David Holz

David Holz is a technologist and entrepreneur who co-founded Leap Motion, the company behind the Leap Motion Controller, and was its chief technology officer. Leap Motion developed camera-based hand tracking, which it first sold as a desktop computer accessory and later adapted for virtual reality and augmented reality headsets. During his time there the company released the Orion tracking software (2016), and in 2018 Holz announced Project North Star, an AR headset design that Leap Motion later released as open source.

Ultrahaptics bought Leap Motion in 2019, and the combined company became Ultraleap. In 2021 Holz founded Midjourney, a generative AI company whose service creates images from text prompts. As of 2026 he is its founder and chief executive.

Reviewed 11 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited Society for Science, SIGGRAPH, Businessweek, Inc., Register, Leap Motion blog (Wayback), UploadVR, Engadget, Road to VR, Voices of VR, Google Patents, GamesBeat, SETsquared, TIME, MIXED, SiliconANGLE, The Decoder and PYMNTS pages. About review dates.

Early life and education

Holz grew up in southern Florida. A 2012 Bloomberg Businessweek profile reported that in high school he built a system that used several microphones to work out where a noise came from. The project took him to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, where he did not win a prize. Society for Science lists him as an alumnus of the 2006 International Science and Engineering Fair. The Register reported that he had a design business in high school, where he studied math and physics.

He studied applied mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later left his PhD program to co-found Leap Motion. Businessweek wrote that he was doing contract work for NASA by the time he was in college. According to The Register, he took a leave of absence from his applied mathematics doctorate in 2008 to start Leap Motion. The same profile says he spent a year as a student researcher at the Max Planck Institute and two years as a graduate student researcher at NASA's Langley Research Center, working on LiDAR, Mars missions and atmospheric science. Society for Science describes his Max Planck work as neuroscience research and his NASA work as contracting for Langley.

Career

Founding Leap Motion

Holz built the first versions of the tracking technology while still in graduate school. In a 2013 interview with Inc. he said: "I was doing applied mathematics in graduate school, working for NASA on the side, and building what would become the first versions of Leap." His co-founder was Michael Buckwald. In a 2016 Reddit AMA, excerpted on Leap Motion's blog, Holz said the two had been friends since fourth grade. He said he visited Buckwald in Washington, D.C., in 2010 to talk about starting a company; Buckwald was then selling his second company, and the pair moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and raised a seed round a few months later. Inc. described them arriving in San Francisco in 2010 with the earliest prototype in two backpacks. Buckwald recalled it as a Logitech webcam and a set of LEDs in Radio Shack cases, taped together, connected to a laptop and able to track only one finger. The Register dates the company's start to 2008, the year Holz took leave from his doctorate.

In May 2012, when Holz was 23, Businessweek described the Leap Motion device as being about the size of a cigarette lighter with three small cameras inside, with a planned price of US$70, and said its software could track all ten of a user's fingers. At that point Leap Motion had raised US$14.5 million. Holz told the magazine that gesture control would replace the mouse, which he called "a needless layer of technological complexity". By mid-2013 the company had raised about US$45 million in total. The Leap Motion Controller was priced at US$79.99, with a ship date of 22 July 2013. Engadget's launch review noted that it worked with infrared optics and cameras rather than depth sensors.

Holz is the sole named inventor on US patent 8,638,989, "Systems and methods for capturing motion in three-dimensional space", which was assigned to Leap Motion. It was filed on 16 January 2013, claims priority to 17 January 2012 and was granted on 28 January 2014. The patent describes using a camera to capture the shadows or illuminated edges that light sources cast on an object, dividing the object into two-dimensional cross-sections and reconstructing its three-dimensional shape from those slices.

Hand tracking for VR

By 2014 Leap Motion was moving its sensor from the desk to the front of VR headsets (see Leap Motion VR). In a June 2014 episode of the Voices of VR podcast, Holz discussed the full skeletal hand model in the company's new beta SDK, the move onto headsets and plans for AR integrations that would use the device's cameras. At SIGGRAPH 2014 he and Daniel Plemmons presented a Labs studio session, "Creating Next-Gen 3D Interactive Apps With Motion Control and Unity3D".

On 17 February 2016 Leap Motion released a beta of Orion, a new hand tracking software stack that the company said was built from the ground up for VR. It ran on Windows with the existing Leap Motion Controller, and the company said it was working with OEMs to embed Orion hardware in headsets. Holz told UploadVR that "Orion software represents a paradigm shift in how we do hand tracking". He told Engadget that the system made a partial guess at fingers it could not see, using pixels around the knuckles to locate them. In a Reddit AMA held after the release, he said the main challenge had been handling parts of the hand the sensor could not see, whether because of occlusion or because the hand was against a white surface that looked the same color as skin. He also said Orion artificially dropped hands beyond 80 cm (2.6 feet), although tracking reached a little farther.

