Andy Yoder Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Wa, Us

Seattle, Wa, Us

Greater Seattle Area

At the forefront of Walmart’s push into the future of retail, as part of Project Archer leadership I played a key part in getting the Innovation Lab's AR efforts started and then in building real applications. My role involved: • Pioneering AR Technologies: Leading dynamic teams in the development of groundbreaking AR solutions, including digital twin tooling and precision alignment technologies, that serve as the backbone for immersive retail experiences. • Enhancing User Interfaces: Directing the creation of intuitive, data-driven 3D user interfaces that simplify complex retail operations, making them more engaging for employees and customers alike. • Streamlining Operations with AR: Innovating Walmart's processes by overseeing the development of AR applications that boost employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Key projects include: - Online Pick and Delivery Application Prototype: Revolutionized the grocery picking process, enabling associates to efficiently fulfill online orders while ensuring customers receive exactly what they asked for. - Back-of-Store Inventory Management: Developed a prototype application leveraging AR for inventory tracking and management, optimizing getting products out to the sales floor, where sales actually happen.

Seattle, Washington

As a member of the Seattle Magic Leap team I worked on internal demos and prototypes to show-off the capabilities of Magic Leap’s AR hardware and created tools and libraries to speed up AR development.Ultimately much of this work was released as a series of “Goat Labs Developer Samples” demonstrating how to build non-trivial AR applications in Unity and Unreal. These samples presented how to perform character navigation and animation in dynamic real-world environments, culminating in an application where virtual goats walk, run and jump around on the couches, chairs and tables in your real world room.Products Shipped: • Goat Labs Developer Samples

Greater Seattle Area

Laughing Nomad, in partnership with Three Story House created a new approach to interactive storytelling: Ink Spotters. Ink Spotters was a Unity based mobile iOS application that was part game, part comic book.In addition to Ink Spotters, Laughing Nomad offered contracting and consulting services. My role in these services included: • Created Augmented Reality prototypes for Magic Leap on a contract basis for their Head Mounted Display, the Magic Leap 1. • Provided consultation services to Posed2 a Seattle startup. Essentially operated as Posed2's CTO/head of engineering as they got underway and built their first MVP. Product involved games, AI and a career path recommendation system. I was the engineering face of the company and led a small internal team of developers and a data scientist.Accomplishments: • Developed AR prototypes on prototype hardware. We demoed these to the CEO of Magic Leap and they got a great reception. These demos were later shown on stage at several conferences/public presentations. • Successfully executed a large-scale test of Posed2’s technology involving 5000 people. This allowed us to validate our hypothesis that data about a player's play style could be used to accurately predict a player's personality traits. • Developed and shipped Ink Spotters on behalf of Three Story House. Enabling Three Story House to begin pitching this tech and game system to other companies looking to make games around their IP. Products Shipped: • Ink Spotters 1: The Art of Detection • Ink Spotters 2: The Last Breath

Greater Seattle Area

Fantoccini Studios was created to make character animation accessible to everyone. We developed PuppetShorts as a Unity based iOS and Android application which allowed people with no animation experience to create short character based animations and share them with their friends.Accomplishments: • Developed application software to enable users to create animations using patent pending technology. • Pitched PuppetShorts technology to Twitch.Products shipped: • PuppetShorts

Greater Seattle Area

At PopCap I primarily focused on tools and shared technology, and led the Shared Tech Group responsible for evolving and maintaining PopCap's proprietary game engine.Accomplishments: • Successfully enabled Peggle 2, Plants vs Zombies 2 and Bejeweled Blitz to ship using the same engine code-base • Coordinated with game teams to prioritize engine features to align with ship dates. • Architected a server based system allowing games to be content driven. The system also added a runtime game object system to the PopCap engine allowing authoring of data and content while games were running as well as providing a standard data pipeline around which content authoring tools could be developed. • Stress tested backend services for Plants Vs. Zombies 2 to ensure it would be able to successfully handle more than 15 million users on launch day.Products shipped: • Plants Vs. Zombies 2 • Plants Vs. Zombie Heros • Bejeweled 3 • Bejeweled Blitz • Bejeweled Stars • Peggle 2 • Solitaire Blitz

