Erik has worked for DIGITAL, COMPAQ, and Hansen Technologies in New Zealand Australia and England. He has also worked in architectural / building practice in New Zealand and for a major road construction company in Japan.

He graduated in architecture, philosophy, and engineering (Geomatics). His doctoral thesis (sponsored by an Australian Research Council industry grant) involved the design and evaluation of online virtual environments; the industry partner was Lonely Planet. Since his PhD he has supervised or collaborated on various games and virtual environment projects, mostly based on cultural learning, spatial projection, or physical computing. He has taught game design, interaction design, user experience design, architectural design, digital media and CAD.

Recent research includes co-editing special issues of Techné, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, and Leonardo Electronic Almanac. In 2006-7 he was invited to speak at Learning in Cyberspace: New Media For Heritage Didactics And Interpretation 2006 (Barcelona), State of Play V 2007 (Singapore), Virtual Systems and Multimedia 2007 (Brisbane), and Digital Applications in Cultural Heritage 2007 (Tainan). 

Papers in 2007  focused on virtual place design, tabletop urban design visualization, prototyping interactive environments, digital archaeology, biofeedback gameplay and improved evaluation techniques for cultural presence in virtual environments.

He is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at COFA, UNSW Sydney, and a member of IGDA (International Game Developers Association), DiGRA, ACM SIGGRAPH, the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), and ICIP (ICOMOS International Committee on Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites).