TC Sessions AR/VR 2018
October 18, 2018 — Los Angeles
Speakers
Parham Aarabi
Founder and CEO ModiFace
Mariana Acuna
Chief Product Officer & Co-founder Opaque Studios
Adam Arrigo
Co-Founder & CEO Wave
Gil Baron
Co-founder & CEO Mindshow
Derek Belch
Co-Founder and CEO STRIVR
Niko Bonatsos
Founder & Managing Director Verdict Capital
Nathan Burba
Co-Founder & President Survios
Greg Castle
Managing Partner, Founder & CEO Anorak Ventures
Ashley Crowder
CEO & Co-Founder VNTANA
Sophia Dominguez
Clorama Dorvilias
CEO & Founder Debias VR
Maureen Fan
Co-Founder & CEO Baobab Studios
Ross Finman
AR Niantic
Shawn Frayne
Co-Founder & CEO Looking Glass Factory
Brett Jones
CEO & Co-Founder Lightform
Ficus Kirkpatrick
Director, Camera Facebook
James Iliff
Morgan Mercer
Founder, CEO Vantage Point
Matt Miesnieks
Jacob Mullins
Partner Shasta Ventures
Eitan Pilipski
SVP Snap
Guy Primus
CEO Valence Community
Yelena Rachitsky
Executive Producer of Experiences Oculus
Peter Rojas
Partner Betaworks Ventures
Kirin Sinha
CEO & Founder Illumix
Jon Snoddy
Co-Founder & CTO Big Stage
Jay Tucker
Executive Director Center for Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES) UCLA Anderson School of Management
Catherine Ulrich
Venture Partner FirstMark
Allison Wood
Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder Camera IQ
Stephanie Zhan
Partner Sequoia Capital
Parham Aarabi is the Founder and CEO of ModiFace, the world’s leading beauty-focused augmented reality company which was acquired by L’Oréal in 2018. He is also a Professor at the University of Toronto focused on applied AI. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in Electrical Engineering at the age of 24, subsequently becoming one of the youngest professors in University of Toronto’s history. He is the recipient of numerous awards including MIT’s TR35 “world’s Top Young Innovator” award, the Premier’s Catalyst Award for Innovation, the IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Award, the Canada Research Chair, and University of Toronto’s Inventor of the Year award. Parham has authored over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, 30 patents, and two books, mostly focused on Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence.
Mariana is a technologist, connector, and entrepreneur. During her years at The Foundry, she focused on virtual reality post-production workflows, as well as being the Head of Product Specialists in the Americas. Mariana was a pioneer in her hometown Mexico City, where she founded the first VR and 360 video production and branding agency – JoltVR. Most recently she co-founded Opaque Studios, where she leads the roadmap for new and existing technology developing tools for Virtual Production using VR & AR, transforming the way filmmaking is done today. She was one of the ten finalists of the Women Startup Challenge VR and AI, she completed the certification in “Artificial Intelligence – Applied to Business Strategy” from MIT. Prior to her switch into tech, she worked as an on-set VFX supervisor & senior digital artist and has over 13 years’ experience in the motion picture industry working at such studios as Sony Imageworks, CIS Hollywood, Digital Domain, HBO, Columbia Pictures and Fuse FX.
Adam is passionate about building radically new experiences at the intersection of music, games, and technology, which ultimately bring people closer to each other. He has 13 years of experience working on music tech products as a game designer and product leader. While at Harmonix, he worked on AAA titles like Rock Band, Dance Central, Disney’s Fantasia, Harmonix Music VR, and more. He led the development of the 2015 Music App of the year Ditty, at LA-based music tech startup Zya (acq by Google). He is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and synth enthusiast.
As Co-founder & CEO at Mindshow, Gil Baron brings his vast expertise in storytelling and the digital effects process to make storytelling possible in Virtual Reality. Mindshow is creating revolutionary software for creativity and collaboration around storytelling in VR, and has been at the forefront of thought leadership in the space since the company’s founding in 2014. Before launching Mindshow, Gil was a creative director, visual effects supervisor and an active DGA guild director who created graphically driven commercials for award winning directors and nationally recognized brand names. Gil has built teams and scaled operations successfully – as such, he was part of an executive team that nurtured Method Studios strategic growth from less than 30 to over 600 employees in over 9 locations worldwide. As a CG technical supervisor for feature films, he created the 3d for the signature CG bullet wake effects on the first Matrix bullet time sequences, in addition to many additional feature credits.
