Vinay Narayan

Vice President, Platform Strategy & Developer Community, HTC Vive

Vinay Narayan serves as Vice President of Platform Strategy and Developer Community, overseeing the company’s platform approach to ensure VIVE is providing the best value to both consumer and commercial partners. In his role, he also manages and grows strategic relationships to bring best in class products and solutions to the market. Additionally, he leads efforts to create and foster a community of developer partners who are passionate about XR and strives to create a path of profitability for the entire industry.

He is actively involved in the development and expansion of the XR ecosystem as both a frequent speaker and sounding board for the community. He is a Board Member and Adviser to a host of emerging technology companies, associations, and institutions. He is currently the VRARA Chapter President for Seattle, Mentor for Techstars, Adviser for Commotion Incubator, and serving Board of Advisors for Washington Technology Industry Association.

Chelsea Klukas

Product Design Manager, Oculus

Chelsea Klukas is a product design manager at Oculus / Facebook AR/VR leading the design team defining the future of work and productivity including training and collaboration.

Klukas is also a founder of MakeFashion and Lumen Couture, wearable technology startups that brings high tech and high fashion to the runway. Her “Lumen Couture” projector hat, a hat that includes real-time projection mapping and visual inputs to display video on a dress, has gained international attention as the first of its kind. Prior to Facebook, Klukas was a UX design manager at Amazon focused on social consumer innovation products including Amazon Spark and Echo Look. Before Amazon she was the creative director of BeauCoo, a social shopping startup that used technology to helped women find clothes that fit.

Dr. Walterio Mayol

Professor, University of Bristol

Professor Walterio Mayol-Cuevas is member of the Computer Science Department of the University of Bristol, UK and Principal Research Scientist at Amazon, Seattle, US. His Ph.D. from the University of Oxford developed some of the earliest wearable computing systems with cameras and jointly with collaborators at Oxford and Bristol, some of the earliest examples of 6D visual SLAM in real time and its application to Robotics and Augmented Reality. Most recent work includes novel concepts of human-robot interaction, Computer Vision methods for scene understanding and algorithms for novel visual sensors and machine learning applications to asses skill visually. General co-chair for BMVC2013 and General Chair for IEEE Int Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR2016).

Dr. Evie Powell

Virtual Reality Engineer, Proprio Vision & President/CEO, Verge of Brilliance, LLC

Dr. Evie Powell is a games researcher and developer specializing in immersive interactions and prototype design. She is the lead UI developer at Proprio Vision, a surgical imaging company fusing human and computer vision into a powerful new system for surgical performance and training. Previously she founded Verge of Brilliance LLC, an independent experimental games studio in Seattle, and worked at Microsoft on natural user interfaces and the Kinect technology at Xbox.

With a unique career bridging gaming and healthcare, Dr. Powell integrates game design and UX design to create meaningful experiences that help people learn, play, and work differently. At Proprio her focus is on anticipating how surgeons think and designing a suite of tools to empower them to think and perform optimally. Dr. Powell graduated from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte with her Ph.D in Computer Science. Her research centered on socially pervasive game experiences and context aware gaming using mobile technologies. 

Stefan Alexander

VP Engineering, North

Stefan Alexander is North’s Vice President of Advanced R&D. Notably, Stefan was the first to work on North’s nascent smart glasses project in 2014. Since then, he has led a team in the development of Focals, overcoming countless obstacles to bring the device from prototype to consumer-ready product. Today, Stefan is one of North’s most visionary team members, paving the way for the future of the smart glasses category. Prior to joining the team at North, Stefan led the creation of state-of-the-art display prototypes at IGNIS Innovation. Stefan’s proclivity for research follows him outside of work as well. He is a published boardgame designer, and experiments with coffee brewing and roasting techniques.

Bernard Kress

Partner Optical Architect at Microsoft / Hololens

Dr. Bernard Kress has made over the past two decades significant scientific contributions as an engineer, researcher, associate professor, consultant, instructor, and author. He has been instrumental in developing numerous optical sub-systems for consumer electronics and industrial products, generating IP, teaching and transferring technological solutions to industry. Application sectors include laser materials processing, optical anti-counterfeiting, biotech sensors, optical telecom devices, optical data storage, optical computing, optical motion sensors, digital image projection, displays, depth map sensors, and more recently head-up and head mounted displays (smart glasses, AR and VR). His is specifically involved in the field of micro-optics, wafer scale optics, holography and nanophotonics. Dr. Kress has published numerous books and book chapters on micro-optics and has more than 32 patents granted worldwide. He is an SPIE fellow and currently serves on the board of directors for SPIE.