Ari Hollander

Ari Hollander is co-Founder, CEO, and Technical Director of Firsthand Technology. He has over 20 years of experience leading development of practical applications of virtual reality. He works to forge new paradigms in human-centered technology, pulling together diverse teams of artists and technologists and drawing on a wide range of technical and scientific disciplines to build virtual worlds that make the real world a better place. Although he had his first gold record by age 21 (album cover art) he pursued a career in Applied Science Fiction instead of Rock and Roll. Ari received his undergraduate degree in Astrophysics from the UC Berkeley in 1991 and an M.S.E. from the University of Washington in 1994 where he studied Virtual Environments and Advanced Interface Technology. His thesis project explored the idea of extending the domain of human hearing to include “auditory shapes” by carefully constructing 3D sound objects according to psychoacoustic models of spatial sound perception. He later worked as a Research Engineer at the UW Human Interface Technology Lab where he headed an alternate input systems group and served as the Creative and Technical Director of the HIT Lab Learning Center.