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Arthur van Hoff

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Arthur van Hoff is a Dutch software engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the cinematic VR company Jaunt in 2013 and served as its chief technology officer.[1][2] As chief technology officer he described Jaunt's camera systems for stereoscopic 360-degree video in talks and interviews, from an early rig built from GoPro cameras to the 24-camera Jaunt ONE.[3][4] He left Jaunt in December 2018, after the company had turned from VR toward augmented reality, and joined Apple as a senior architect in April 2019.[5][6]

Before working in VR, van Hoff was an engineer on the Java programming language team at Sun Microsystems, where he wrote the Java compiler and in August 1995 sent the finished Java and HotJava release to Netscape, Java's first commercial customer.[7][8] He then founded or co-founded several companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry, Zing and Ellerdale, and was chief technology officer of Flipboard.[9]

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every cited source for the Sun/Java, Marimba, Strangeberry/TiVo, Ellerdale/Flipboard, Jaunt, Lucid and Apple claims, dates, quotes and camera specifications. About review dates.

Early life and education

Van Hoff grew up in the Netherlands and left to study at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, where he earned a master's degree in computer science.[7] At Strathclyde he developed a user interface environment for NeWS, a window system from Sun Microsystems. According to a 1998 Developer.com profile, Sun contacted him to apologize when it cancelled NeWS, and later offered him a job in California.[7]

Career

Sun Microsystems and Java

Van Hoff's first assignment at Sun was DOE (Distributed Objects Everywhere), a project he found complex and political. After meeting James Gosling at a party, he asked to join a smaller group, and Gosling hired him onto the Java project in 1993.[7] Developer.com reported that he was brought in to simplify the language, removing features that confused its definition, and that he wrote the Java compiler.[7] A 1997 Stanford University colloquium listing describes him as a former senior staff engineer at Sun who worked with Gosling, Bill Joy and Guy Steele on Java.[10]

In an account of Java's launch in the December 1995 issue of Wired, David Bank described van Hoff, a few minutes before a midnight deadline in August 1995, encrypting the Java and HotJava source code, placing it on an Internet site and e-mailing the key to Netscape Communications. Bank wrote that colleagues called his working principle "Arthur's Law: Do it right, or don't do it," and quoted van Hoff's view that Java could become "the DOS of the Internet."[8] In a JavaWorld history of the language's name, van Hoff, then a senior engineer, said he believed that engineer Chris Warth first suggested "Java" during a long naming meeting, while Warth was drinking a cup of Peet's Java.[11] With Sami Shaio and Orca Starbuck, members of Sun's Java implementation team, he co-wrote the book Hooked on Java: Creating Hot Web Sites with Java Applets.[12]

Marimba

In early 1996 van Hoff left Sun and founded Marimba with two other Java developers, Sami Shaio and Jonathan Payne; former Java project manager Kim Polese joined shortly afterward as chief executive.[7] As chief technology officer he led development of Castanet, which a 1997 Stanford colloquium abstract of his talk described as an architecture for distributing applications and their content over the Internet and intranets.[10] Marimba was often grouped with "push" technology companies, a label van Hoff disputed in 1998.[7] That year he told InfoWorld that the company had "made the mistake in the last year of riding the push wave"; the magazine reported that Castanet 3.0 supported applications written in Visual Basic and C++ as well as Java.[13] Marimba went public in 1999.[9] BMC Software agreed in April 2004 to acquire the company for US$239 million in cash.[14]

Strangeberry, TiVo, Zing and Dell

In April 2002 van Hoff co-founded Strangeberry in Palo Alto with Jonathan Payne and Adam Doppelt, a member of Marimba's advanced development group. The company developed home-network and broadband technology for delivering new services to televisions. TiVo acquired it in a stock deal that closed on January 12, 2004 and was disclosed later that month in a TiVo filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.[15] Van Hoff then worked at TiVo as a principal engineer; he resigned in February 2005, which he confirmed in April of that year.[16] He also founded Zing, which Dell acquired, and was chief technology officer for software and services at Dell.[9][6]

Ellerdale and Flipboard

Van Hoff and Jens Christensen founded Ellerdale in 2008. The company applied semantic analysis to large real-time streams of social web messages. Flipboard announced on July 21, 2010 that it had acquired Ellerdale and that van Hoff would become Flipboard's chief technology officer.[17]

Jaunt

Van Hoff, Jens Christensen and Tom Annau met as entrepreneurs in residence at Redpoint Ventures and founded Jaunt in Palo Alto in 2013, with Christensen as chief executive, van Hoff as chief technology officer and Annau as vice president of engineering.[2][1] In April 2014 the company announced US$6.8 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, British Sky Broadcasting and the angel investors Peter Gotcher and Blake Krikorian.[18] Van Hoff told TechCrunch that the first camera "was entirely built in our VC's office" from parts ordered on Amazon, and that footage of Shaolin monks filmed in a Los Gatos park produced "this sense of teleportation."[18] He told Road to VR that the founders "never showed any Powerpoint slides to anyone" when raising money, and that Jaunt avoided moving the camera because doing so was "very disconcerting."[2]

