h i g h l i g h t s

 

 

meta :: supernatural

As Director of Technical Product Management at Supernatural (within Meta) (2022-present), I lead product management for internal platform and tools teams.

 

 

magnopus :: product engineering

As a Director of Engineering for Product at Magnopus (2020-2022), I shaped the US side of the company’s first product engineering team, both organically and by hiring.

Starting in the middle of the pandemic, I hired and internally recruited to assemble an effective new software delivery organization. The goal was to apply best practices not just in engineering, but to cultivate workflows across disciplines: product, design, interaction prototyping, and QA. This let teams move quickly, learn quickly, and deliver with rigor. I also focused on growing the next generation of product-minded engineering leaders within the company.

The product team delivered prototypes across a range of technology stacks and platforms: Unity, Electron, React, iOS, Android, VR, and AR, and shipped a product to the iOS App Store which was named a Time Best Invention of 2022.

 

 

oblong industries :: mezzanine

As a Product Manager for Mezzanine (2018-2020), I owned the user experience of a groundbreaking immersive meeting product, one which enabled any team to bind remote rooms together and work as though side-by-side.

Mezzanine was a highly flexible digital canvas which let users share many forms and streams of data in any layout, and it integrated with digital whiteboards, analog whiteboards, and a variety of videoconferencing systems. Mezzanine rooms found a market with an extensive list of Fortune 500 customers and featured innovative forms of interaction unique in this product category.

In addition to driving measurable improvements in the usability of the core product, I also championed a new, radically simpler edition of Mezzanine and led the effort to ship it in 6 months. This benefited users but also enabled a tighter strategic integration with the products of a critical partner.

This video shows an early version of Mezzanine circa 2015.

 

 

oblong industries :: client solutions

As Director of Engineering for Oblong’s Client Solutions division (2010-2018), I grew and led an interdisciplinary team of engineers and designers in creating a series of highly complex immersive environments for clients such as IBM, McKinsey, and ESPN. Our ability to build interactive spatial experiences using realtime graphics – 100 million pixels at a time – led to attention, awards, and fruitful long-term relationships with happy clients. With less than a tenth of company headcount, the group often earned more than a quarter of company revenue.

After starting as an engineer on the team, I eventually played the combined roles of chief technical architect, primary client point of contact, and manager of all projects and teams – about 15 people altogether.

warehouse 1

warehouse 2

 

 

oblong industries :: ibm watson experience centers

The Client Solutions team’s work was the centerpiece of a series of IBM Watson Experience Centers – located in New York, San Francisco, Cambridge, and Munich – whose purpose was educate IBM’s customers and constituents about machine learning. Both the reality of machine learning, and its potential, were brought to light through unique, interactive, realtime data visualizations and setpieces, developed from 2013 to 2020.

The Centers were a technology showcase, and featured a variety of environments created by Oblong, including large pixel walls and immersion rooms in different configurations. Human engagement was enabled via touch, spatial pointing devices, voice, proximity, and more.

These UX Design Award-winning collaborations with IBM and design partners such as Local Projects were entirely prototyped and developed at our warehouse in Los Angeles, lovingly crafted from the raw materials of C++ and OpenGL.

IBM produced this promotional video about the work.

 

 

oblong industries :: process

Most client work can’t be shared here, but these videos give insight into a highly collaborative prototyping and development process, as well as illustrating various technical and design achievements in realtime data visualization, high performance distributed rendering, interaction design, systems integration, and more.

The team operated at a sustainable pace, with very low turnover, and never shipped a project late.

 

 

oblong industries :: greenhouse sdk

I was one of the principal architects, authors, and maintainers of Greenhouse, a C++ creative coding SDK based on Oblong’s g-speak spatial operating platform. Compared to g-speak, Greenhouse’s goal was to offer more approachable abstractions and quicker time-to-joy. It was released to the public on its own website which our team also created (internet archive here); and was heavily used within the Client Solutions group to quickly execute production-quality work from 2013 to 2018.

 

 

oblong industries :: saudi aramco

Using Oblong’s g-speak software platform, we created an immersive geology visualization and simulation application which could be controlled by glove interactions, by touchscreen, by mobile device, and by web interface. This video shows me demonstrating some work in progress, using a miniature version of the real, much larger system which existed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The project ran from 2010 to 2012.

 

 

accenture :: interactive wall

“The Wall” was the earliest multi-touch, high-performance pixel wall to see daily use in public. After less than two years of development, The Wall went live and was usable by the general public in O’Hare, JFK, and other airports starting in 2006. These systems remained operational for nearly 10 years after their debut.

The Wall was developed entirely by a team of three people at the Accenture Technology Labs. It was also the subject of a number research papers we wrote, some of which are still referenced in HCI literature; and it played a pioneering role in the domain of public interactive technology experiences.

I made core contributions to every part of this new platform, from hardware prototyping to patented computer vision algorithms, to physical enclosure design, to designing a 60fps clustered rendering framework (C++/DirectX), to building applications on that framework, and supporting other developers doing the same.

wall wall 2

wall :: publications & coverage

 

 

public talks

 

 

art :: sagrada perihelia

An experiment in buoyant architecture, this piece was created for Burning Man 2019 and partly supported by a Black Rock City Honorarium Grant. The larger balloon is 8 feet in diameter and lit from inside by a large LED filament we created. The hundred other balloons are also lit from within by LEDs, but the delicate visual effect of this doesn’t photograph well. Guess you had to be there! :) More details available at the art project blog/newsletter. (On the landing page, click “Let me read it first”.)

dawn 1 night day detail dawn 2

 

 

education

  • Cornell University, English, Master of Arts
  • University of Utah, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science
  • University of Utah, English, Bachelor of Arts