THE DREAM/HACK
THE DREAM/HACK
THE DREAM/HACK

MIT.nano

Talis Reks

Talis Reks is the VR/AR/Gaming/Big Data Technologist at MIT.nano's Immersion Lab. Talis earned a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, specializing in Neuroscience, from Northeastern University. During his tenure at Pfizer Inc, Talis worked within the Optical Microscopy Core, where he delved into the utilization of VR and AR for scientific research and development, gaining expertise in the virtual and immersive technology space. He then served as the Operations Manager and Lead Service Technician at MindTrek VR, the world's largest Virtual Reality Arena, where he brought VR gaming to the masses and built the facilities' own ESports Arena for competitive e-sport gameplay. Talis further honed his expertise at Harvard Universities' School of Public Health, leading various VR/AR projects that involved scientific computing, data analysis, and interactive game development.

Unity 3D

Russell Sng

Russell is an avid gamer who turned that passion into a career in game development to create unique experiences in virtual space. He’s been specializing in VR for the last three years.

By integrating his background in marketing with developer insights, he is excited to enable other creators to take their projects to new heights with cutting-edge Unity features. Past projects include implementing rehabilitation tasks in VR for healthcare, game design and character animation in AI, non-traditional control schemes like eye tracking, navigation in Unity for accessibility, and integrating external hardware like the Myo armband into a gesture-based wizard spellcasting game.

Harvard Library

Matt Cook

Matt Cook is Digital Scholarship Program Manager at Harvard Library. In this role, Matt provides instruction, assists in the development of technology spaces, and leads efforts to digitize and explore heterogenous (i.e. text, artifacts, AV, etc.) material collections, at scale, while keeping “humans in the loop” through the use of augmented and virtual reality interfaces. As a researcher, Matt also studies the state and trajectory of digital scholarship generally, what it takes to manage exploratory teams in libraries, and the scholarly impact of new knowledge services related to physical fabrication and mindfulness. Find out more at mncook.net.