Alex Kipman | |
---|---|
Born | 1979 (age 43–44) [1] |
Other names | Technical Fellow |
Education | Rochester Institute of Technology |
Alex Kipman (born 1979) is a Brazilian engineer. He was the lead developer of the Microsoft HoloLens smartglasses and helped develop the Xbox Kinect. [2] [3]
Kipman was born in Curitiba in 1979. [1] [3] The son of a Brazilian diplomat, Kipman grew up around the world. [4] When he was seven or eight, he learned how to program the Atari 2600. [5] Later on he would go to RIT, graduating in 2001 with a degree in software engineering and joined Microsoft that same year, [6] [7] starting development on Microsoft's integrated development environment (IDE) Visual Studio. Starting 2005, he helped in the development of Microsoft Windows, until joining the Xbox department in 2008, [8] where he oversaw the acquisition of the technology for the Xbox Kinect from an Israeli company, [9] PrimeSense. [10] The product was finished two years later. [5]
In 2011, Time magazine named him to its list of its 100 Most Influential People in the World, a list consisting of leaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes. In a subsequent interview with Fast Company , he said "Software is the only art form in existence that is not bound by the confines of physics." [11] [8] [12] In 2012 he was named Inventor of the Year by the Intellectual Property Owners Association. [13] [14]
In 2013, Kipman gave the commencement speech at his alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). [15] [16]
In 2016, he gave a Ted Talk on mixed reality, called "A futuristic vision of the age of Holograms". [3] [17] [18] In a 2017 interview with Alice Bonasio, he emphasized his passion for mixed reality, stating how it gives him a sense of "displacement superpowers". [19] During the Hololens 2 reveal at the Mobile World Congress in 2019, Alex Kipman talked about how the Hololens 2 would be the "next era" of mixed reality, making it more culturally relevant. [20]
In 2019 while he was developing metaverse technologies, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C named Kipman the winner of an American Ingenuity Award, calling him a pioneer of holographic and augmented reality technology. [21] Later that year he gave a speech in Shanghai announcing that Microsoft's second-generation HoloLens would ship later that year. [22]
In 2021, he received the Longuet-Higgins Prize by the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Technical Committee at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) for fundamental contributions in computer vision. [23]
In May 2022, it was announced Kipman would leave Microsoft later in the year. A report from Business Insider (now rebranded as Insider) accused Alex Kipman and other Microsoft execs of harassment, [24] [25] later reporting that Kipman would resign his position at Microsoft after a two-month transitional period. [26]
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