This post was originally published using Medium.com on May 31st, 2018.
Today I’m thrilled to announce I have joined AWS as a Principal Engineer on the Amazon Sumerian team! A little context on why I’m so excited about this opportunity…
For those who don’t know, the past five years of my career have been spent working on a Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality OS. Two years ago, I realized that as VR/AR hardware reaches wider audiences, people will expect more than installable apps and games. They will expect the Web.
In fact, extrapolating from phone/tablet usage today, half of time spent in VR/AR could be spent browsing the Web. That realization began my journey into what became the W3C Immersive Web group and our work to design and build the WebXR Devices APIs to enable that future.
Imagine a world in which, with one click on a website, you are able to tour college campuses, can get help fixing a printer, or see furniture in your home before buying.
And that brings me back to why I’m so excited about Amazon Sumerian. A big part of making that dream a reality, is empowering 3D content creation at a broad scale. But very few developers today, especially on the web, have 3D development experience.
For those folks, Sumerian could be a game changer. No prior knowledge of 3D is needed, the interactive scene designer runs right in the browser, and coding/scripting is done in JavaScript!
Not to mention, because Sumerian is in AWS, it’s easy to add on other AWS products like Lambda and more. Sumerian even provides pre-built 3D characters called hosts with natural language capabilities wired up using Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly.
tl;dr? I couldn’t be happier about joining Amazon and the Sumerian team! It’s an amazing time to be part of the Immersive Web ❤