Ian Heisters
Staff UX Engineer at Niantic Spatial, Inc.
California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIan Heisters is a multidisciplinary Staff UX Engineer based in California with 12 years building interactive products that blend design, AR, and AI. He has led UX prototyping and shader-driven creative tooling across major platforms, contributing to Facebook/Instagram AR camera features and large-scale computer vision systems at Niantic. Ian moves fluidly between hands-on engineering (C++, OpenGL, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript) and product-facing design leadership, shipping prototypes that inform core AR and AI experiences. His background in dance, theater arts, and hypermedia gives him an uncommon sensitivity to embodied interaction and spatial storytelling in technical systems. He has consulted for cultural and commercial clients—Sundance, BBC, Greenpeace—bringing theatrical rigor to interactive installations and performances. Colleagues rely on him to translate experimental research into production-ready UX for emerging platforms.
12 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BA Dance Computer Science, BA Dance Computer Science at Marlboro CollegeUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Github Skills (71)
omxplayer10
face9
trigrams9
pg-search9
opensoundcontrol9
multi-search9
metaphone9
cpp8
ruby8
postgresql8
mp48
full-text-search8
video-player8
uploadcare7
opengl7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
heisters/motion-transfer
Dec 2020 - Aug 2021
Contributions:36 commits, 23 pushes, 1 branch in 8 months
heisters/Cinder-FrameGraph
Jun 2016 - Jul 2018
Contributions:63 commits, 36 pushes, 3 branches in 2 years 1 month
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