Derek Belch is a Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of STRIVR.
Niko Bonatsos is the Founder and Managing Director at Verdict Capital. Niko leads the first money round in ridiculously ambitious tech founders who are building in categories that don’t yet have a name. Niko has been an early stage VC for 15+ years now and was an early investor in companies such as Discord, General Intuition, Hive, Mercor, Pylon, Remote.com, Snap and Triumph Arcade. Prior to becoming a VC Niko was a perpetual student and collected a few degrees from NTUA, the University of Cambridge and Stanford University.
Nathan is an entrepreneur, product developer and software engineer. In 2013 he co-founded Survios, a virtual reality company headquartered in Los Angeles, California. During his time as CEO, the company raised $54M of venture capital funding and grew to over 100 employees. Survios is now widely recognized as one of the premiere VR game developers in the world. In 2018 he transitioned to the role of President. Survios develops virtual reality software and games including the titles Raw Data, Sprint Vector, Electronauts, Creed: Rise To Glory, Battlewake, The Walking Dead Onslaught and Westworld Awakening. It also operates Survios branded Virtual Reality Arcades and a worldwide VR software distribution network operating in over 50 countries. Before founding Survios, Nathan was the Director of Product Holodeck, a joint research effort between the Mixed Reality Lab and the Advanced Games program at the University of Southern California. Nathan is the author of the Cocos2d-iPhone Game Development Cookbook. He also has 1 published research paper and 2 patents pending issuance.
Greg is the Managing Partner of Anorak Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on emerging technology. Based in Silicon Valley, the firm focuses on VR/AR, robotics, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, deep learning and artificial intelligence. Portfolio companies include Against Gravity, Catalog, Lightform and 6d.ai. Prior to Anorak, Greg was an active angel investor with 26 investments counting Flexport and two exits including Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook for $2bln. With strong ties to the VR/AR community, Greg focuses much of his time investing in, and mentoring startups in this sector. Previously, Greg led marketing for the popular game development company Scaleform (acq. 2011) and for Autodesk’s Game Technology Group.
Ashley Crowder is the co-founder and CEO of VNTANA, an industry leading augmented reality platform for creating and distributing premium mixed reality experiences. Prior to co-founding VNTANA she graduated from USC with a bachelors and masters in engineering and gained valuable manufacturing experience at Gulfstream, Northrop Grumman and BP. She leverages her engineering background to guide VNTANA’s overall direction and technology development. Ashley was featured as one of USC’s leading engineering CEOs of 2016. Ashley is a part of the Microsoft Early Developer Program along with the Microsoft Bizspark Plus program. Ashley has been a speaker at SXSW, Digital Summit, Internet Summit, Augmented World Expo, TEDx Venice, the World Economic Forum’s Global Growth Companies & Technology Pioneers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, The Montgomery Summit, Siemer Summit, Digital LA, and others.
Sophia Dominguez is the Head of Camera Platform Partnerships at Snap. Previously, she was the CEO & Co-founder of Svrf, the first search engine for AR and VR, which was acquired in 2020. In 2015, she was the Entrepreneur in Residence at Rothenberg Ventures and was the first person to travel the world with Google Glass and document how people reacted to seeing and experiencing it for the first time. Sophia graduated from NYU Gallatin in 2013 with an individualized B.S. degree in “How Technology Impacts Human Interaction.”
Clorama is the Founder/CEO of Debias VR. She has been researching and developing applied vr experiences exploring bias and empathy since 2014 for a various sectors in the industry. Her mission is to transform the bias training industry towards more engaging, measurable, and effective solutions, leveraging VR technology and game simulations. She has a Master’s Degree in Interaction Design Communication from the University of the Arts in London where she created her first VR app gamifying anti-bias training for the workplace in 2015. She was a selected winner for Oculus Launch Pad 2017, and is also a Product Manager in Applied Machine Learning at Facebook.
Maureen Fan is CEO & Co-Founder of the 2 time Emmy-award winning and leading immersive animationstudio Baobab Studios, whose mission is to inspire you to dream by bringing out your sense of wonder.Baobab was started by industry leaders Maureen Fan (Zynga VP of Games, Farmville Franchise), EricDarnell (Director of all 4 Madagascar films), and Larry Cutler (Dreamworks’ Head of Character Tech,Pixar TD Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc, Oscar tech judge).
