Ian McDowall is the CEO of Fakespace Labs, a research and products company in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the ...

. He is one of the founders of Fakespace, started in 1991, and developed hardware and software for high end scientific and government

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...

applications. Working with

Mark Bolas Mark Bolas is a researcher exploring perception, agency, and intelligence. He is a Professor of Interactive Media in the USC Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, Director of their In ...

and Eric Lorimer, the company created tools including the Boom, Push, Fs2, Pinch Gloves, Immersive Workbenches, the Rave, and a software library called VLIB. In 1998, Fakespace spun into two companies, Fakespace Systems and Fakespace Labs. In 2006, he helped develop a very wide field of view, stereoscopic,

head-mounted display A head-mounted display (HMD) is a display device, worn on the head or as part of a helmet (see Helmet-mounted display for aviation applications), that has a small display optic in front of one ( monocular HMD) or each eye ( binocular HMD). An ...

called the Wide5 to be used in the

field. The Wide5 weighs less than 1 kg and displays a stereo image over a

field of view The field of view (FoV) is the extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment. In the case of optical instruments or sensors it is a solid angle through which a detector is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation. Human ...

~150° horizontally, ~88° vertical with a dynamic resolution that has been hardware resampled from an input signal resolution of 1600x1200 at 60 Hz; the display costs around US$32,500 Other projects include development of fast frame rate projectors; light field displays; fast camera capture systems; and optical projects in the display and camera/image acquisition space.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mcdowall, Ian Living people American technology chief executives Year of birth missing (living people)