INDUSTRY SHOWCASE
10:45 am - 12:00 pm PDT
Jake Steinerman
Director of Community
Jake is the Director of Community at Spatial, a venture-backed AR/VR startup focused on improving how companies & organizations work, collaborate, and meet with one another face-to-face (virtually). Companies across the Fortune 500, such as Ford, Pfizer, and Mattel are already using the platform today to improve how they get work done by leveraging Spatial across AR/VR, mobile, and web. Over the past year, Spatial has also seen explosive growth in new fields like cryptocurrency, as well as a wide range of innovative uses for their VR platform as a result of the pandemic.
Jake has nearly a decade of experience working in the AR/VR industry, including founding the first AR/VR team at Dow Chemical, founding a Google Glass startup focused on driver safety, and working with hundreds of companies to implement AR technology as a Principle Engineer while at PTC/Vuforia.
Kate Kessler
Global Field Sales Manager
Kate Kessler started her journey as a contractor with Oculus in 2014 where she was hired as an Office Administrator. She transitioned into the Global Oculus Event and Logistic Manager the same year after being converted to full-time employee. She managed all tent-pole events focusing on the onsite activation for CES, E3, Gamescom, Sundance, and Oculus Connect. In 2016 with the launch of Rift into retail, Kate moved into the Oculus Sales Team working as a NA Channel Marketing Manager.
For the last two years, Kate has been leading FRL Global Field Sales Programs throughout US, EU, and Japan focusing on people programs that provide interactive experiences to drive conversion of Oculus and Portal hardware products. Also, leading the global training programs to provide education on our brand and product portfolio to build brand recommendation and improve interactions with customers within retail.
Larry Cutler
CTO and Co-Founder
Larry Cutler is the Chief Technical Officer and Co-Founder of Baobab. He brings deep technical leadership over the past 20 years in the area of animation creation and development. Larry currently serves on the Digital Imaging Technology Subcommittee for the Oscar Technical Achievement Awards. He was most recently the Vice President of Solutions at Metanautix, a big data analytics startup company (acquired by Microsoft). Prior to that, Larry spent 10 years at DreamWorks Animation where he served as Global Head of Character Technology and held several leadership positions in the areas of character development, animation workflow, rigging, and character simulation. Larry began his career at Pixar Animation Studios as a Technical Director on the films Monster’s Inc., Toy Story 2, and A Bug’s Life. Larry holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in computer science from Stanford University.
Steve Smith
XR Lead
Steve Smith (yes, that's his real name) is the engineering lead for the Unreal Engine XR team at Epic Games. The XR team at Epic owns all things VR and AR in the engine, from the higher level rendering functionality around stereo rendering, all the way down to the guts of platform level support; from PSVR to Oculus Quest, from ARKit to ARCore, and a whole bunch more besides. Steve happens to think this is the best job in the world, but he might be slightly biased.
Steve has been knocking around the games industry in various guises for quite some time. In previous incarnations, he worked at Microsoft in the XBox Advanced Technology Group (ATG), helping developers get the most out of the rendering capabilities on Xbox 360 and Xbox One platforms. He led the VR team at HBO (doing experimental VR entertainment stuff), was the lead engineer at Envelop VR (a VR startup working on putting the Windows Desktop into VR, amongst other things). He was also the rendering engineer on an indie title called "Planetary Annihilation" where he helped implement rendering features in the game's custom engine, as well as achieving a 10x improvement in performance.
Joy Horvath
Senior Instructional Designer
Joy Horvath is a Senior Instructional Designer within the Real-Time Learning team at Unity Technologies, where she develops educational content for the Unity Learn platform. Prior to joining Unity, Joy taught game development for five years at different schools and tech camps in California.
Gregory Chiemingo
Technology and Platform Communications Lead
Greg Chiemingo leads technology and platform communications at Niantic, Inc. He has 25+ years of experience in PR, communications and marketing as part of global teams pioneering new platforms and technologies. He led communications for Sega’s first online gaming networks (Heat.net and the Dreamcast Network), launched Xbox Live for Microsoft and introduced the world to the first three generations of Microsoft’s Surface tablet computer. He has a M.A. from Emerson College in professional writing and B.A. from Rutgers University in English.
David Sarno
CEO
David founded Lighthaus in 2013. He is a lecturer at the Stanford School of Medicine, and covered technology for 7 years at the Los Angeles Times. A recipient of the John S. Knight Journalism fellowship at Stanford, David has a degree in computer science from Yale, and a degree in fiction writing from the University of Iowa.
Ketki Jadhav
Lead Product Designer
Ketki Jadhav is a user experience designer who leads the Product Design department at Magic Leap. She was one of the key designers leading Magic Leap’s strategic shift from consumer to enterprise and is responsible for core experiences in the operating system like Fitting, Eye Calibration, Device onboarding, Identity etc.
Joe Michaels
Chief Revenue Officer
Joe leads business development, marketing and sales for HaptX, a company which has developed the industry’s leading haptics solution that brings lifelike touch to VR and robotics. Joe has over two decades of business development experience, specializing in structuring partnerships for companies on the leading edge of new media including XR technologies and digital publishers. Prior to HaptX, Joe was Senior Director of Business Development and Strategy at Microsoft, where he negotiated partnerships on behalf of MSN, striking deals with television networks and producers, film studios, music labels, news publishers, sports leagues and many others. He was instrumental in the development of MSN Video, the first major ad-supported video service on the Internet, as well as MSN Originals, a pioneer of digital video series. Prior to Microsoft, Joe co-founded affiliate marketing company Nexchange Corporation which earned numerous U.S. patents related to e-commerce. He began his career as a television writer and producer in Washington, DC, and earned his BA from Georgetown University and MBA from The Wharton School. Joe lives and works in Seattle.
Jeremy Bailenson
Founding Director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab
Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication, Professor (by courtesy) of Education, Professor (by courtesy) Program in Symbolic Systems, a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a Faculty Leader at Stanford’s Center for Longevity. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. He spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.
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Bailenson studies the psychology of Virtual and Augmented Reality, in particular how virtual experiences lead to changes in perceptions of self and others. His lab builds and studies systems that allow people to meet in virtual space, and explores the changes in the nature of social interaction. His most recent research focuses on how virtual experiences can transform education, environmental conservation, empathy, and health. He is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford. In 2020, IEEE recognized his work with “The Virtual/Augmented Reality Technical Achievement Award”.
Andy Tsen
CEO
With a background as both a Software Engineer and a Product Manager, Andy has worked on some of the most successful mobile and Facebook games of the past decade, but nothing has him more excited than Zenith and VR.
Christoph Leuze
Director of Visualization Core at Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Dr. Christoph Leuze is director of the Visualization Core at the Stanford Wu Tsai Institute where he focuses on techniques for visualization of MRI data using virtual and augmented reality devices, and founder of Nakamir, a company aiming to enhance first responder training capabilities with augmented reality. Dr. Leuze is closely working with clinicians on techniques to visualize and register medical imaging data to the real world using optical see-through augmented reality devices. Dr. Leuze has studied at Leipzig and Chiba University and received the Otto Hahn medal of the Max Planck Society for his PhD thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.