Ross is leading the vision and development of augmented reality (AR) mapping at Niantic, Inc., an innovative company building cutting edge planet-scale AR technology that can be leveraged to create “real world” interactive experiences that foster exploration, exercise and social interaction. Obsessed with everything connecting the physical and digital worlds, Ross founded Escher Reality in 2016 to focus on exploring the intersection of digital and physical worlds, augmented reality (AR), and computer vision, which was which was acquired by Niantic in 2018. Prior to founding Escher, Ross spent seven years on his graduate research at MIT in 3-D perception and mapping. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering with a focus on Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in three years.
Shawn Frayne is the CEO and co-founder of Looking Glass Factory, a Brooklyn-based startup that makes the Looking Glass, a desktop holographic display for 3D creators that groups of people can see and touch without VR or AR headgear. His favorite hologram is the shark that tries to swallow Marty outside the Holomax theatre in Back to the Future II. Shawn has his B.S. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Brett Jones is the CEO of Lightform, a company creating the first design tool for projected augmented reality. Brett has been prototyping new technologies to create magical experiences for the past decade. Before starting Lightform, he worked at Disney Imagineering and Microsoft Research. At Microsoft he was a co-creator of IllumiRoom and RoomAlive, two ground-breaking projects that turned regular living rooms into immersive projected AR experiences. He has a PhD in computer vision from UIUC.
In the future, AR glasses will merge art, information, and people from the virtual world together seamlessly with the real world. Ficus Kirkpatrick leads the Camera team at Facebook, building a diverse community of creators and consumers to realize this vision today – on the smartphone camera people already have. Prior to joining Facebook, Ficus was an engineering director at Google and a founding member of the Android team, helping to grow the Android platform from its inception to powering over 2 billion devices around the world. Earlier in his career, Ficus also worked on mobile and platform technology and products including the Danger Hiptop (also known as the T-Mobile Sidekick) and BeOS, a media-focused operating system.
James Iliff is Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Survios, a virtual reality startup focusing on engaging games and immersive technology. Iliff is the creative director of the breakthrough action-combat VR game Raw Data, adrenaline platformer Sprint Vector and upcoming cinematic boxing game Creed: Rise to Glory. As a virtual reality game designer with a background in HMDs and motion capture, he also works in the areas of UX design, avatar embodiment, interaction design, world building, spatial storytelling, branding, PR and marketing. He has spoken at the Wearable Technologies Conference and Sweden Game Conference, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, VentureBeat GamesBeat Summit, and Gamasutra among others. Prior to co-founding Survios, he was the producer of Project Holodeck, a full-motion virtual reality project at the USC Interactive Media and Games Division.
Morgan Mercer is the founder of the VR-based enterprise training company, Vantage Point. Vantage Point’s suite of immersive training tools is initially aiming at tackling Anti-Sexual Harassment and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training. Mercer was recently regarded as one of the Top 10 Female Tech Innovators [in history] by TechRadar and has been featured in 4+ dozen publications including WIRED, NPR, The Economist, Vogue and more. Mercer was regarded by the UN Women chapter as a “Champion of Change” in the ‘Era of Equity’.
Jacob Mullins is a managing director at Shasta Ventures, where he has invested in VR/AR since 2016.
itan Pilipski is VP, Camera Platform at Snap Inc., where he leads the company’s team of designers and engineers building and scaling Snap’s augmented reality platform. Previously, Eitan served as VP, Engineering at Vuforia where he assembled a world class team to build the company’s AR and VR platforms. Under his leadership, the team spearheaded new capabilities in the fields of 3D reconstruction, sensor fusion and image recognition which were incorporated into partnerships with Lego, BMW and Mattel. From 1999 to 2010, Eitan was Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm leading the commercialization of innovative R&D projects in mobile video and 4G wireless.
Guy Primus is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Virtual Reality Company (VRC), a market leader in the production and distribution of cinematic Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality content. Guy’s co-founders in VRC include two-time Oscar winner Robert Stromberg, who directed Disney’s Maleficent, and Chris Edwards, the CEO of previsualization studio The Third Floor. Prior to co-founding VRC, Guy was Chief Operating Officer at Overbrook Entertainment, the film and television production company founded by actor Will Smith and producer James Lassiter. Before joining Overbrook, Guy served as director of digital media at Starbucks Entertainment, group product marketing manager at Microsoft’s MSN Entertainment, and as vice president of strategy & planning at Blue Flame, the marketing and advertising agency founded by Sean “Diddy” Combs. Guy is chairman emeritus of the advisory board of Georgia Tech’s top-ranked School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and is a member of the Georgia Tech Advisory Board. Guy is also a member of the board of trustees of Southern California Public Radio, Park Century School and The VR Society, and is a voting member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (The Emmys). Guy earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech and his MBA from Harvard Business School. Guy, his wife, Heather, their son, Grant, and their daughter, Clarke, reside in the Beachwood Canyon area of Los Angeles.
