Blair MacIntyre

Blair MacIntyre is a Canadian-born computer scientist who has worked on augmented reality (AR) since 1991. As a PhD student of Steven Feiner at Columbia University he co-developed the KARMA maintenance prototype, the "Windows on the World" paper and the Touring Machine, an early outdoor mobile AR system. From 1999 to 2022 he was a faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he directed the Augmented Environments Lab and started the Argon AR web browser project. He was a principal research scientist at Mozilla from 2016 to 2020, where he worked on WebXR, and later headed immersive technology research at JPMorgan Chase.

As of October 2026 MacIntyre is a professor at Northeastern University, with appointments in the Department of Art + Design in the College of Arts, Media and Design and in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He is a member of the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy (class of 2023) and the AWE XR Hall of Fame.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited sources: AWE Hall of Fame entry, IEEE VGTC 2023 Academy citation, Northeastern and Georgia Tech bios, Columbia and UIST award pages, press articles, his personal site, and Crossref metadata for all DOI-cited papers. About review dates.

Early life and education

MacIntyre was born and raised in Canada. He earned Bachelor of Mathematics and Master of Mathematics degrees in computer science at the University of Waterloo, attending St. Jerome's University for the bachelor's degree, and a PhD in computer science at Columbia University. Columbia's computer science department lists him as a 1999 PhD graduate; the AWE XR Hall of Fame gives 1998 as the year he completed the doctorate. According to his own account, he was a graduate student in the Computer Graphics Lab at Waterloo and in the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab at Columbia, and as a student held internships at the Waterloo Systems Research Lab, the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, Xerox PARC and NYNEX Science and Technology's research center.

Career

Columbia University

MacIntyre began working on augmented reality in 1991 as part of Feiner's group at Columbia. With Feiner and Dorée Seligmann he developed KARMA (Knowledge-based Augmented Reality for Maintenance Assistance), a prototype that used a see-through head-mounted display to explain simple end-user maintenance of a laser printer. Logitech 3D trackers attached to printer parts let the system follow their position and orientation, and a modified version of the IBIS rule-based illustration system generated the overlaid graphics and text callouts. The paper "Knowledge-based augmented reality" appeared in Communications of the ACM in July 1993.

At the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in 1993, Feiner, MacIntyre, Marcus Haupt and Eliot Solomon presented "Windows on the world: 2D windows for 3D augmented reality". The paper received the UIST Lasting Impact Award in 2010.

In October 1997 Feiner, MacIntyre, Tobias Höllerer and Anthony Webster presented "A Touring Machine: Prototyping 3D Mobile Augmented Reality Systems for Exploring the Urban Environment" at the first International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The prototype gave users information about Columbia's campus. It tracked the wearer with differential GPS and a magnetometer/inclinometer, and showed information on a head-tracked, see-through head-worn 3D display combined with an untracked handheld 2D display with stylus and trackpad. The AWE XR Hall of Fame calls the Touring Machine "the first mobile augmented reality system (MARS)". In 2017 the paper received ISWC's inaugural Early Innovator Award, given to the paper from the first ISWC with the most impact over the following 20 years.

Georgia Tech

MacIntyre joined the Georgia Tech College of Computing and its GVU Center in January 1999 and founded and directed the Augmented Environments Lab. He later became a professor in the School of Interactive Computing and stayed at Georgia Tech for 23 years; the institute now lists him as an adjunct professor. According to MacIntyre, the lab's AR research ranged from military and industrial applications to art, entertainment, education and games. In 2001 he was one of the co-authors, with Ronald Azuma, Y. Baillot, R. Behringer, Feiner and S. Julier, of the survey "Recent advances in augmented reality" in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

The lab's design tools and experiments included:

• DART (the Designer's Augmented Reality Toolkit), built with Maribeth Gandy, Steven Dow and Jay David Bolter on top of Macromedia Director so that designers could move quickly from storyboards to working AR experiences. It supported sketch-based 3D "animatic" actors and the capture and replay of synchronized video and sensor data. The paper was presented at UIST in October 2004.
• AR Façade, an augmented reality version of the desktop interactive drama Façade, made with Dow, Manish Mehta, Michael Mateas and others. Players walked through a physical apartment and used gestures and speech to interact with two autonomous characters, Trip and Grace, and the project was used to study the relationship between presence and engagement.
• An integration of Second Life into an AR system, which the AWE XR Hall of Fame lists among his notable projects; MacIntyre names it "AR SecondLife".

AR games and the Qualcomm Augmented Reality Game Studio

In 2009 the Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) made ARhrrrr, a zombie shooter built for NVIDIA's Tegra graphics chip for handheld devices. In December 2009 SCAD listed Microsoft's Zune HD as a current platform, with Tegra-based phones expected later. Pointing the handheld device at a special game map showed a 3D town overrun with zombies, seen from a helicopter overhead; the player shot zombies to clear a path for trapped civilians, and Skittles candies placed on the board served as tangible inputs that could be shot to trigger explosions.

