Tag Archives: IVRPA Conference Speakers

Soufi Esmaeilzadeh

Soufi Esmaeilzadeh is a Product Manager for Google Maps Street View. Her primary focus is Business View, a product that helps businesses showcase their presence online through panoramic photography.

Soufi joined Google in 2011, expanding the company’s partnerships in the Geo Imagery space. Prior to Google, she ran her own business in the tech space focused on SMBs and also advised fortune 500 companies as a management consultant.

She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Brown University where she conducted research and co-authored papers on conformable displays.

Soufi is an avid traveler and skier!

She lives in Palo Alto, California.

Tom Mills

Tom Mills is 37 years old and Photography has played a substantial part of his life. Computer skills generated along side it allowed him to develop an expertise in the emerging field of 360 degree panoramic photography and virtual tour programming.

He is an international panoramic photography award winner, and has been exhibited in England, USA, Germany and France. His photographs have been selected for exhibition in London by the Association of Photographers. Tom Mills over the years has garnered a host of prestigious clients from famous fashion brands to world renowned art galleries.

Commissions include the Royal Wedding, Cannes Film Festival, the Monaco Royal Wedding, the Champions League and FA Cup Finals, Wimbledon, Range Rover, Jaguar, Burberry, Top shop, Jimmy Choo, BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian, Sunday Times, Hello Magazine, The Red Cross, BT, EE, Kings of Leon, the FA, Juventus FC, Arsenal FC and Red Bull. He has created virtual tours of the interior of Prince William’s helicopter and a groundbreaking virtual tour for the National Gallery.

Portfolio: http://tommills.co.uk/

Aleksandr Reznik

Born in Vilnius, USSR (now Lithuania)

I have been calling myself a photographer since 1990. By education I am an IT specialist. Currently I am working in my own company as an IT consultant. Since 2002 I provide IT trainings, so opening photo school was a natural decision. The school is running since 2010.

I became interested in panoramic photography in 2009.  Main areas of interest:

  • Gigapixel panoramas
  • Spherical gigapixel
  • Handheld panoramas
  • Spherical group photo

In Iceland 2013 at conference I spoke about “Smart gigapixel” technology – combining different techniques to improve gigapixel quality.

As I started making panoramic photography without any panoramic equipment I had to deal with lot of parallax errors and as a result use a lot of retouching.

In 2013 I have founded professionalpanorama.com site which offer panorama stitching services – Our main area of expertise is stitching of panoramas with parallax errors. This usually includes panoramas from helicopters, handheld panoramas, or panoramas’ shoots at difficult conditions. We also offer gigapixel, HDR, and 360 video processing services.

Matthew Mascheri

Matthew Mascheri President, Dome3D LLC – Matthew is the President of Dome3D LLC, an award winning immersive media company, that works in a variety mediums ranging from fulldome theaters to head mounted displays.  He and his team create immersive content, design custom hardware solutions and provide production training and support.

For over fifteen years Matthew has created immersive content, beginning his career at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.  In 2007 he founded Dome3D, and has worked on a wide variety of projects around the globe.  His clients include museums, planetariums, bio-tech firms, professional sports teams and sky diving facilities.

Matthew is involved with IMERSA, DUG, IPS, IVRPA, IAAPA and other trade groups to explore how immersive technologies can be applied in a variety of markets.

Joergen Geerds

Joergen Geerds is partner at Freedom360, a worldwide supplier of professional 360 video rigs with customers and resellers around the globe. He is a recurring speaker at the IVRPA conferences, with a long creative background in fine art panorama photography, film making, advertising and art direction. He shares a deep love for the medium and encourages everyone to experiment with it.

Kirk Membry

Kirk was inspired to become a photographer because of his interest in the intersection of technology and art. He holds a BA in Graphic Design from Rutgers University and has over 20 years of IT and web design experience including Fortune 500’s such as Dell, IBM, Viacom and Panasonic. Combining his web design skills with his photography expertise, he created Moss Creek Media (www.mosscreekmedia.com) in 2009, a photography company that specializes in 360 degree panoramics and virtual tours for the hospitality and tourism industry.

He works fulltime at MadPow (www.madpow.com) as a Senior Experience Designer, where he focuses on the user experience.  Kirk is a champion for the user, bridging the gap between design and development for  websites and applications (web, mobile and stand alone), always with the user’s best interests in mind.

A self proclaimed “gadget geek”, Kirk is always checking out the latest technologies and when he’s not buried behind a wall of monitors, he’ll be out on the trails hiking and snowboarding or out on the water sea kayaking, always with a camera in hand.

Kazutaka Uchida

Kazutaka Uchida is the Chief Technology Officer of Kadinche, Tokyo, Japan. He designed and implemented the cloud based panorama virtual shop hosting and authoring tool called PanoPlaza jointly with his team members. He is specialized in both software development and hardware hacking.

Before joining Kadinche, he was a research scientist in Sony corporation doing research on next generation audio visual application. He earned his master’s in engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Roelof de Vries

Roelof de Vries (1980) is specialized in panoramic photography, aerial photography, timelapse photography and mashups of these three disciplines.

During an internship in 2003 he saw his first 360˚ image and was immediately sold. His first project Dak van Rotterdam (Rotterdam Rooftops) was also his gradiation project for an education in media technology.
Right after his study he founded his company Little Planet and specializes in the production of  visual, (online) concepts based on photography, mainly for the presentation of real estate, urban planning/development and large construction-projects.

Since last year he joined the Shadowview Foundation which provides Unmanned Aerial Systems for environmental, conservation and humanitarian relief operations where he intergrates his knowledge about 360˚ visuals into Shadowviews projects.