Jonathan Hale's Linkedin Analytics

My passion has always been productivity, programming, computer graphics, and developing video games. As a Computer Science B.S. student, I started working on KNIME Image Processing, a set of image processing extensions for the KNIME Analytics Platform, in early 2013. There, Christian Dietz introduced me to Open Source development. This student job led me to an internship at KNIME. Ever since discovering Virtual Reality with the Oculus Rift in late 2013, I have been working on VR experiences with a hobby-based team. I started working on a custom game engine and eventually came across magnum, an Open Source OpenGL graphics engine, to which I have made some significant Open Source contributions over time. The author of magnum, Vladimír Vondruš, taught me a lot about a clean style of C++, documentation, testing, and project infrastructure and I owe him a lot for that. In early 2017, I and a hobby-based VR game dev team abandoned our own custom game engine in favor of Unreal Engine 4. Since then development rapidly accelerated, since engine development no longer required any of our resources. We released small games like "Cook for the Giant (VR)", "Spring Cleaning VR" and "Wastepaperbin VR". These games helped us find contract work, which led Florian Isikci and me to found "Vhite Rabbit GbR", a VR/AR development agency. On the side, we launched "Construct Arcade" (now HeyVR), the world's first VR-only browser games platform. The experience we gained with WebVR and WebAR with this project allowed us to specialize the agency into web-based 3D. Quickly, we realized that it was incredibly difficult to build #WebXR experiences, as development tools were not comparable to those we had for native VR development. I began writing the first lines of code for what would become Wonderland Engine in 2019 and founded Wonderland shortly after to empower developers with highly optimized tools for VR, AR, and 3D on the web.