Austin specializes in immersive communication and has spent over ten years primarily focusing on AR/VR design in academic and industry settings. Austin is the Head of XR UX and Corporate Vice President at Samsung Electronics. Before joining Samsung Electronics, Austin focused on designing XR input at Reality Labs – Research Design at Meta, a team dedicated to developing design solutions for the future of wearables and immersive experiences in AR/VR. Before joining Meta, he was the Design DRI for multimodal voice interactions and controller input in mixed reality experiences on Microsoft's HoloLens team. As a former patent lead, Austin oversaw communications-related inventions by Skype and Teams during his time at Skype Design, Microsoft. Since 2013, he has successfully launched multiple mixed reality and hardware products as a design lead, such as Skype for HoloLens, Skype for Windows Mixed Reality, and Skype for Amazon Echo.
Before returning to the industry, Austin held a tenure-track position as a professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). At CMU, he also assumed the Interaction Design Topic Chair role for the Master’s program and was a founding faculty member of the undergraduate Environments Track. Additionally, Austin held an affiliate faculty position in the School of Architecture’s Master of Tangible Interaction Design program at CMU.
Austin has received international design awards from Red Dot and Adobe. He has shown his work internationally at CHI, UIST, SIGGRAPH Asia, TEI, and the IDSA Conference. As the lead coordinator and interaction designer on a team representing South Korea, he presented an interactive design installation piece at the London Design Biennale 2016 at Somerset House in London. Austin holds two Master’s degrees from the MIT Media Lab and ArtCenter College of Design for his work in Human-Computer Interaction and Media Design.
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