Greater Seattle Area

Loose Cannon Studios simultaneously shipped Tornado Outbreak on the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles using an engine and tool chain developed in-house. I was responsible for tools architecture and implementation. Accomplishments: • Developed extensible game object data formats. Created C# tools and libraries to operate on these formats and to produce final files for runtime use in the game. Created a C++ Maya plugin to provide easy access for reviewing and modifying game data. • Implemented runtime systems for object culling/visibility testing, runtime game object database and animation instancing. • General coding, cleanup, bug fixing, hacking, making the game work • The “keep the game fitting in memory” guy. Developed procedures to reduce commits that pushed the game over memory. Analyzed and reduced memory usage of the entire game. • Mentoring of junior team membersProducts shipped: • Tornado Outbreak (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii)

Greater Seattle Area

Responsible for product engineering efforts. Product involved a local java application to produce dynamic websites enabling photographers to sell images.Worked with co-founders to set company strategy and products with the goal of building a sustainable "lifestyle" company.Accomplishments: • Developed complex interactive web interfaces in flash and HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX. Implemented e-commerce systems and product activation/unlocking mechanisms. • Created a system for rapid provision of domain/website hosting, including HTTP Server configuration, DNS and email handling for customer domains. • Researched and evaluated 3rd party tools, competitors products, and server/hosting options

Greater Seattle Area

Responsible for creating a DRM system to wrap existing casual game executables. This was then coupled to a micro-payment and subscription payment system allowing games to, for example, support a free trial period with payment required to continue after the initial trial.Accomplishments: • Created a working prototype of a micropayments system that enabled the unlocking of casual games. This enabled us to pitch this technology to potential customers and partners.

Greater Seattle Area

WildTangent developed and published PC casual games using their Java-based WebDriver technology. At a time when Microsoft’s commitment to Java on Windows was in question, I was brought on to help to mitigate WebDriver’s dependence on Java.Accomplishments: • Lead development of a C++ component-based system at the core of WildTangent’s casual games platform. • Created system for dynamic script bindings allowing games to be written in different languages (initially implemented for javascript, java and python). • Responsible for network caching performance, work achieved a tenfold increase in performance. • Performed security review of WildTangent technologies, identified potential exploits and developed fixes. • Reverse engineered other company’s products to identify those infringing on WildTangent patents • Responsible for developing a C++ library of fast data structures, file access APIs, and scripting/programmable control systems. These systems were used on both the PC and Xbox.

Greater Seattle Area

“Hired-gun” to identify causes of recurrent failures in server software. Identified the cause of failures and presented options for correcting.

Greater Seattle Area

A spin-off from Adobe at the dawn of the digital camera age, PictureIQ was charged with creating an accessible/casual equivalent to Photoshop. My work ranged from developing embedded software for consumer devices, to interactive web-based photo manipulation services.Accomplishments: • Architected a skinnable HTML widget set and web-based image editing framework (PictureIQ PhotoTools®). PhotoTools was deployed by Yahoo!, OFoto (Kodak), Zing, Lycos and others. • Developed web based management/configuration interface for TransForce, a server appliance for transcoding images to formats appropriate to a wide array of mobile devices in the Japanese market. • Ported Java VM threading enhancements to embedded VxWorks running on the Sega Dreamcast.Products shipped: • Dream PhotoFun (Sega Dreamcast)

Greater Seattle Area

Crave Entertainment’s Seattle team was formed out of a desire to develop an American RPG. I joined early on to create the game engine and content pipelines for Shadow Madness, an RPG for the PlayStation.Accomplishments: • Developed scene creation tool used to create all game content. • Created game-specific scripting language, associated byte-code compiler, and runtime interpreter. • Mentored engineering intern.Products shipped: • Shadow Madness (Sony PlayStation)

Greater Pittsburgh Area

After interning at FORE Systems for two years, I joined as a full time employee following graduation.Accomplishments: • Created high level transaction based APIs on top of SNMP. • Performed source code control and integration tasks. • Mentored newly hired integration engineer.