from avatar speech to merchandise interactions. No glue code — just declarative pipelines that scale.

n8nSupabaseWebSockets

Lines of code

62,820

production, end-to-end

Third-party validation

“Itransition partnered with Holla to deliver secure AR applications for iOS and Android allowing users to interact with celebrity avatars and buy their merchandise.”

— Itransition, development partner

Android task switcher showing multiple HollaCo apps coexisting on a phone — Authenticate, Collections, and others

The Suite

Babylon was just the proof. Here's the rest.

The avatar walking through the alley at the top of this site? Built with HollaCo's tooling. We use what we sell.

Visit hollaco.com

HollaCo is what I'm building now. But it's not the first time I've shipped something that quietly gave people their time back.

Next: Sapiocare
Sapiocare EHR platform — cinematic hero

Case Study · 02

Giving doctors their time back.

Sapiocare · 2014 — 2019 · Chief Information Officer

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Context

The documentation problem

Electronic health records were supposed to make medicine more efficient. They didn't. Doctors were staying after-hours to finish charts, clicking through templates instead of looking patients in the eye, and burning out at unprecedented rates.

The thesis at Sapiocare was simple: documentation isn't the disease, input is. Fix how the information enters the chart and the whole encounter changes.

Sapiocare EHR login screen

The Moment

“The first physician I demoed it to picked up the SmartPen, dictated a SOAP note, and watched it fill the chart in real time. He looked up and said, "I just got my evenings back." That's when I knew.”

Per encounter

2+ hrs

documentation time saved

Team

30

engineers across 3 years

01Pillar

Voice + SmartPen capture

Speech recognition paired with digital pen capture, so dictating a chart felt like dictating to a scribe — not battling a form.

NuanceDragon MedicalAnoto
02Pillar

Clinical Text Analysis

Apache cTAKES pulled structured codes, allergies, meds, and problem-list updates out of unstructured dictation — no templated clicking.

Apache cTAKESUMLSSNOMED
03Pillar

Telemedicine, built in

Physician-to-physician consults and patient video visits launched from inside the chart — not a separate app, not a separate workflow.

WebRTCHIPAAVoIP

Budget

$4M

delivered on-target

Third-party validation

“Sapiocare's EHR shipped with a near-zero learning curve — a rare achievement in healthcare software, where complexity is the enemy of adoption.”

— Development partner · published case study

Sapiocare EHR platform modules

The Platform

Charting · e-prescribing · labs · telehealth · billing

Complexity is the enemy of adoption in healthcare software. Sapiocare won by making the path of least resistance the right path — and giving every minute of saved documentation time back to the patient on the other side of the desk.

Two careers shipped, both built on technical discipline. There's a third practice that's been running in parallel to all of it — older, quieter, more personal.

Next: Photography
Illuminated Chinese dragon lantern at night

Photography · Phase 04

Frames worth keeping.

Travel, found composition, and the occasional cat. Shot on Sony, Fuji, and a 1973 Pentax K1000.

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A loose archive · 2011 → 2026

No edits, no themes.

Just frames worth keeping. Hover any tile for context; click to enlarge.

Smith’s Bar neon sign on a city corner at night
Last callNew York · 2023
Two cocktails on a wooden surface at sunset, peak silhouette in the distance
ToastGolden hour · 2024
Black-and-white candid of a child with an outstretched hand
ReachStreet · 2023
Aged blue wooden door set into a stone wall
ThresholdMediterranean · 2024
Peacock fanning iridescent tail feathers
DisplayGarden · 2024
Trio of antique door handles on a warm-toned wall
ThreeSpain · 2024
Two cats curled together asleep
PileHome · 2025
Tile detail with a small red marker on a blue gradient background
FoundStreet · 2024
Black-and-white BMW parked on a quiet street at night
ParkedNight · 2024
Portrait from behind of a woman with backlit blonde curls
HaloPortrait · 2024

// the long version

Ross McCullough

Twenty-plus years of crossing disciplines — engineering, design, leadership, and the camera. Here's the through-line.

2022 — NOW

HollaCo Holdings· Chief Executive Officer

Subscription platform for AI-driven digital doubles — 4K photorealistic personas that scale a creator’s presence without burning out the human behind them. Leading product, engineering, partnerships, legal, and creative end-to-end.

2020 — 2022

HollaCo Holdings· Chief Technology Officer

Built the initial HD digital twin AR platform for iOS and Android end-to-end on Azure. Team of ~10 plus artists. Microsoft ISV Partner. Multi-billion-dollar valuation across the proposed timeline.

2015 — 2019

Sapiocare· Chief Information Officer

HIPAA + ONC-compliant EHR. 30-person team, $5M budget across four years. Voice, SmartPen, Apache cTAKES, telemedicine — gave doctors back hours per encounter. Published case study.

2011 — 2015

Triptych Technologies· CIO / Sr SysAdmin (contract)

Solo-maintained 99.97% uptime across 1,000+ nodes for a national auto-finance institution. Replaced legacy VoIP and saved 75%. Designed commercial smart-home integrations on the side.

2011 — 2012

America's Auction Network· Senior auctioneer, on-camera

Live national TV, 2–6 AM. Jewelry, gemstones, Persian rugs, scientific equipment. Safeguarded $500K+ in nightly inventory while running the airtime math live.

2010 — 2011

GridOne· Senior systems consultant

990 km of overhead ADSS fiber to the Government of Nigeria. Coordinated AFL and Prysmian, ran FAT testing, sponsored vendor visas, taught fusion-splicing best practices.

2007 — 2010

St. City Software· Senior PM

Negotiated a first-of-its-kind IP-broadcast platform contract with the Chinese PLA — replacing traditional broadcast infrastructure with all-IP streaming.

2001 — 2007

GoIndustry DoveBid · eNox · Aztek

40+ Fortune 500 auctions (Tyco, Corning, Kodak, Xerox, Lucent, IBM). E-commerce builds in PHP/MySQL. Where I learned to ship on a clock.

ALWAYS

Photography· personal practice

The longest-running thread. Landscapes, portraits, light. Gallery on 500px.