David Lawson Email & Phone Number

San Leandro, California

Santa Clara, California

Developed virtual reality software development kit on Android, MacOS, and Windows for light weight head mounted display. Android development was on Snapdragon platform. Unity VR plugins created for Windows and MacOS.

Greater San Diego Area

Developed virtual reality software development kit on Linux and Windows for light weight head mounted display. Created custom Wayland VR display manager to replace X-Windows on Linux.

San Diego

Used goal oriented AI planning, utility theory, and constraint solvers to create user-driven story plots while still providing story author with control of relationship forming and high-level story arcs. Logic "bricks" provided designers and users with a simple tool for programming AI goals, plots, character drives and potential relationships.

San Diego

Worked with the Zeroth neuromorphic computing group in Corporate R&D division. There I was programming lead for virtual world and robotics simulator used for computer vision, perception, and motor control research. One challenge was the physical simulation of robot systems, sensors and actuators. This required understanding of current robotic sensor limitations and modeling of IMUs, RGBD cameras, sonar, etc, Created a training framework to provide stimulus to brain chips and verify perception and motor control models.

Technical representative for core management team working closely with production, art, design, QA, and corporate technology group. Managed technical team of 30 engineers, performing hiring, mentoring, and career development. . Provided strategic technical direction, wrote, and reviewed TDDs for production pipeline tools and game engine. Architect and developer of new cinematic tool used to author content for NBA “The Life” story mode.

Managed the technical staff for its NBA Franchise as well as providing technical direction for tools and the game engine. Responsible for developing and communicating three year technical strategy to advance our core character behavior AI and animation systems. Evaluated middle-ware technologies to incorporating including physics and advanced IK into our behavior system. Provided system level coding support for entity system, replay system, memory systems, file systems, camera, cut scene, graphics, audio and animation.

Responsible for technical leadership, schedules, task assignments, and hiring of programming staff. Grew technical team from 4 to 20 engineers. On the technical side, I continued to add features to 3D graphics engine and create a new character animation system. This system used blend pose trees which in its day was cutting edge. With limited CPU and memory budgets of Playstation 2, I focused a good deal of attention on memory and performance optimizations of game and graphics engines.

Developed Playstation 2 graphics engine down to hardware level, including Maya Exporter, asset pipeline tools, run-time engine, and all VU render pipelines. Wrote and optimized 3D math library for SIMD vector units. This was all under demanding pressure as we were a launch game title for PS2.

Ported Dynamix Studio's Darkstar 3D software rasterizing engine to Direct3D. Ported OpenGL based graphics engine to Direct3D. Work supported release of ProPilot 2000 flight simulator and Trophy Bass 3D games.

Real-time simulation and game development in both the defense and entertainment division. Created visualization simulations for Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) pilot and mission training scenarios. Led video game programming team that created aircraft/combat racing game released into Location-based entertainment centers like GameWorks and Dave & Busters.

Consultant for a range of companies in aerospace, wireless data, and electronics industries. Technical projects included radar operator training system, real-time simulation, data communication terminals, embedded systems and device drivers.

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