Now, Hartmann has launched a new venture, which offers virtual reality streaming services to gamers as well as a virtual club house.
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.”
What Hartmann’s company MTION is doing is unique in that it builds a virtual reality space that then incorporates the physical reality into that space, both through the design of the space and through sources of video, audio and other feeds.
“You still get the benefits of being immersed inside the virtual world but then you can also take aspects and pieces of reality and impose them into your virtual space,” Hartmann said.
Read more in the feature article in Waterloo News.