Dr. Michael J. Gourlay

Dr. Michael J. Gourlay works as a software engineer at Meta working on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.

He previously worked as a Principal Architect in the Mixed Reality division at Microsoft. There, he worked on augmented reality and virtual reality platforms such as HoloLens, Windows Holographic and Windows Mixed Reality. He previously managed AltspaceVR and led teams in the Environment Understanding group of Analog R&D, including the teams that created inside-out tracking, surface reconstruction (a.k.a. "Spatial Mapping") and computer vision-based calibration of environment sensors.

He previously worked at Electronic Arts (EA Sports) as the Software Architect for the Football Sports Business Unit, as a senior lead engineer on Madden NFL, on character physics and the procedural animation system used by EA, on Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), and as a lead programmer on NASCAR. He wrote Lynx, the visual effects system used in EA games worldwide and patented algorithms for interactive, high-bandwidth online applications. He also architected FranTk, GenEx and the Flux Capacitor, the game engine behind Connected Career and Connected Franchise.

He also developed curricula for and taught at the University of Central Florida (UCF) Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA), an interdisciplinary graduate program that teaches programmers, producers and artists how to make video games and training simulations. He also taught graduate computer science classes at Northeastern University.

He was also a Subject Matter Expert for Studio B, and wrote articles for Intel on parallelized computational fluid dynamics simulations for video games. He was also a technical editor for, and contributed material to, Real-Time 3D Rendering with DirectX and HLSL: A Practical Guide to Graphics Programming by Paul Varcholik.

Prior to joining EA, he performed scientific research using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the world's largest massively parallel supercomputers. His previous research also includes nonlinear dynamics in quantum mechanical systems, and atomic, molecular and optical physics, stealth, RADAR and massively parallel supercomputer design. He also developed pedagogic orbital mechanics software.

Michael received his degrees in physics and philosophy from Georgia Tech and the University of Colorado at Boulder.