Blair MacIntyre

Blair MacIntyre is a Professor of Augmented and Virtual Reality in the Department of Art + Design, jointly appointed with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Since the early 1990’s, he has been creating tools and experiences leveraging AR (and more recently VR) technology with the goal of understanding the potential of AR/VR as a new medium for games, entertainment, education, and work. His research, teaching, and creative interests cover all aspects of the design and implementation of interactive AR, VR, and MR environments. His current research is focused on exploring how distributed, social mixed reality can support conferences, meetings, recreation, teaching, and learning. He is interested in ethical approaches to the creation and use of immersive technologies, especially ensuring equal access to their benefits while respecting the privacy and dignity of their users. He is particularly interested in the web as a model for supporting these goals and he has been working on bringing AR to the web since 2008, when he started the open-source Argon project.

He was a Principal Research Scientist at Mozilla from 2016 to 2020, leading up their efforts to bring XR technology to the web. While at Georgia Tech, he created and ran the Qualcomm AR Game Studio with professors at SCAD-Atlanta, an Experimental Game Studio with colleagues at Georgia Tech, and shipped three handheld games during that time. He has also investigated military, industrial, and enterprise uses of AR. He is actively involved with numerous conferences and workshops, speaks and consults regularly, and has published over 100 academic papers in the field.