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Bio
Ari Hollander explores new paradigms in real-time 3D design at the unruly intersection of art, technology, interface, and perception. He has been building virtual worlds for clinical research, education and Serious Games for more than 15 years and will help create the future even if it kills him.
Ari crawled out of the tester’s pit at LucasArts Games back in the early 90’s and finished his B.A. in Astrophysics at UC Berkeley. He then headed North to the University of Washington to complete his degree program in Applied Science Fiction with a Master’s in Virtual Environments and Advanced Interface Engineering. Thereafter he was hired as the Creative and Technical Director of the UW Human Interface Technology Lab’s Learning Center where he lead research projects in virtual reality input systems and helped to bring Virtual Reality technology into 120 public schools.
In 1995 Ari co-founded Firsthand LLC (later renamed Imprint Interactive Technology) with two other members of the HIT Lab: Howard Rose and Dr. Kimberley Osberg. Together they worked on research projects including some of the earliest VR therapy applications and did consulting and educational virtual reality projects for clients including Boeing, Microsoft, Edmark, Hewlitt-Packard, and Disney.
Ari took a brief hiatus during the Dot Com Era to work on two start-ups, one in 3D eCommerce and the other in dramatic, story-focused massively multi-player online game technology. He briefly worked on an Unreal Engine project as well as art tools in the Microsoft Game Studios, and then decided to get back into virtual reality and build his first Post-traumatic Stress Disorder therapy application, for suicide bomb attack victims (instead going into computer games that allowed people to pretend they were terrorists).
To this day, Ari does high-level design work as well as hands on construction and programming with tools like Maya, Photoshop, Virtools and various digital sound editors.
He had received his first Gold Record by age 21, but has yet to earn a second one.
*All rights to the documents listed below are held and maintained by the author or Imprint Interactive Technology LLC unless otherwise noted.
- Hollander, Ari J. (1994). An Exploration of Virtual Auditory Shape Perception, masters thesis. HTML | Macintosh Microsoft Word 5.1 format (at HIT Lab site)
Kollin, Joel and Hollander, Ari (February 2007) Re-engineering the Stereoscope for the 21st Century. Proceedings of the SPIE Vol. 6490. Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems XI. Short online version in the SPIE Newsroom
Hollander, Ari. (March, 2006) Playing Games with Painful Memories: Designing VR Exposure Therapy Simulations for PTSD. Presented at the Serious Games Summit at the Game Developer’s Convention in San Jose, CA. Also reprinted in the Serious Games Source and the Defense Management Journal. HTML
Rose, H., Osberg, K., & Hollander, A. (1999).Taking Charge of Technology. LNT Perspectives. HTML
- Hollander, Ari J., & Furness, Thomas A. (1994). Perception of Virtual AuditoryShapes. Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Displays. November, 1994. HTML (at HIT Lab site)
- Hoffman, H.G., Groen, J., Rousseau, S., Hollander, A.,Winn, W., Wells, M., & Furness III, T. (1996). Tactile Augmentation: Enhancing Presence in Virtual Reality with Tactile Feedback from Real Objects. Presented at the Meeting of the American Psychological Society, Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Society. HTML (at HIT Lab site)
- Winn, William, Hoffman, Hunter, Hollander, Ari, Osberg, Kimberly, and Rose, Howard. (1997). The Effect of Student Construction of Virtual Environments on the Performance of High- and Low-Ability Students. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, March 1997 HTML (at HIT Lab site)
- Osberg, K., Winn, W., Rose, H., Hollander, A., Hoffman, H., Char, P. (1997). The Effect of Having Grade Seven Students Construct Virtual Environments on Their Comprehension of Science. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, March 1997. HTML (at HIT Lab site)
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