Steve LaValle

Steve LaValle started working with Oculus VR a few days after its successful Kickstarter campaign and led its R&D efforts up to its $2 billion acquisition by Facebook in March 2014. He developed perceptually tuned head tracking methods based on IMUs and computer vision. He has also led a team of perceptual psychologists to provide principled approaches to virtual reality system calibration and the design of comfortable user experiences. He is also Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He has worked in robotics for over 20 years and is known for his introduction of the Rapidly exploring Random Tree (RRTs) algorithm of motion planning and his book, Planning Algorithms.