This is part of a series of blog posts featuring some of the amazing talent we have working on the technology behind Ubiquity6.
This week, we’re excited to be featuring Willie Hartman. Willie is a designer at Ubiquity6 who oversees the UI / UX for our primary app as well as interaction and first party content prototypes.
Why did you choose to join Ubiquity6?
I love working with AR content and teams and I have a lot of experience in the space so I was actively looking for opportunities in AR. While I enjoyed working with iconic brands such as Star Wars and Disney to help develop their approaches in AR and VR, I wanted to join a company where I could be closer to the product and have more ownership over our direction.
When I first learned of Ubiquity6, I was working closely with Magic Leap so I had enough exposure in the industry to know that Ubiquity6’s approach was cutting edge and forward looking. The technology they are working on was something that I had never seen anywhere else. Rapid localization and persistence on a phone blew me away. I had never seen that on mobile before but I had seen it on some very specialized hardware and runtime scenarios. I saw that they had figured out a way to take all the benefits of an integrated hardware device and put it into the cloud which basically gives your phone super powers.
What are your working on right now?
One of the coolest things I am working on is our 3D and 2D menu systems to launch experiences that are placed in the real world. There are dozens if not hundreds of types of experiences that we can imagine folks will want to build, so the menu system and the abstractions we are introducing have to be flexible enough to support concepts far into the future. Our approach is to prioritize delightful primitives that encourage a structured, modular presentation of augmented reality content. This will allow anyone, from an industry insider to a layperson, to be able to open our app and see something amazing and easy to understand very quickly. Designing these formats and weaving the concepts through the product is one of the neatest things about my role at Ubiquity6.
What is the favorite part about working for Ubiquity6?
I’ve always been super excited about the AR promise our tech is enabling. Aside from the product and ownership I feel over my work, one of my favorite parts of working at Ubiquity6 is how talented the team is here. I’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in entertainment, who have incredible resources and talent and I can honestly say that Ubiquity6 has some of the best people I’ve ever worked with in my career. Everybody is very smart and good at their jobs and I constantly feel like I’m learning a lot.
I also love that people here work smart, move fast, and are not afraid to take calculated risks to benefit the long term. When you look at a company like Disney, you realize that they don’t need to ship anything. They have earned the luxury of only shipping when they have something amazing which is why every Disney movie is a hit. At Ubiquity6, the entire team is constantly pushing themselves to bring the product to the next level, and while they move fast, they make very carefully considered decisions.
What are 3 words to describe Ubiquity6?
Fast, Thoughtful, Optimistic
What advice do you have for prospective Ubiquity6 candidates?
For anyone looking to join the team, the best thing you can do to prepare yourself is to really look into and understand the AR landscape. Try to really imagine just how big this idea is and what it would take to serve the huge amount of AR content that would be necessary to create a sci-fi future. There are so many inspirations: the images, the rich descriptions, the movies, all the places you’ve ever imagined AR would work in fiction — just imagine the type of company it would take to support all of that. That’s what we’re trying to do at Ubiquity6 and I think it’s incredibly exciting.
