CO-FOUNDER

Michael was the co-founder and Chief Software Architect at Oculus, which revived the virtual reality industry and became a part of Facebook in 2014. At Oculus, Michael led the software team for Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2, including the rendering runtime, game engine integrations and public APIs of the Oculus SDK.

Michael's favorite moments at Oculus included working with a small team to define early VR APIs, iterating on ever elusive distortion correction, fighting latency, seeing positional tracking come to life as you looked around objects in space, and taking VR to the next level "timewarp" reprojection. Later at Facebook, Michael helped build the Oculus Web VR team which shipped the Carmel browser and React VR.

CO-FOUNDER

Michael was the co-founder and CTO at Scaleform, a user interface middleware company sold to Autodesk, Inc. He led the development of Scaleform GFx, a leading user interface toolkit that shipped in hundreds of games including Mass Effect and Crysis. Core functionality of Scaleform included GPU-accelerated vector graphics and a bytecode VM to enable playback of Flash content inside of game engines on PCs, consoles and mobile devices.

One of the technically challenging aspect of Scaleform was building a GPU-accelerated renderer that could tesselate and cache complex vector shapes in real-time, rendering them with flawless anti-aliasing. In August 2011, Michael gave a presentation on the design of this renderer, including its approach to batching and multi-thread friendly render tree design. Scaleform documentation is available on the AutoDesk site.

FOUNDER

Michael is the founder of Formic Ventures, an early stage high tech and biotech investment firm focused on prolonging human healthspan and empowering human creativity.

FOUNDER

Michael is the founder of The Michael Antonov Foundation, a charitable organization that supports biotechnology research and various causes that improve well being of people around the world.