Thomas Wallner, founder and owner of DEEP Inc. is a producer, writer, director and game designer working in feature film, television, games and interactive media. In addition to producing innovative cross-media properties for television, he has written and directed eight award-winning feature documentaries that have been broadcast in more than 30 countries.

Thomas Wallner is a rare example of a creative filmmaker who is truly at home in the interactive media world. His work earned him international recognition as one of the world’s leading cross platform TV pioneers. Over the past ten years Thomas has consistently applied his award winning vision as a storyteller to push the limits of interactive narrative. A leading figure in the creation of participatory narratives he brought the underground genre of Alternate Reality Gaming into the Television mainstream, culminating in the Emmy Award winning genre-benders Fallen and Regenesis. In 2007 Thomas Wallner pushed the boundaries of nonlinear story telling even further by developing the story concept for Late Fragment, Canada’s first interactive feature drama produced by the National Film Board.

His project Inside Hana’s Suitcase, a feature documentary, interactive world and video web series adaptation of the bestselling children’s book, Hana’s Suitcase was nominated for a 2010 digital Emmy.

Additional credits include interactive adaptations of the CBS/CTV police drama Flashpoint, the CTV Space / SyFy Network drama Sanctuary, TVO’s Empire of the Word and the M.I. High Game for BBC while ongoing distribution of Total Drama Island – Totally Interactive! (Teletoon, Cartoon Network) now includes over ten million registered players.

Thomas is a recipient of numerous international honours including two Emmy Awards and three additional nominations, a Rose d’Or, SXSW Interactive Award, and two Webbys. More recently he was nominated for Interactive Producer of the Year at the Canada New Media Awards.

At DEEP Thomas is currently focusing on developing a cinematic language that utilizes 360 video technologies to tell stories in innovative ways.

Greg Downing specializes in image-based 3D technologies and computational photography techniques. His photographic work has been displayed in some of the nations most prestigiousmuseums including the American Museum of Natural History, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the Tech Museum. He has worked on the development of  photogrammetry and stitching software at Realviz and in film production as a technical director at Rhythm & Hues and Sony Pictures Imageworks on “Narnia”, “Spiderman 3″ and “I am Legend”. He teaches at Gnomon School for Visual Effects and has published professional training DVDs on  photogrammetry and panoramic stitching. He has presented at professional conferences for both photographers and visual effects artists.
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Eric Hanson is a visual effects designer specializing in the creation of digital environments. Having worked with leading visual effects houses such as Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, Dream Quest Images, and Walt Disney Feature Animation, his work can be seen in “The Day After Tomorrow”, “Cast Away”, “Mission to Mars”, “Fantasia 2000”, and “The Fifth Element”, among others. He has authored four educational DVDs on digital environment creation for The Gnomon Workshop, as well as having published two books on Maya technique.  He is also an Associate Professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, leading their curriculum in visual effects. Eric is a member of the VES, IVRPA, PMA, ACM/Siggraph and attended the University of Texas at Austin. He wishes he could sleep more.
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Torsten Hemke was born in Weimar, Germany.

He has been creating 3D panoramas since 1995, starting with photo paper in those days. His first digital pano cam has been Nikon coolpix 950.

Now he uses the latest Canon cameras.

In 2006 he already experimented with the 360º Video using two Sanyo camcorders with two fisheye adapters. Back then, Thomas Rauscher had developed specially for him a cylindric 360 video player for the use on the Internet. Have a look!

Bigger 360º projects by Torsten Hemke are 3D Tour by the German Federal President, the European Parliament, the Dresden Frauenkirche and German Castle Neuschwanstein.

Since 2004, Torsten Hemke is taking panoramas of stars onstage and in TV studios during numerous TV shows and concerts.

Since 2006, he is taking special panoramas of award winners of the Golden Camera (German Oscar’s). The organizer of the Award publishes the panoramas on the Internet and in printed media as a spread in one of the news magazine of Media Group Axel Springer.

Check 3D-TOP-Event.INFO for more info about his work.

Urs Krebs is a partner at Seitz Phototechnik AG in Switzerland (roundshot), where he is responsible for Marketing, Business Development and Finance.

“Economist by trade and photographer at heart, I took a sabbatical leave to have fun with my Roundshot 28-220 (film!) in Sydney Australia in 2002.

360° photography opened my eyes to a whole new world! This put an early end to my career as a consultant, but opened the door to an exciting new venture at roundshot.”

Anne Archambault is a senior UX program manager on the Microsoft Photosynth team.  She has worked at Microsoft for the past thirteen years where she designs user experiences for software projects with a focus on social computing and photography.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Anne worked for the Technical University of British Columbia (now Simon Fraser University), the Banff Centre for the Arts and Banff National Park.  She has a B.Sc. in Microbiology from McGill Universitry and a Master of Environment Studies from York University.  Her publications range from academic papers at the Computer Human Interaction Conference to coverage of her photography on Popular Photography. Anne has seven pending and granted technology patents.

Anne is a native French speaker from Montréal, Canada.  She currently resides in Seattle, WA.  Outside of work she enjoys photography, travelling, mountaineering and has a deep love of French macarons.

Dr. Cheney received his master’s degree from Utah State University in Instructional Technology and then worked at Brigham Young University for 5 years. While there he attended the last class in offered by Apple University in Cupertino California on creating virtual panoramas. Since then, he has been using Virtual Reality Photography in his work and teaching.

Paul Cheney is currently a faculty member in the DigitalMedia department at Utah Valley University. Paul keeps one foot in the realworld and the other in education in an effort to make the classroom experience as useful and authentic as possible.

Paul Cheney was born in Wyoming, USA and nowlives in Utah USA where he teach in the Digital Media department at Utah Valley University. Every year his students photograph a historical building or site in the area. These virtual tours are stored on virtual.uvu.edu.