Innovation, entrepreneurship and building the metaverse

Returning to in-person experiences in February: for more information. Computer science PhD candidate launches company offering virtual reality streaming services Jeremy Hartmann successfully defended his dissertation in December 2021 and launched an entrepreneurial venture that took his academic research to the next level. As a graduate student in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, Hartmann's PhD was a study of merging the real and the virtual, which his new company MTION is putting into practice as a virtual reality streaming service and digital clubhouse. While pursuing his PhD, Hartmann was involved in the Waterloo innovation ecosystem and was a winner of the Concept by Velocity startup challenge for graduate students. He completed internships at Microsoft Research in 2018 and Adobe Research in 2019, and developed the technical side of his current venture in the Human Computer Interaction Lab, supervised by computer science professor Daniel Vogel. "My research program took up different types of extended reality," Hartmann said. "I've been working to build and understand different interaction techniques and different systems to enable things like augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality." Augmented reality is layered on top of our everyday physical reality, such as through a pair of digital glasses that may show information or overlaid images in physical space.