Timoni West (Unity) on Building the Future of Human-Computer Interaction

The Guest

Timoni West is the Director of XR Research at Unity, where she leads a team of cross-disciplinary artists and engineers exploring new interfaces for human-computer interaction. And these days, that focus is on spatial computing: how we will live, work, and create in a world where digital objects and the real world live side-by-side.

One of her team’s first tools, EditorXR, which is a tool for editing Unity projects directly in virtual reality, won San Francisco Design Week’s first-ever Virtual Tech award in 2018.

Prior to Unity, Timoni has worked as a product designer at Flickr and Foursquare. She went on to found or co-found three companies including her own product strategy and design studio, where she worked with clients such as Samsung and AirBnB.

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Timoni West

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Unity

She has stated, “My goal is to make computers better tools for a wider swath of humanity; not just available or useable, but really useful. This means they need to be more flexible, responsive, interactive and thoughtful than today’s computing paradigms allow.”

The Conversation

In this conversation, Timoni shares the origin of her passion for computers and her path to leading XR research today.

We discuss the role of computers in our lives, both today and far in the future. And we dive into the challenges of making these computers, and specifically smartglasses, better tools for a wider swath of humanity. Her goal is to create something that’s both good and truly useful.

While it’s a natural tendency for some to focus on the possible dystopian future that these new technologies may bring about, Timoni encourages us to flip our perspective [and think about what we DO want. Her challenge to each of us is to share your vision for what you would want if you could 1) tie together all of the devices in your home, or 2) have AR glasses, or 3) be able to create a virtual space.

Jason McDowallconsumer, UX, VR, AR smartglasses