At the tenth Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) meetup in 2014, van Hoff described the capture rig of the time: 14 GoPro cameras in a custom 3D-printed housing, each recording 1080p video at 60 frames per second, for about 1.7 billion pixels of capture per second. The footage was color-matched, corrected for lens distortion, blended and stitched with GPU acceleration, taking about 20 seconds of processing per second of video, and was delivered as H.264 in a proprietary spherical stereoscopic layout with ambisonic sound. He said Jaunt would be willing to work with others on a standard format.[3] In April 2015 he gave a keynote titled "Virtual Reality - Coming to a Display Near You" at the NAB Show Technology Summit on Cinema in Las Vegas.[19]

In June 2015 Jaunt announced a professional light-field camera series codenamed NEO, later released as the Jaunt ONE. Van Hoff said in the announcement that NEO was "the culmination of several years of research" and that it would spare creators "the complexity of cameras built from off-the-shelf components not designed for VR."[20] In an October 2015 interview with Kent Bye he said the camera used 24 camera modules with global shutters, reached about 20 pixels per degree (enough for 8K per eye) and captured about three gigapixels per second; Jaunt captured as many angles as possible and then synthesized left-eye and right-eye views. Sound was recorded in ambisonics with tetrahedral microphones.[4] At Oculus Connect 2 on September 24, 2015 he was a panelist in the session Lessons from Hollywood: Making Movies in VR with Ikrima Elhassan, Felix Lajeunesse, Robert Stromberg and Saschka Unseld.[21]

Christensen stepped down as chief executive in May 2016, shortly after a US$65 million investment that Engadget described as coming from Disney, and van Hoff took the chief executive role on an interim basis.[22] When former Hearst executive George Kliavkoff was named chief executive in September 2016, van Hoff returned to the chief technology officer role; TechCrunch reported that Jaunt had by then raised US$100 million from investors including The Walt Disney Company, GV, Redpoint Ventures and Evolution Media Partners.[23]

In October 2018 Jaunt laid off a significant part of its staff and announced in a post titled "The Future of Jaunt is AR" that it would wind down a number of VR products and content services.[24] Van Hoff said he would leave Jaunt by the end of 2018, and he left in December of that year.[6][5] In September 2019 Verizon acquired Jaunt's software and technology, including its tools for volumetric video capture of people.[25][26]