Yelena Rachitsky is an Executive Producer of Experiences at Oculus, overseeing dozens of groundbreaking, narrative-driven VR projects that range from Pixar’s first VR project to original independent work. Prior to Oculus, she was the Creative Producer at Future of Storytelling (FoST), which aims to change how people communicate and tell stories in the digital age. Yelena also helped program for the Sundance Film Festival and Institute’s New Frontier program and spent four years in the documentary division at Participant Media, working on films like Food Inc. and Waiting for Superman. She’s passionate about big creative ideas that will make technology meaningful.
Peter Rojas is a partner at Betaworks Ventures, a seed stage venture capital fund based in New York and San Francisco. He is also the co-founder of several startups, including Weblogs Inc. (acquired by AOL in 2005), where he created and was editor-in-chief of both Engadget and Joystiq; Gizmodo (formerly Gawker Media, now part of Univision); music discovery service RCRD LBL; and gdgt, a social commerce platform (acquired by AOL in 2013). Prior to Betaworks Ventures he worked at AOL as VP of Strategy and later as Co-director of Alpha, the company’s experimental products group.
Kirin Sinha, 25, is the founder and CEO of Illumix, a Lightspeed and Maveron backed AR gaming and technology company focused on developing adaptive and immersive experiences for the mobile phone. Previously, she founded SHINE for Girls, a national nonprofit targeted at encouraging middle school girls to pursue the study of mathematics. Not your typical gamer or CEO, Kirin is a Marshall Scholar and holds Masters degrees with honors in mathematics and statistics focused on machine learning, specifically computer vision, from the University of Cambridge and LSE respectively. She received a degree in electrical engineering / computer science and mathematics from MIT, and her MBA from Stanford University.
Jay Tucker is the Executive (Managing) Director for the Center for Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES) at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. In that role, Tucker regularly brings c-suite executives and industry leaders together with the business school community to explore the future of entertainment through thought leadership, educational offerings and conferences. He has launched partnerships with Hollywood studios, device makers, service providers and professional organizations – facilitating the exchange of ideas and development of new initiatives. His current areas of focus include monetization, business analytics, emerging technologies, immersive content, and diversity and inclusion. Previously, Tucker served as a Director at the Institute for Communication Technology Management at USC. He founded Silicon Beach @USC, a massive initiative featuring a venture competition that awarded $50K per year and a conference focused on startups, technology and digital content. Tucker also curated, and taught in, a series of executive education courses focused on leadership frameworks for the digital age. Tucker is passionate about entrepreneurship and serves as an advisor to the Hollywood Post and other early stage ventures. He holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, an MA in Instructional and Learning Technologies from Columbia University, and a dual BA from Stanford University in Political Science and African & Afro-American Studies. He resides in Santa Monica, CA.
Catherine Ulrich, a Managing Director of FirstMark Capital, invests in a broad range of enterprise and consumer start-ups. She has a deep passion for and expertise in health and wellness, AI, and behavior change. Prior to joining FirstMark, she was the Chief Product Officer at Shutterstock (NYSE: SSTK) where she was responsible for product strategy and execution across all of Shutterstock’s offerings and brands including the company’s move into machine learning/computer vision and creative editing tools. She was also the first Chief Product Officer at Weight Watchers (NYSE: WTW), responsible for their global digital and retail experiences. Catherine holds an AB in Engineering and a certificate in Public Health Policy from Harvard College.
Allison Wood is the CEO and co-founder of Camera IQ, the world’s first augmented reality platform for camera marketing. Since inception, they have worked with major brands and platforms to build and distribute captivating camera media at scale. Allison has been creating new realities since she started her dual MFA in Interior Design and Digital Interactive Art at Pratt Institute. Exploring the intersection between design, architecture, and human interaction, Allison has spent her career building technology to bridge our online and offline worlds.
Stephanie Zhan is a partner on the early-stage investing team at Sequoia Capital. She loves partnering with companies across consumer and enterprise, starting at the earliest of stages at the Seed and Series A and helping them scale over time. She is on the board of companies including Rec Room, Linear, Middesk, Sunday, and Brud.