IT’S a remarkable thing, but wherever you travel, whether it’s the UK or abroad, it’s never long before you meet someone from Teesside.

It’s not just people we export, though, but skills and expertise, often of a surprising kind.

So if you’re lucky enough to holiday in the US in the near future and are enjoying some spectacular multi-dimensional effects at a theme park or at a stage or screen show at your hotel, take a close look at the programme.

Because it is likely to say that those effects were dreamt up in Middlesbrough.

Last week, I visited the offices of Amazing Interactives, a company I have taken a close interest in since meeting one of its founders, Tim Dear, at the University of Teesside’s Virtual Reality Centre ten years ago.

Every time I go to Amazing Interactives, I am astonished at how it is expanding its portfolio and how technology is moving on.

The company specialises in high-quality interactive 3D processes, which have educational and therapeutic applications, but it is in the entertainment world where they have really taken off.

They company has recently staged shows in Honolulu, California, New Mexico, Washington and its latest coup is to provide Halloween and Christmas five-dimensional spectaculars for a leading Marriott managedhotel resort in Dallas, Texas, not to mention its current negotiations with a premier casino- hotel in Las Vegas.

The next stage of Amazing’s development will focus on owning and operating its 5D Adventures brand, combining storytelling, big screen and stage effects and 3D content with the aim of what Tim calls “immersing” family audiences in a new sensory experience.

I suppose it is like losing yourself in a book or a play, only on a grander scale.

In 2011, the business received vital support from UK Trade Investment and while its products are light years away from Teesside’s traditional exports, I think they are hugely important to our economy – Tim and his fellow directors may deal in illusion but the wealth and jobs they have created are real and sustainable.

Most of his staff are recruited locally and despite working in a global market, Tim tells me he can’t envisage being based anywhere else. That is good to know as this is a local success story that I hope will go on and on.

Because it is companies like this, with local roots and global aspirations, that will change for good the image of Teesside. They are living examples of the importance of the knowledge economy, the vital links between centres of higher education and new industries.

I watched a couple of pre-school children enjoying Amazing’s effects. It was clear they were fascinated – immersed even – but it was clear, too, this wasn’t the old stereotype of technology taking over while a kid sits staring blankly at a screen.

This was real interaction in which a child’s mind and imagination were fully engaged. It made them not just watch, but take part and learn, and that has to be good.

When it comes to imagination – maybe even intellect – I was pretty much a lost cause at school. If this kind of technology had been around then, who knows?

Next time I see the Amazing team, I’ve no doubt they’ll have pushed the boundaries of the senses still further, won new business and helped to put Middlesbrough on the map.

Our imaginations have no frontiers, though, particularly when we’re young, so there is plenty of territory left to explore and win.