Lucid and Apple

In January 2019 van Hoff joined the board of advisors of Lucid, a company developing camera-based 3D depth sensing for phones and other devices.[27] In April 2019 he started at Apple as a senior architect based in Menlo Park, California. His LinkedIn profile listed the new position, and Apple did not name the project he joined.[28][6][29] AppleInsider noted that Apple had hired several former Jaunt engineers before him.[28] As of September 2026, his public LinkedIn profile lists Sovera Corporation as his employer.[30]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Todd Spangler (2014-04-03). "Cinematic Virtual-Reality Startup Jaunt Raises $6.8 Mil from BSkyB, Others". Variety. https://variety.com/2014/digital/news/cinematic-virtual-reality-startup-jaunt-raises-6-8-mil-from-bskyb-others-1201152111/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Brian Hart (2014-04-03). "Jaunt Pulls in $6.8 Million in Funding for VR Cinema Toolset". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/jaunt-vr-virtual-reality-cinema-platform-6-8-million-funding/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Brian Hart (2014-05-10). "Jaunt VR Reveal How Their 3D 360 Video Technology Works at SVVR #10". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/jaunt-vr-shares-technical-details/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Kent Bye (2015-10-06). "#222: Jaunt CTO Explains the Jaunt One Camera Specs, Lightfields & Ambisonics". Voices of VR Podcast. http://voicesofvr.com/222-jaunt-cto-explains-the-jaunt-one-camera-specs-lightfields-ambisonics/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Jon Fingas (2019-04-09). "Apple hires the founder of VR content startup Jaunt". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/09/apple-hires-jaunt-founder/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Juli Clover (2019-04-09). "Apple Hires Jaunt VR Founder Arthur van Hoff". MacRumors. https://www.macrumors.com/2019/04/09/apple-hires-jaunt-vr-founder-arthur-van-hoff/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Amy Oringel (1998-03-11). "Sun didn't set on Arthur van Hoff". Developer.com. https://web.archive.org/web/20210228100658/https://www.developer.com/net/vb/article.php/602271/Sun-didnt-set-on-Arthur-van-Hoff.htm. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 David Bank (1995-12-01). "The Java Saga". Wired, issue 3.12. https://www.wired.com/1995/12/java-saga/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 "Company". Jaunt. 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20140825153308/http://www.jauntvr.com:80/company. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "New Concepts in Software Distribution on the Internet and Intra-net". Stanford University EE380 Computer Systems Colloquium. 1997. https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/9697sum/node8.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  11. ↑ Kieron Murphy. "So why did they decide to call it Java?". JavaWorld (republished by InfoWorld). https://www.infoworld.com/article/2170044/so-why-did-they-decide-to-call-it-java-3.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  12. ↑ George W. Leach (1996-08-01). "Will this book hook you in?". InfoWorld. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2169722/will-this-book-hook-you-in.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  13. ↑ Nancy Weil (1998-06-23). "Marimba launches new Castanet with a less Java-centric focus". InfoWorld. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2165480/marimba-launches-new-castanet-with-a-less-java-centric-focus.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  14. ↑ Stacy Cowley (2004-04-29). "Brief: BMC to buy Marimba for $239M". Computerworld. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1708173/brief-bmc-to-buy-marimba-for-239m.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  15. ↑ Paul Gough (2004-01-27). "In A Strange Move, TiVo Acquires Strangeberry, Plots Broadband Course". MediaPost. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/5828/in-a-strange-move-tivo-acquires-strangeberry-plo.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  16. ↑ Thomas Hawk (2005-04-21). "TiVo Principal Engineer Arthur van Hoff Resigns". eHomeUpgrade. https://web.archive.org/web/20170808075604/http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/2005/04/21/tivo-principal-engineer-arthur-van-hoff-resigns/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  17. ↑ "Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale to Boost Content Relevancy in New Social Magazine". Flipboard. 2010-07-21. https://about.flipboard.com/press/flipboard-acquires-ellerdale-to-boost-content-relevancy-in-new-social-magazine/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Kim-Mai Cutler (2014-04-03). "Jaunt Builds Cameras, Software To Bring Cinematic Experiences To VR". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/jaunt-vr/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  19. ↑ "Arthur van Hoff of Jaunt to Present Keynote Address on Virtual Reality at NAB Show Technology Summit on Cinema". National Association of Broadcasters. 2015. https://www.nab.org/documents/newsroom/pressRelease.asp?id=3634. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  20. ↑ Will Mason (2015-06-29). "Is it "The One"? Jaunt announces series of light field cameras for virtual reality, codenamed NEO". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/jaunt-vr-neo-camera/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  21. ↑ Ben Lang (2015-09-04). "Oculus Announces Connect 2 Schedule, 3 Days Full of VR Knowledge-building". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/oculus-announces-connect-2-schedule-3-days-full-of-vr-knowledge-building/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  22. ↑ Jon Fingas (2016-05-28). "Cinematic VR maker Jaunt needs a new CEO". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/28/jaunt-searches-for-new-ceo/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  23. ↑ Lucas Matney (2016-09-12). "VR studio Jaunt hires Hearst exec George Kliavkoff as its new CEO". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/12/vr-studio-jaunt-hires-hearst-exec-george-kliavkoff-as-its-new-ceo/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  24. ↑ Lucas Matney (2018-10-15). "Disney-backed Jaunt lays off 'significant' number of employees as it moves away from VR". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/disney-backed-jaunt-lays-off-significant-number-of-employees-as-it-moves-away-from-vr. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  25. ↑ Igor Bonifacic (2019-09-30). "Verizon buys Jaunt's AR and VR technology". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-30-verizon-buys-jaunts-ar-vr-technology.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  26. ↑ Jeremy Horwitz (2019-09-30). "Verizon acquires Jaunt XR's software and technology". VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/30/verizon-acquires-jaunt-xrs-software-and-technology/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  27. ↑ "Jaunt Founder Arthur Van Hoff Joins Lucid to Advance Multi-Camera Capture on Mobile Phones". ACCESS Newswire (via Yahoo Finance). Lucid. 2019-01-29. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jaunt-founder-arthur-van-hoff-120000772.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Roger Fingas (2019-04-09). "Apple hires Arthur van Hoff, founder of VR startup Jaunt". AppleInsider. https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/04/09/apple-hires-arthur-van-hoff-founder-of-vr-startup-jaunt. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  29. ↑ Jeremy Horwitz (2019-04-09). "Apple hires Jaunt VR founder and multi-camera 3D expert Arthur van Hoff". VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/mobile/apple-hires-jaunt-vr-founder-and-multi-camera-3d-expert-arthur-van-hoff. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  30. ↑ "Arthur van Hoff". LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/aavanhoff/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
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