David Robert

S.M. student in MAS

David joins the group following a decade of work in the film industry as a Technical Director and Animator for 20th Century Fox where he worked on several feature films and co-founded a creative research and development department investigating alien musculature. Together with Rob Gardner he developed a hybrid, physiology-based muscle layering system for facial animation in 1997. In 1999 he joined Side Effects Software publishers of two-time Academy Award winning procedural animation software, Houdini, where he consulted and worked with the world’s top animation studios including PIXAR, Dreamworks, LucasArts, ILM and Disney Imagineering. He taught at The Academy of Art, Walt Disney Feature Animation, PU (Pixar University) and enjoyed lecturing on art, landscape architecture, urban design and anthropodecentric notions of consciousness in Singapore, Japan, Canada, Spain and the United States (MIT, Stanford, The San Francisco Art Institute and RISD). He came to MIT to live the dream that the future of animation is off the screen.
David is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Personal Robots Group. His interests include developing the intersection between real-time animation and semi-autonomous robots for early childhood development through physical play.