Christopher Messer Email & Phone Number

Orange County, Ca, Us

Austin, Texas, Us

I am the software devlopment lead for the Spatial Mapping team on the Hololens project. The Spatial Mapping team creates software that enables Mixed Reality devices (such as Hololens) to understand the shape of their environment. By sharing this understanding with developers via public APIs, we facilitate real-world spatial reasoning capabilities such as occlusion, collision, placement, navigation, and more.

Initiated the Bing Maps "Aerial 3D Cities" product (3D cities reconstructed from high-resolution multi-view aerial imagery) as development lead for a team of 4-7 developers. Led the team through all phases of the product cycle: prototyping, R&D, "selling" the concept, broader product development across multiple groups, & ultimately large-scale production of the 3D cities product which my team continues to own. Collaborated with MSR & PCV teams to leverage research & expertise within the company. Was the architect for the data creation workflow, & coordinated the product design across multiple development teams spanning several sites across the globe. Led team in supporting feature design, milestone planning, & load balancing. Serving daily as development lead, technical architect, design & algorithm & code reviewer for many domains in a broad problem space, contributing IP for:* 3D mesh simplification* multi-image mesh texturing* 3D data compression* computational precision issues* level-of-detail selection for renderingAt this point in the project, I spend most of my time on managing a team of 6 developers; the team has recently inherited _all_ product development for the aerial imagery on Bing Maps (both 3D data and 2D ortho views). Daily activity includes coordination with production ops team to assess blocking issues & assigning out work, defining goals & new work for the next milestone, coaching my team members, reviewing & contributing to feature designs, and collaborating with peer teams to define the path forward.

Initiated the "Streetside cubes" project as development lead for the data product (team of 4 developers for 9 months). Designed the data product & compute pipeline for generating the product; led the team in defining & scheduling the work-items required to build it. Served as technical expert & design reviewer for the team. Collaborated & contributed to overall product design across development teams spanning multiple sites. Provided day-to-day technical guidance for 5-15 developers & dev leads as the project grew.Became technical lead for the Streetside data product for 8-10 developers (led definition of work & product features, provided technical guidance, and helped with task scheduling, without direct management responsibility). Monitored team's progress, drove towards product milestones, provided constructive feedback to individual team members. Taught group how to use profiling for targeted optimization; used SQL to perform audits on product deliveries, identify bottlenecks, measure failure modes, & assess scope / impact + plan mitigation strategies, audited application of fixes. Contributed to camera hardware improvements & IP. Coached team members in coding & scientific thinking.Other projects: contributed functionality, implementation, & ideas to a variety of other products within the group. Produced analysis + presentation materials to identify & communicate issues around image artifacts due to a combination of sensor design + high-altitude flying.

Individual contributor on the VirtualEarth / Streetside project. Took ownership of image compositing, panorama generation, RAW camera image decoding, and other image-processing algorithms. Lead the team technically in algorithm & software development. Helped to drive the team's progress by assisting with debug & performance optimization issues as an expert developer.

4+ years as a Developer in the Windows Media Codec group. This is the team responsible for WMA (audio codec), WMV (video codec), HDPhoto / JPEG-XR (image codec), and also some audio / video signal processing filters for Windows. My responsibilities were primarily on WMA.Shipped products include Windows Vista, Windows CE, XBOX360, and WMA encoder & decoder porting kits for 3rd parties. Activities included code performance optimization, fixed-point algorithm development, precision analysis, & implementation, debugging, build & test support. Supported 3rd parties that were porting WMA encoders or decoders. Supported XBOX360 team in porting WMA encoder to PowerPC. Implemented WMA-Pro LBR (low-bit-rate) decoder in fixed-point for use on DSP chips. Invented & implemented an inverse-telecine algorithm for the WMV (Windows Media Video) encoder. Co-developed "headphone virtualization" algorithm & software for rendering multi-channel content through headphones while providing a compelling "surround-sound" experience. Co-author of several patents related to above activities.