On 30 June 2010 Qualcomm and Georgia Tech announced the Qualcomm Augmented Reality Game Studio on Georgia Tech's Atlanta campus, built on Qualcomm's then newly announced augmented reality platform. The studio was led by MacIntyre, then an associate professor of interactive computing, working with Professor Tony Tseng and students of SCAD's Interactive Design and Game Development program. MacIntyre said in the announcement that the processors and graphics engines in mobile devices "have only recently reached the point where they can meet the computing requirements for augmented reality".

Argon and web-based AR

MacIntyre started the open-source Argon project in 2008 to bring AR to the web. Its platform, KHARMA, was described at IEEE ISMAR 2010 as an open KML/HTML architecture for mobile AR applications. The Argon browser was released for the iPhone in February 2011. It drew web content over live camera video, and the first release displayed anything that Mobile Safari could render as virtual billboards. MacIntyre, director of the KHARMA project, described the goal as giving "a foundation for millions of Web developers to begin writing applications". The team published "The Argon AR Web Browser and standards-based AR application environment" at ISMAR 2011. MacIntyre writes that when he left Georgia Tech in 2022 the lab's largest recent project was Argon and its open-source argon.js framework, and that this work led to his time at Mozilla and shaped how he approached the design of WebXR.

Mozilla

From 2016 to 2020 MacIntyre was a principal research scientist in Mozilla's Emerging Technologies group, working on mixed reality and helping lead the company's web-based AR and VR efforts. In December 2017 Mozilla released the WebXR Viewer for iOS, an app for testing web-based AR that used ARKit tracking; MacIntyre said code written with Mozilla's JavaScript library also ran in Google's experimental WebARonARCore browser for Android. In February 2018, as WebVR was becoming WebXR, he told VentureBeat that AR and VR "share many technologies, from spatial trackers to head-worn displays to interaction devices", so combining device support in one API should simplify both implementation and use. The IEEE VGTC citation describes him as a co-designer of the initial WebXR APIs. He also took part in the W3C's Immersive Web Community Group.

JPMorgan Chase

In July 2022 MacIntyre became head of immersive technology and spatial computing research at JPMorgan Chase. His team, part of the bank's Global Technology Applied Research group, studied how immersive technologies could affect the company, its employees and its customers. In November 2022, after Meta's layoffs, he invited affected employees to apply to his team in a LinkedIn post, writing that "there are many companies like ours using AR/VR for real applications". Papers from the group with JPMorganChase affiliations examined privacy and security when sharing physical space in remote mixed reality collaboration, including "SpatialPrivacy" in the ISMAR 2024 adjunct proceedings and a 2025 MobiHoc paper on enterprise spatial sharing. His website gives his time at the bank as 2022 to 2026, with the title Global Head of Immersive Technology Research.

Northeastern University

In 2023 the IEEE VGTC described MacIntyre as on leave from Northeastern University, where he was a professor in the College of Arts, Media and Design and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Northeastern lists him as Professor of Augmented and Virtual Reality in the Department of Art + Design, jointly appointed with Khoury, teaching courses that include computer graphics, augmented and virtual environments, ethics and privacy, and user interface software. His stated research focus is distributed, social mixed reality for conferences, meetings and teaching, along with ethical approaches to immersive technology, including equal access and user privacy.

Consulting

MacIntyre writes that in 2009 he co-founded Aura Interactive, a design and consulting firm specializing in AR entertainment, which he ran with Maribeth Gandy Coleman. After Aura shut down in 2014 he founded The MacMynatt Group in 2015 to continue consulting on design, augmented reality and related technologies. His consulting has covered advice on deploying immersive technology, expert legal opinions, and system design and development.

Publications

MacIntyre has published more than 100 academic papers on AR. With Jay David Bolter and Maria Engberg he wrote the book Reality Media: Augmented and Virtual Reality, published by the MIT Press in November 2021.

Professional service

MacIntyre was program co-chair of ISWC 2000, IEEE ISMAR 2003 and ACM UIST 2003, and general co-chair of IEEE ISMAR 2012 and IEEE VR 2020. He has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies and Virtual Reality, and lists himself as being on the editorial board of Frontiers in Virtual Reality.

Recognition

Year	Recognition	Details
2010	ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award	With Feiner, Haupt and Solomon, for "Windows on the world: 2D windows for 3D augmented reality" (UIST 1993)
2017	ISWC Early Innovator Award	With Feiner, Höllerer and Webster, for the Touring Machine paper (ISWC 1997)
2023	IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy	Elected to the academy's 2023 class
Not stated	AWE XR Hall of Fame	Listed as "Pioneer of Mobile AR Games and Entertainment, WebAR"

See also

• Steven Feiner
• WebXR
• WebAR