Frontier Tech Event: Mobile Augmented Reality Makers

A night of presentations and panel discussions

On May 6, 2019, augmented reality and computer vision/Machine learning enthusiasts and professionals came to our San Francisco campus to hear from panel experts and watch presentations.

Augmented reality companies in attendance included:

Lenovo, a leading personal-technology company that produces innovative PCs and mobile Internet devices. A global Fortune 500 company, Lenovo is one of the largest PC vendor and fourth-largest smartphone company.

8th Wall is a cross-platform development solution for building augmented-reality experiences that run on mobile Web and iOS/Android applications. The company has a total funding of $10.4 million.

Fireside Chat Panelists

Nicholas Butko
Director of Engineering at 8th Wall
Former staff software engineer at Google
Post-Doc, UCSD Machine Perception Lab
Ph.D, Cognitive Science, UC San Diego

Nicholas Butko is the architect of 8th Wall's computer-vision technology and products, including the company’s industry-leading, on-device real-time camera application framework. Prior to 8th Wall, he worked at Google as a staff software engineer and manager, leading teams in Google Photos to develop product experiences using computer vision, and in Google Music to optimize product latency and data-infrastructure reliability.

Rigel Benton
Interaction Designer at 8th Wall
Former XR Developer at Banjo

Rigel Benton previously worked as a cinematographer before transitioning into AR/VR development and creating experiences for clients such as Salesforce, Warner Bros. and Stanford School of Medicine. He also designed PLNAR, an ARKit app for measurements. Rigel holds a B.S. in Radio-Television-Film from The University of Texas at Austin.

Mayan Shay May-Raz
Augmented Reality SDK Product Manager at Lenovo
Former AR SDK Product Manager at Meta

Mayan Shay May-Raz manages the software for Lenovo’s AR commercial products. She is an AR specialist with a background in UX/UI research and design for spatial computing. Previously, Mayan worked as an SDK product manager at Meta, a pioneering company in AR.

Fireside Chat Moderator

Sheng Huang
Head of Business Operations and Partnerships at Sturfee

Sheng Huang is the Head of Business Operations at Sturfee, a computer-vision company that creates the world’s first city-scale visual-positioning service (VPS). Prior to Sturfee, he was an early member of Niantic Labs, helping the company scale user operations to support millions on Ingress. Before Niantic, Sheng was part of the strategy team in Google’s internal incubator for local products such as Wallet, Offers and indoor maps. Sheng received his M.B.A. at the London Business School and undergraduate business and legal degrees from UC Berkeley.

Organizer

Epic Events is a premier event organizer of 150-plus attendee meetups and 450-plus attendee parties, conferences and other events on technology-related topics, primarily on frontier technology. Epic Events include the AR+CV (Augmented Reality and Computer Vision), Computer Vision and Deep Learning, Machine Learning and B+DLT (Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies) meetup groups in San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles:

San Francisco:

New York City:

Los Angeles:

Check out photos from the event:


Fireside chat moderator Sheng Huang (right) interviewing panelist Nicholas Butko fro 8th Wall

 

 


Fireside chat panelist Rigel Benton (left) presents to the audience and moderator Sheng Huang (right)

 


Fireside chat panelist Rigel Benton (left) presents to the audience and moderator Sheng Huang (right)

 


Fireside chat moderator Sheng Huang (right) addresses the audience