On 5 December 2016 Holz introduced the Leap Motion Mobile Platform in a blog post. It combined a new sensor and software for untethered, battery-powered VR and AR devices. According to Holz, the tracking software ran at nearly ten times its previous speed, and the new sensor covered 180 by 180 degrees, compared with 140 by 120 degrees for the PC peripheral. Leap Motion built a reference system on the Samsung Gear VR and shipped it to headset makers.

Project North Star

On 9 April 2018 Holz announced Project North Star, which he described as a full augmented reality platform. The headset used two low-persistence 1600x1440 displays at 120 frames per second, a visual field over 100 degrees and Leap Motion's 180-degree hand tracking sensor. Holz wrote that the design could be produced for under US$100 at scale, and that the company hoped it would "shift the conversation from what an AR system should look like, to what an AR experience should feel like."

A companion post by Holz, "Our Journey to the North Star", described how the optics were developed. The design used ellipsoidal reflectors, sections of curved mirror cut from a larger ellipsoid. The team first modeled the system around 5.5-inch smartphone displays and 3D-printed test reflectors, then diamond-turned reflectors from optical-grade acrylic. That first prototype had a combined field of view of 105 by 105 degrees at 1440x2560 per eye but ran at only 50 fps. By cropping the view, the team settled on about 95 by 70 degrees, which allowed smaller, faster 3.5-inch LCDs from BOE driven by an Analogix display driver. Leap Motion released the headset's schematics and build guide under an Apache license on 6 June 2018.

Talks

Holz gave several public talks on the future of VR and AR input. The talks below were documented on Leap Motion's blog.

Date	Event	Subject
January 2015	SFHTML5	Upcoming generations of VR headsets and sensors, and what VR hand controls need
May 2015	SVVR 2015	Hand input in mobile VR, virtual interfaces worn on the hands, and the combination of many input sensors in later VR/AR devices; included a demo of building blocks created by pinching
February 2016	Vision Summit	The future of VR technologies, inputs and sensors; internal projects including an arm-level interface and an application launcher
July 2016	AltspaceVR	What was happening behind the scenes of the VR industry

At SVVR 2015 he said the pinch-to-create demo "starts to cross what I would call the uncanny valley of VR interaction," and predicted that cameras tracking eyes, hands, bodies, objects and the environment would come together with voice recognition in a "fusion of input modalities".

Ultrahaptics deal

On 30 May 2019 Ultrahaptics, a U.K.-based mid-air haptics company, partially confirmed a Wall Street Journal report that it was acquiring Leap Motion. In the announcement of the deal, Holz said: "We've been working with Ultrahaptics for nearly six years." GamesBeat reported that Ultrahaptics paid about US$30 million and would take on Leap Motion's patents and staff, Holz included, but not Buckwald. The combined company later took the name Ultraleap. The Register wrote that Holz ran Leap Motion for twelve years and left in 2021, when it had about 100 employees.

Midjourney

Holz founded Midjourney in 2021. It calls itself an "independent research lab" and, according to TIME, became profitable within a year without outside investors. In August 2022 he told The Register that the company had about ten people and was self-funded. That month MIXED reported his prediction that within about ten years games would be generated live by AI, quoting him: "All the games are dreams, and everything is malleable, and we're going to have AR headsets."

In August 2024 Midjourney announced that it was "getting into hardware". SiliconANGLE reported that its head of hardware, Ahmad Abbas, had worked at Leap Motion and then spent five years at Apple on the Apple Vision Pro. In August 2025 Meta Platforms licensed Midjourney's "aesthetic technology" for image generation. According to The Decoder, Holz said the arrangement was a licensing deal rather than a buyout and that Midjourney would stay independent, community-driven and investor-free. On 17 June 2026 Holz presented the company's first hardware product at an event in San Francisco. It was the Midjourney Scanner, a full-body ultrasound device from a new Midjourney Medical division, and at the time it was not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use.

Recognition

TIME included Holz, as founder of Midjourney, in its TIME100 AI list for 2025. Society for Science says he joined its National Leadership Council in 2020 and its Board of Trustees in 2026.

See also

• Leap Motion Controller
• Leap Motion VR
• Project North Star
• Ultraleap
• Hand tracking